User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 221

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Wikipedia is becoming atheist

I know you're an atheist, and I respect that, but Wikipedia is being written in an atheist point of view. This bothers me because it's not a neutral point of view, neutral is either there is a god or there isn't, an atheist point of view says that there isn't. Some kind of system needs to be made that is completely neutral. - ZLEA (Talk,Contribs) 17:07, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

To be neutral is to not be neutral. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 18:49, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
(talk page gnome) Note: Wikipedia articles do not contain what Jimbo says, but summarize what reliable sources say. At least, ideally . — PaleoNeonate — 18:56, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
Neutral point of view is mean without any editorial bias based on reliable sources information, I don't think it should declarative about the god of religion-ship. SA 13 Bro (talk) 21:12, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
This is less useful than it could be as you provide no examples to discuss. --NeilN talk to me 21:22, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
Why doesn't God edit Wikipedia directly to correct any flaws? Count Iblis (talk) 23:12, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
Sorry, when I see a question, you know what I do... Perfection is an attribute of the most beautiful of the angels, the sort of prosecuting attorney among them, namely Satan, who judges all others deficient in one regard or another. An angel who, naturally, would bow to no snivelling dirty-diapered masterpiece given the free will to do this and that and wreck everything it touches. And yet... how does one who is perfect create, when to create would mean to depart from perfection? I might speculate then that things could be worse or better than perfect, and that the search for truth, with all its errors, is more valuable because of the occasional new insight than a perfect understanding. The world is alive, people are alive, Wikipedia is alive, to do evil and regret it, to do good and rise to some new condition. TLDR: you're reinventing the problem of evil. Wnt (talk) 23:54, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
My favorite theory to address the worst of the "problem of evil" is the idea that God created the World 2 minutes ago. You then don't get rid of imperfections as they exist now, but there would then not have been a WWII, 9/11 would never have happened etc. etc. Count Iblis (talk) 20:12, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
Another option is that God re-creates the world at some point in future, erasing the evil parts of history, like it never even happened. But people get to keep all the good character traits and positive feelings that they built up over time while dealing with evil. This one has some historical adherents, Lethe, "wipe away every tear" and so on. Wnt (talk) 16:01, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
Such ideas are actually not all that crazy :) . Count Iblis (talk) 20:31, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

For other recent examples of the OP's deep insights, see here and here. --JBL (talk) 00:46, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Joel B. Lewis has numerous Conflicts of Interest. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.87.109.111 (talk) 07:23, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
Well that's a pretty damning point right there. Looks like you're going to have to recuse yourself, Joel. /s — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 19:00, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
I was curious, so I searched out what OP was complaining about. They are apparently[1] unhappy that Genesis flood narrative was changed from Christian-based BC/AD dates to "atheist" BCE/CE dates. If you check the link I gave, the complaint has been well refuted. The article-topic is the Jewish Torah flood narrative, a narrative which has been adopted by, or has parallels in, various religions. The change in date style was made in accordance with MOS:ERA. Apparently it is atheism to deny Christian WP:OWNership of this article.
However I am sympathetic to OP's concerns. Wikipedia should never advance an atheistic POV, particularly on articles about religion. I therefore I propose correcting this article to more appropriately use theistic-style dates. If there is consensus, I am willing to do the work of converting the article to Jewish calandar date style. Grin. Alsee (talk) 09:17, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
That wouldnt be in line MOS:ERA, which generally says BC/AD or BCE/CE etc when appropriate. As a Jewish article, BC/AD as a 'Christ' based date is probably inappropriate. So its better to use BCE/CE. It may *also* be appropriate to have the dates in the Jewish format, but not exclusively, because the many many many readers who are not Jewish would not have an appropriate frame of reference. (Of course your 'grin' may mean this was a joke suggestion). Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:35, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
Only in death does duty end, yep, the grin indicated humor. They wanted the article to have a Christian dates, and they tried to formulate the complaint as Wikipedia pushing an atheistic POV. So I "agreed" with their complaint, and offered to fix it... with Jewish dates. It played off the presumption that Christianity somehow gets to hijack Ownership of Torah content. I guess I nailed the wiki-rationale too well, making it look serious. Alsee (talk) 11:14, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
To me BCE and CE seem unfamiliar. I mean, I just checked yet again to remind myself of whether BCE dates are exactly the same as BC dates or if the system fixed the bug about not having a year 0. (It didn't, so they are the same). I don't know if I have a parochial viewpoint here, but if other readers are as unsure, I don't like them. Plus, the idea of using the exact same years but ditching one acronym for another based on the implication of a vague Latin phrase strikes me as a just absurd bowdlerization. If you're using BCE/CE, you're still using the Christian date scheme, not to mention the traditional Gregorian calendar (after Pope Gregory XIII) with the traditional Roman months named after Pagan gods Mars and Juno and the extra Julian months shoehorned in named after the traitorous tyrant himself and the autocratic old catamite that came after him. So I can see how a person can smell a bit of specifically anti-Christian atheistic political correctness to this. Wnt (talk) 14:36, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
The CE in BCE/CE stands for Common Era. The C in BC stands for Christ, a term based on the Greek participle χριστός ("Christos", annointed), a translation of the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ ("Mashiach", Messiah). "Christ" wasn't the guy's last name; it is a title. AD (Anno Domini, the year of [our] Lord) is just as non-NPOV. In my personal conversation and writings, I refer to him as simply "Jesus" or "Jesus of Nazareth". The fact that our language has historically forced non-Christians to affirm something they don't believe doesn't mean that it should continue to do so. Peter Chastain [¡habla!] 16:07, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
I'll concede that I was wrong: actually, one of the acronyms would be unreasonably ditched based on the implication of a vague Greek phrase. Aside from that, refusing to use the title of the year based on its provenance still seems excessive. I mean, would you refuse to call Pope Francis by his title in an article because he's not your daddy? His title, and his notability, comes from people who think like that, no matter what we think; and the same ought to be true of the years nominally based on the birth of Jesus. So I would still tend to dismiss CE/BCE as, in essence, either bowdlerization or plagiarism. Wnt (talk) 15:57, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
@Alsee: Ha, funny you should suggest that. After I replied to ZLEA's comment I remarked to my boyfriend that I had half a mind to troll and change all the dates to anno mundi instead. But, y'know WP:POINT and all that boring stuff. ;) In seriousness, though, I'm amused to see that this showed up on Jimbo's talk page of all places, and glad to see y'all think I acquitted myself well in my response. — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 18:53, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps we should take a page of the Romans and their use of Ab urbe condita (dating from the founding of Rome) but instead use "ab urbe condita Wikipedia", thus giving 2001 AD as the year 1... Herostratus (talk) 19:45, 17 May AUCW 17 (UTC)
Sounds good. I've gone ahead and fixed your signature for you. — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 20:05, 17 May AUCW 17 (UTC)
Herostratus, that would be 'ab Wikipedia condita', unless you consider Wikipedia to be a virtual city (or vice versa). :) Peter Chastain [¡habla!] 20:28, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
All Wikipedia dates should operate on a Year Of Our Lord calendar with year-zero day-zero: August 7, 1966. Alsee (talk) 02:53, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
ATHEISM MAKES YOU MORE INTELLIGENT: "The study also noted that the association of intelligence and religiosity is stronger amongst college students and weakest in teenagers and children." Count Iblis (talk) 20:14, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

The original poster might be happy to know that the consensus at "atheist" Wikipedia was to title the articles on the years 1 – 100 as AD 1 – AD 100. Lengthy discussion of the matter may be found at Talk:AD 1 at its archives. wbm1058 (talk) 20:54, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Jon's head

Hi Jimbo. My attention was recently drawn to a recent change to Bell pepper. Some vandal had added that an alternative name was "Kyle's teeth". Anything mentioning Kyle is usually obvious vandalism, right? I looked at the recent article history, and found some previous vandalism that had sat there for a week - someone had added that an alternative name was "Jon's head". Right, also reverted. The vandal came back and added it again. At this point, with the addition having previously sat there for a week, I started to look a bit closer in case I'd missed anything, because some of these plants sometimes have stupid names in some parts of the world - I mean take the egg plant for example. Google the name and there's some hits for it - some recipes, some for sale, some pictures, some Jon's Head soft toys. I had a chat with a wiki-colleague to see if we could get to the bottom of it.

We came to the realisation that the following sequence may have occurred. "Jon's head" was added as an alternative name for the bell pepper by a UK IP address in September 2015. It was quickly reverted but re-added by the same IP user in November 2015. This time it remained in the article for seven months, until User:Heaviside glow had the sense to spot it and remove it. By this time the name "Jon's head" had been added to the filename of an image of some bell peppers. It seems this combination had an influence around the world. We then started to consider the so-called Jon's Head Grill restaurant, apparently established after 2015, with its Mediterranean-influenced menu and its logo artwork containing bell peppers. But really, Google is not persuasive either way. Poor Jon. Jon's head - have you heard of such a thing? -- zzuuzz (talk) 08:00, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Is there some action you would like Jimbo or anyone else to take as a result of this? Siuenti (씨유엔티) 08:05, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
No, thank you. No action is needed. -- zzuuzz (talk) 08:10, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
For example, adding a filter that tags all edits containing common names like "John" for extra attention might help in future. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 08:06, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
I dropped a message at User_talk:ClueBot_Commons#User_talk:Jimbo_Wales.23Jon.27s_head Siuenti (씨유엔티) 08:30, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
@Siuenti: ClueBot NG was down at the time the edit was made. Such vandalism is normally caught by CBNG, but because it was down more vandalism was getting past recent changes patrollers. The best course of action, when you see it, is to diligently revert it. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 22:00, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
Do you do anything differently when it goes down? Ask people somewhere to be more active in recent changes patrol? Keep a record of the edits it missed for review? Ask someone to fire up a backup copy? Siuenti (씨유엔티) 00:45, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Hello

How are you? Mordecai (talk) 16:34, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Good today, thanks!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:38, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Method of archiving discussions here

Jimbo or whomever, I am just curious as to what is the method for archiving the discussions here? Is it based upon some sort of activity/interest level, time since last edit, simple time frame? I'm not complaining at all...just curious. Nocturnalnow (talk) 13:57, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

You can see the bot settings for yourself at the top of the edit window; any thread which has had no comments in the previous 24 hours when the bot does its daily pass is archived provided it leaves at least one thread on the page. ‑ Iridescent 14:02, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. Nocturnalnow (talk) 22:14, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia existential threat and I'm quitting for health reasons

Jimbo Firstly I want to say thank you for your hard work( albeit a work of love most probably) over these many years and especially your non-avarice mentality in terms of potential personal financial gain for yourself...imo, you are one of the very few "givers" to the world's peoples who has contributed real, qualitative and measurable benefits continually for over a decade without missing a beat. The fact that someone with your talents and mentality came out of Alabama in the 70s is as impressive to me as MLK coming out of Georgia in the 30s. I am quitting as of this edit for health reasons. And rather than leave you, and whomsoever else is interested in my opinion, with such positive words, I prefer to leave you with these words: you and the rest of WMF and the Volunteers MUST shut down paid editing fast and hard. You have access within the community to some of the smartest and most dedicated IT people on the planet and I KNOW you can lead the WMF and Volunteers into designing and implementing a way to get it done. The mere acceptance of any Paid Editing will absolutely fuck up this entire Wikipedia/encyclopedia project in its reliability, usefulness and soul. YOU, Jimbo need to "man up", and destroy this "love of money" threat before you give any more time and energy to WikiTribune or any other projects. I wish there was someone else who could lead this fight for survival for Wikipedia, but there is not. The buck stops with you, Jimbo, whether you like it or know it or not. Good bye and God bless. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:06, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

DYK for Wikitribune

Andrew D. (talk) 06:37, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Net Neutrality blackout

A few people have recently written in to Wikimedia asking about or encouraging Wikimedia to support a blackout on 14 June in connection with net neutrality issues.

It is my belief that if Wikimedia were planning to support the blackout, I would have read about it here, and I have not.

I plan to respond that while Wikimedia did support a blackout in connection with SOPA, there are no current plans to support a blackout on 14 June.

I trust someone will let me know if this is being discussed elsewhere.--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:48, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

This is the first that I have heard of it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 01:42, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
@Sphilbrick: It's being discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Wikipedia and Net Neutrality. Graham87 07:31, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
Updating link: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_139#Wikipedia_and_Net_Neutrality--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:10, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Must refs have the neologistic term?

I'm considering expanding some neologistic articles. Can I use sources that do not contain those neologisms but instead use borderline synonyms like sexting (instead nelfie), manspreading (instead leg-spreading), womance (instead female besties), phubbing (instead phone snub) etc? Also, during a deletion discussion, would borderline synonym refs give weight to the notability of a neologistic page? 79.67.95.137 (talk) 11:28, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

WP:Neo says that articles about neologisms are commonly deleted. That makes sense - it's not a complete ban on articles about neologisms - some of them do become notable. That is permanently notable by our definition of notable, not just something that makes the news for a couple of weeks. Perhaps a more direct answer to your question, it also says "Some neologisms can be in frequent use, and it may be possible to pull together many facts about a particular term and show evidence of its usage on the Internet or in larger society. To support an article about a particular term or concept, we must cite what reliable secondary sources, such as books and papers, say about the term or concept, not books and papers that use the term." The last sentence being the most important. Smallbones(smalltalk) 13:46, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

How to fight back against Turkish censorship? Build a better, cheaper internet without the corporate domination!

I just did a news search of recent articles about Wikipedia Turkey, and happened across this ray of hope in a dark world: http://observer.com/2017/05/turkey-wikipedia-ipfs/ The answer is to reinvent the Internet in its original spirit, with a brand new alternative to HTML HTTP called IPFS. The IPFS protocol allows peer-to-peer transmission of files identified by their content rather than their location. Ideally, the users' machines somehow manage to keep a tremendous amount of unique searchable content between them, though I don't pretend to understand all. A practical manifestation is that they have a mirror of the Turkish Wikipedia set up at ipfs.io. However, note that this is only a gateway, and any other IPFS gateway can deliver the same content from distributed networks using the same address (which is actually a cryptographic hash of the content).

I never heard of this before an hour and a half ago, but I just went through testing it works - this is still early days, and I ran across a few foibles. Most notably, the "gold standard" way to access it is via installing the command line interface from dist.ipfs.io, in this case [2] for a Windows system. Most people smart enough to want this program are smart enough to use Linux, so Windows is kind of bottom of the pecking order here - it is necessary to figure out that the command shell has a little hidden option menu in the upper left corner to do pastes, or those hashes will drive you mad. One thing that hung me up is the initial demo link they give you has the command ipfs cat /ipfs/(some-long-hash) but you have to do ipfs QmT5NvUtoM5nWFfrQdVrFtvGfKFmG7AHE8P34isapyhCxX/wiki/Anasayfa.html, without ipfs or the domain name, to get the content that they have on their link I gave above. Still, it does work, and they promise to integrate the whole thing into web browsers directly, avoiding this command line stuff altogether!

This document details that they are interested in working more closely with Wikipedia, and indeed, even decentralizing Wikipedia in a way that I have long hoped to see. They cite a featured strategy discussion at Wikimedia here. Wnt (talk) 00:35, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Peer to peer connections are hard to block, but for the average user Tor (anonymity network) or a VPN may be a better option. It would take an enormous amount of bandwidth to provide a P2P version of Wikipedia at a decent download speed if a large number of people wanted to access it at the same time.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 00:52, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
I assume that you meant HTTP rather than HTML. In a more general scope, peer-to-peer, ad-hoc networks and distributed, decentralized protocols, while not necessarily new, continue to be developed and that cannot be easily stopped, indeed. With the advent of cheap low-power devices and longer range wireless networks, they are becoming more ubiquitous; they can be completely independent of the mainstream internet, but can also proxy to it. Unfortunately they are usually smaller infrastructures that are often slow in bandwidth as well as subject to DDoS attacks, triangulation if wireless, etc. Or they can be implemented on top of the internet (like most darknets and the cases you mentioned like Tor and IPFS and others like FreeNet, I2P and Kademlia). There also are performance challenges. I agree that alternate networks, decentralized protocols (DNS alternatives, DHT/Kad, VPNs, distributed storage, etc), p2p and crypto-anarchism are part of the future. An unfortunate aspect is that the same technologies are also increasingly used to avoid scrutiny, for spying, for covert or anonymous money transactions and malware-distribution.
But it's a fascinating topic, one of my interests. BTW, there were also previous incentives for most browsers to internally support Torrent, although that failed. Browser integration would be a way to achieve mainstream popularity, although this also means bloating even more those "software monsters" and partly remaining subject to their existing vulnerabilities (versus cleanroom protocols and implementations not depending on all the previous and current kludges of the web-culture). — PaleoNeonate — 01:59, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for spotting my error with HTML above. Some commentators think that the decentralized structure should be safer from DDos; I agree with you that a "believe it when I see it" attitude is warranted. That link above also describes some alternatives approaches competing with IPFS. Wnt (talk) 02:11, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
I agree with Paleo. I also agree with ianmacm. "It would take an enormous amount of bandwidth to provide a P2P version of Wikipedia at a decent download speed if a large number of people wanted to access it at the same time." @Wnt: it is an interesting thought :-) —usernamekiran(talk) 07:43, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
It takes an enormous amount of bandwidth to access Wikipedia anyway! And remember, the more people are interested in a document, the closer they can download it from. Sources like [3] seem to believe that bandwidth costs will be massively reduced by use of this protocol. Wnt (talk) 20:18, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
It would be interesting to know how much bandwidth Wikipedia's servers have got. After the Death of Michael Jackson in 2009, there were nearly a million visitors to Jackson's biography within one hour, crashing the system. In theory, Wikipedia could set up an I2P version tomorrow at wikipedia.i2p, but I2P is famously slow and unreliable; it's sometimes not much better than the old Dial-up Internet access connections. P2P undoubtedly offers more possibilities for resistance to censorship, but it is not ready for prime time at major websites with huge numbers of visitors.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 20:29, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
If only there were some place you could look things like this up. ‑ Iridescent 22:53, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Well, a (very) generalised assumption is "every task will have upsides, and downsides." @Wnt: In our use-case, the cost cutting definitely trumps the bandwidth issue. But frankly speaking, by now I know only rudementry stuff about IPFS (I am familiar with P2P a very good deal on theoretical levels). Again in general, Wikipedia needs reliability/stability. As ianmacm stated, "P2P undoubtedly offers more possibilities for resistance to censorship, but it is not ready for prime time at major websites with huge numbers of visitors." I hope we soon get the performance reports/reviews of IPFS; it definitely deserves a thorough consideration. —usernamekiran(talk) 23:06, 27 May 2017 (UTC)
Ideally you would serve a compressed form of the page source, and distribute a rendering program. I chose a random page Nazi book burnings it comes out at 72,287 bytes of HTML and only 15,051 of wiki-text, which should compress to about 4k (or maybe 2k).
If you were going fully distributed you could also transmit deltas, for updates.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:21, 28 May 2017 (UTC).
Hmm —usernamekiran(talk) 19:18, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
What Turkey did was Wrong!, and certainly not adequate set of actions for Encyclopedia, particularly without previous warning. On the other hand editors and administrators at Wikis should have more responsibility for their contributions on Wiki space. With (more) rights and freedoms comes (more) responsibilities and awareness. The best way to resolve situation is to communicate with Turkish government and resolve the dispute or differences.178.223.29.28 (talk) 08:53, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
What is to discuss, Turkey is a brutal autocracy that sponsors terrorist organizations such as Hamas. Whatever the project can do to bypass censors and get information to the Turkish people is a good thing. TheValeyard (talk) 13:41, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
Maybe Turkey is an autocracy, but Wiki should remain neutral and with universal stands and goals not insulting anyone, even Turkish government. If they (Turkey) government request removal of (political) statement(s) that should be taken very seriously regardless of the political system they have there. If other countries follow Turkish precedent it can be harmful for Wiki projects. One task force at Wiki Office perhaps should be formed to settle differences or disagreements with governments that are offended for texts on Wiki projects.178.223.29.28 (talk) 14:53, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
The Turkish government made a beginner's mistake with the Internet. Even the North Korean government doesn't contact foreign websites and demand that they remove material that is critical of their Dear Leader, because they know that these requests would go straight in the circular filing cabinet. The Turkish government has done this with Wikipedia, which is hosted under US jurisdiction. It would have been better for the Turkish government to say on the record that it denied that it had supported any of the groups fighting the civil war in Syria, and to leave it at that.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 15:05, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
Wiki is a sort of NGO and should follow its universal goals and certain international norms, even if the foreign government is not willing to give a full co-operation. To say for example that some government co-operate with terrorist organization(s) is entirely unnecessary. This is not a business or task of Encyclopedia to determine such things. In the case of Turkish "beginner's mistake" the best course of action is to delete disputed article or part of it, and establish some contact(s) with Turkish government. I am sure if Wiki officers correctly approach them, problem(s) would be solved in a matter od days. There is a popular Balkan slogan: "Its better to negotiate 10 days, than to have 10 years war instead."178.223.29.28 (talk) 15:22, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
If Wikipedia deleted material every time a foreign government disputed it, there would be some very large gaps. To recall, it was State-sponsored_terrorism#Turkey and Foreign_involvement_in_the_Syrian_Civil_War#Turkey that the Turkish government wanted removed ASAP. As of today, they are still there. These sections were checked by various editors and they don't seem to have anything wildly wrong with them, and are compatible with WP:5P2.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 15:42, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
@178.223.29.28: And indeed Wikipedia or its editors do not determine this, reliable sources do and Wikipedia must neutrally report about those. So far the relevant articles appear to conform to those policies. — PaleoNeonate — 15:53, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
I can think of several cases were controversial governments (and they are majority in int. community) could introduce harsh admin. measures for diferent reasons (interference in domestic affairs, etc.). Most recent is text on sh. wiki. [4] (with apparent disrespect of foreign dignitary). It is my understanding that Wiki cannot win in these Wars with foreign states or governments, especially on long run, nor its beneficial. Of course, saying that I am not taking sides.178.223.29.28 (talk) 19:14, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
The only way this "war" will end is with the unconditional surrender of Turkey's government. In return for that, we will give them free and unlimited access to one of the world's greatest public knowledge repositories. It's a good deal, they should take it. Murph9000 (talk) 19:38, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
I wish you were right. I don't believe in restrictive government measures, but again Wiki is a Int. NGO and its my understanding that even US government will not unconditionally support Wiki under harsh circumstances. What Wiki Office can do is act in coordination with the US State Department and friendly people in Turkish government and settle this relatively minor/middle problem with Turkish government.178.223.29.28 (talk) 20:00, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

erm... Even though aforementioned statements are correct, we are sort of getting off the topic. —usernamekiran(talk) 18:22, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

To get back on topic, there is probably no chance of Wikipedia being offered via a P2P protocol any time soon. These protocols are based on a system of give and take, known as seeding (give) and take (leeching) Material offered by this method needs to have enough seeders for a decent download speed, otherwise it won't work at all, or have a very slow download speed. InterPlanetary File System looks similar in some ways to I2P and Freenet, neither of which has really taken off despite being around for some years.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 18:30, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Serious error in judgment by somebody

Good grief, can anybody explain why the hell is today's Featured Article about some bridge in Wales instead of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? Who is responsible for this travesty? Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 04:59, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

The successful nomination is here and no-one seems to have noticed that today is the 50th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper, which has picked up a lot of media coverage. Also, Sgt. Pepper was the FA on the main page on 21 June 2014 [5] so it may have been bending the rules to have it again.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 06:07, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
It was suggested here. As Dank (correctly) says, since Wikipedia had only just held a widely-publicized Request for Comment regarding how to select content for the TFA slot, which came to an overwhelming consensus that there should be a minimum five-year gap between articles being repeated, it would have caused uproar had the results of that RFC immediately been discounted to make an exception here. ‑ Iridescent 07:32, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
It was two years ago today, Sergeant Pepper was already TFA... :D
It was released on 2nd June, not the 1st. Stephen 08:51, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
It was released on 26 May 1967. — O Fortuna semper crescis, aut decrescis 08:58, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
Not being a great Beatles buff, I'm confused by this. The infobox in the article says 26 May 1967, but many media sources say 1 June and are treating today as the 50th anniversary, eg here in the New York Times. If the NYT says it, it must be right...--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 09:57, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
It was released in the UK (26 May) ahead of the US, so there's no "anniversary" here. Nothing more to debate. The Rambling Man (talk) 10:02, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

Russian censorship

Soon you will fight against Russian censorship, if situation on these pages not will be changed: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dmitry_Medvedev&action=history

Biography of Prime Minister D. Medvedev was violated because of the lie from so called Navalny. The official checking of Russian MVD says that is lie. But English Wikipedia does not wish publish this information.

МВД не сочло коррупцией факты из расследования Навального о Медведеве (ref 1)

Фонд Навального попросил возбудить дело против Медведева и Усманова (ref 2).

Jimbo and his admins, situation must be changed on this issue. In accordance with the rules of Wikipedia and Russian laws. 78.106.161.37 (talk) 13:28, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

So far in 15 years I saw only three occasions were governments directly intervened for cases of art. deletions. Its very rare, and only in special cases. There were cases with Korea, Turkey and Macedonian request for Janevistan at SH.Wiki. Unless there is something really serious governments are reluctant to intervene in matters relating to Wikipedia editing. Please, correct me if there were more cases of direct foreign gov. interventions.178.222.89.60 (talk) 16:02, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
An agency of the French gov directly tried to have information suppressed on FR.wiki. The Kazakh wiki is basically a government run mouthpiece.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:07, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
Yes, and that was about all. By the way, French case was relating to protection of "National Security" of France.178.222.89.60 (talk) 16:15, 30 May 2017 (UTC)
The talk page of the article is really the best place to hold this discussion. I will say this: our article cites a report by Alexei Navalny, an activist and well-known critic of the Russian government, claiming that Medvedev owns properties and assets worth $1.2 billion. The sourcing of that section is rather thin, with the only quality English language source (note that being English is not a firm requirement, but is helpful to English speakers trying to understand the situation) being a report in Bloomberg about recent protests and the arrest of Navalny. Given that Navalny is a critic, I would expect to see sources which evaluate the quality of his report and the plausibility of the claims. (I personally have no idea! Seems like the kind of thing that could be true, but "seems like it could be true" isn't really the standard used in BLPs.)
If there is an official response from either Medvedev or the government, then that clearly must be cited.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 06:54, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

This violator tries hide very important information: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:El_C&action=history

This information as copy :

"Instead total stupidity, you must implement respecting of BLP in the article about Medvedev in first (not other articles). Banned users means (user marked as sock by checkuser - not tales). Go implement the words of Jimmy if you does not wish troubles for violation of BLP and vandalism." - 128.73.113.234 (talk) 15:47, 2 June 2017 (UTC).

I generally agree with Jimbo, but its not likely to have any official response from Russian government. The best way to procede is not to publish any inflammable political statements on any Wiki, and that in my opinion should be the policy of Wiki. For people on English Wikipedia this case of prime minister D. Medvedev is only a problem of the correct facts and sources, but for Russian people and gov. it is a matter of dishonor of the highest state dignitary and the state itself. In the Turkish case even more than that, it was matter of disrespect of Turkish state and the National Security issue/problem, not only the set of (in)correct facts and statements. As once was said: "The truth is not always the most important goal in diplomacy", and I would aid that each Side will always interpret the same "facts" from different angle with different values.178.222.89.60 (talk) 10:41, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Have you looked around the Wikipedia to see what type of articles we have on our current unfortunate president, Donald Trump? His scandals and controversies are well-documented, following the solid reliable sources that cover his doings. The Wikipedia is hosted in a country that does not have its political opposition harassed, beaten, jailed, sometimes murdered, which is a regular occurence in Russia. The "dishonor" of a public figure is not a factor, what matters is if the coverage is sourced reliably and presented neutrally. ValarianB (talk) 11:52, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Despite controversies and facts about Donald Trump or other world leaders or/and states, if Wiki wants to be truly universal Encyclopedia, it should not take sides or judge countries or their leaders and their actions. It is not a main purpose of Encyclopedia claiming to be International. Wiki needs to respect the international norms of behavior, be tolerant, impartial and be sensitive to views of other countries or peoples, regardless of the fact that they are sometimes wrong in many issues and questions. As for D. Trump, I don't find productive to go after him personally, I would perhaps be to some extent "critical" about the constitutional system (two hundred years old in US), were "electoral system" provides candidates with lesser no. of votes to become US presidents. But, again, saying that I would avoid to be partial or get into any partiality of taking political sides. Wikipedia should not be a newspaper, TV or a blog of Democratic or Republican party (or CNN, etc.), but to the maximum extent be impartial media firmly staying in the encyclopedic boundaries.178.222.89.60 (talk) 15:36, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Reporting the facts of a topic is not taking sides. Alexei Navalny is a well-known critic, his account of Medvedev's corruption has been printed in a reliable source, therefore the Wikipedia can use it in the article. ValarianB (talk) 16:17, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

I find the views of both the above anons (178.222... and 78.106...) to be contrary to the values that underlie Wikipedia. We do not kowtow to government views and "official positions", that would in effect be censorship. Rather we report "documented facts" that we believe are the truth no matter who is offended. We do try to be especially careful with with BLPs, but politicians don't have any special protection here above anybody else. We do not have a policy "not to publish any inflammable political statements." Rather if there is a political controversy, we strive to explain both sides of the controversy.

It is a bit more difficult to write this way when Russia is involved. The press there is not free in the sense that we are used to in the US or western Europe. There has been a long string of murdered journalists. And murdered opposition figures as well. It can be quite difficult to get multiple sources on specific acts of corruption. Let me give an example Volkonsky House#Current ownership. This section of the article doesn't actually mention corruption - it doesn't need to. If the facts are indeed as reported by Reuters, the corruption is obvious. But should we require more sources? If you do that, then there will never be any Russian corruption reported in Wikipedia, which IMHO would be an extreme distortion of the truth.

I suspect that most Wikipedians would be close to my views on the subject: we don't kowtow to governments and politicians. Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:59, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

That all could be even true, but Wikipedia should remain independent and free of any values of political and similar nature added to the interpretation of so called "facts" and "sources". All the so called "facts" comes from "open sources" and most of them are partial information and provide mostly superficial picture. Otherwise, if you disregard norms of respect, honor and principle of non-interference Wiki will become arena of perpetual war(s) external to the nature of academic Encyclopedia, and harmful state measures restricting Wiki could apply in future. Its best is to leave all these judgements on political system and human rights situation(s) to UN and its appropriate bodies. And similarly for the US crisis, lets proper independent state/judicial organs finish their job with Trump's mistakes (Stick to the principle: "until proven guilty everyone is innocent").178.222.89.60 (talk) 17:31, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

"Otherwise, if you disregard norms of respect, honor and principle of non-interference Wiki will become arena of perpetual war(s) external to the nature of academic Encyclopedia." We don't have a "principle of non-interference." Knowledge affects real-life. "You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free." We respect facts and honor the reliable source. The last thing I'm going to do is wait for the UN to tell me what they think the truth is, I'm free to use my own mind, and to make up my own mind. The next to last thing I'm going to do is wait for official bodies, whether supervised by Trump or by Putin, to dictate the truth. This isn't an academic encyclopedia and we are not intelligentsia here to serve the state. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:01, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

Some basic mutual respect should always exit. Without mutual respect you will always have banning and blocking here and on the other side counter-actions harmful for Wiki(s). And we don't want that. I hope you understand that.178.222.120.162 (talk) 08:53, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
The ip that started this thread is just the latest incarnation of User:Need1521 / community banned User:Crazy1980, one of Wikipedia's longest and most prolific sockpuppeteers. We shouldn't be indulging banned users with such discussions as it just encourages them to continue their disruption. Valenciano (talk) 18:39, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
got it Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:44, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

Where to put a new alphabet

If I had like this new alphabet, and I wanted to share it with the world, is there some wiki somewhere I can put it? Not this one I guess, because it's OR and Wikipedia is like allergic to OR in mainspace. Maybe some other part of Jimbo empire family of wikis. Hmmm. Also all Wikipedia pages should have versions "written" in my language, as soon as it takes off. You heard it here first. SonABC (talk) 18:56, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

(talk page gnome) We have Constructed language with the template below including some alphabets; the issue with yours would be the lack of notability. That's not an allergy of course, it's to prevent the encyclopedia from becoming a collection of trivia and promotional material. There are blog platforms, web hosters and user wikis which would be very happy to host your project. Who knows, if it achieves critical popularity , then someone else will write about it here... —PaleoNeonate - 19:09, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
Wikia is very welcoming to all kinds of projects and might be worth a look.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:09, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
COI disclaimer? Carrite (talk) 16:11, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
  • See Unifon for an example of the general fate of new alphabets. Looie496 (talk) 14:22, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Cease using Rotten Tomatoes in film articles

Dear Mr Wales,

I saw that at the top of this page it says you welcome comments. Here's my first and only comment, which I left at the following location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Cease_using_Rotten_Tomatoes_in_film_articles:

I know next to nothing about Wikipedia policies and how they work, and, from what I understand, the closed-shop attitude of many users therefore means that my proposal may well be dismissed out of hand, which is fine. This problem is likely to be exacerbated by the fact that I do not have any awareness of what policies currently support the current tendency to which I am objecting. Nevertheless, I believe it should at least be stated: it is detrimental to the encyclopedia, to cinema, and to culture in general that film articles on Wikipedia almost universally refer to the "Rotten Tomatoes" score for a film. This score, composed of a sum of thumbs up and thumbs down, represents the absolute nadir of critique. It indicates nothing of significance or importance about a movie, and only contributes to the general lowering of critical capacities, and probably to film producers being even further encouraged to worry about nothing except the lowest common denominator opinion. Use of this score represents, to me, nothing but the laziest approach to composing encyclopedic articles on cinema. In my view, whatever policies or guidelines support the constant reference to this website should be changed to prevent this use, and articles that currently refer to this "score" should be edited to no longer do so. Perhaps this question has already been debated and decided upon (I would have no idea where that debate may have taken place), but if so, it is time to revisit it: Rotten Tomatoes really is something rotten in the heart of Wikipedia's film pages.

If you agree, then of course that would be most pleasing.

All the best, 49.194.22.210 (talk) 04:57, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Kirk Cameron, for your input. It is nice to see a filmmaker of your caliber editing Wikipedia. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:15, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
So WP:OUTING is not a thing anymore? Carrite (talk) 15:52, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Rotten Tomatoes is intended as partial review: I'm not sure Jimbo has time to respond to this question this week. However, with over 500 new films per year, our busy editors have trouble writing about detailed reviews of films, so that is why Rotten Tomatoes seems to be a main review source on Wikipedia. See detailed explanation at essay page "wp:Review aggregators" (wp:AGG or wp:ROTTEN). -Wikid77 (talk) 21:17, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Times of Israel on Wikipedia/binary options/paid editing

See http://www.timesofisrael.com/wikipedia-vs-banc-de-binary-a-3-year-battle-against-binary-options-fake-news/ featuring Smallbones. Proof that while paid editing is a reputational drag on the project, efforts to fight it burnish our collective esteem. Coretheapple (talk) 16:23, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

I should mention that there is very little new in that interview. It's based entirely on Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-06/Special_report, with the Wiki-jargon removed. The interviewer, of course asked her own questions and addressed some of her own interests and the needs of her usual audience (general readership Israelis), rather than aiming at Wikipedians like I did in the SignPost article. I have to admit that one question (on Russian involvement in binary options) did completely go over my head at the time of the interview.
I do intend to continue to try to reach out to general audiences regarding Wikipedia's paid editing problems. It seems like the least I can do as long as admins, arbs, and the WMF can't find a better way to deal with it on-wiki. Jimmy, would the WikiTribune be interested in a humor piece about our articles on individual food trucks, donut shops, on-line seamstresses and the like? Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:28, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
What I think this article demonstrates is that outside the Wikipedia bubble there is no debate about it. Paid editing is unacceptable, full stop. Coretheapple (talk) 19:47, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
I am not familiar with this case, but wasn't the issue in this case undisclosed paid editing by sockpuppets, rather than paid editing per se? Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 23:28, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
That's not my take at all (I just quickly glanced at the story, as I'm already familiar with the gist of it). The article demonstrates that using social media, including Wikipedia (which after all is a specialized form of social media) to manage your reputation so you can commit fraud is unacceptable. Duh. But paid editing? What do you think all the donors giving money to the WMF think they are paying for? Wouldn't most donors be fine with the idea of the WMF paying editors to fight these fraudulent reputation managers? Robbing banks is bad. Unacceptable. What society would expect volunteers (i.e., vigilantes) to stop the robbers? wbm1058 (talk) 23:58, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
(EC)I do hope @Wbm1058: is not accusing me or any of the very many people who helped stop Banc De Binary's adverts of the violent or otherwise negative actions usually associated with vigilanteism. Self-policing is almost the only type of policing done on Wikipedia to enforce our rules, and it will likely stay that way for awhile. It is important to do this type of policing, especially with firms like Banc De Binary that could easily cost our readers $millions per year.
I don't consider letting the general public know of our troubles with paid editors to be anything like vigilanteism. It is simply letting people know the truth, it's an important area that we are having difficulty handling. We have an ideal of transparency and sunshine is the best disinfectant. "Naming and shaming" is a limited tactic, however. I think our best tactic is just to spread the word that we have rules, and I believe that most people will follow our rules once we let them know about it and show that we take them seriously.
There are extreme cases, of course, and we have quite a few of them. EpiPen comes to mind only because of a new report that they did not overcharge the government by $465 million, but by $1.27 million [6]. The article on the company's CEO was stage-managed for a long time by a declared paid editor. Unpaid editors couldn't put well documented info on the CEO bio page on her phony MBA, because ... well just because. Would having that info in her main article have affected the public debate that occurred during last year's scandal? I believe it would have.
I do agree with Wbm1058's suggestion that donors would expect us to use their money to remove ads for company's like Banc De Binary. It shouldn't be hard to operationally define "get-rich-quick-scheme" and have WMF-paid editors remove these types of articles. That use of donors' money would actually save our readers (and donors) several times the amount spent on it. It might also apply to false advertising by big-Pharrma. I don't think it would work very well for the single-store donut shop in the middle of nowhere, that puts jalapeños on their donuts. There are lots of different strategies and tactics that can be used against the many types of ads we face, Time to just do it. Smallbones(smalltalk) 04:08, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
Hmmm, somebody is projecting... Here's what I read: “All paid editors must declare that they are paid and who is paying them, thus allowing volunteers to monitor and change any paid edits. Undeclared paid editors are not allowed to contribute to any of these sites. Advertising, marketing, and public relations text is prohibited by Wikipedia policy.” Which is true. But how does a person with the ability to read written English get to "Paid editing is unacceptable, full stop." out of that?!? Carrite (talk) 03:47, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm referring to the attitude of people outside the Wikipedia bubble, not inside. I'd suggest that a deep dive by any investigative journalist into Wikipedia's attitude toward paid editing, as epitomized by the mealy-mouthed passageyou just cited, would find their jaws dropping to the floor. What other website would allow paid editing as long as it is declared? That's like allowing shoplifting if you fill out a form at the front of the store. Anyway, not trying to argue with you, as the paid editing brigade has clearly won; It's the public perception of paid editing that I was referring to, and that the paid editors and their apologists will never win because Wikipedia as an institution simply doesn't act as normal people do on this subject. Coretheapple (talk) 04:09, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
Many newspapers run op-eds by people who are paid to advocate certain positions (think tanks and so on). The affiliation of the writer is disclosed, and it is a matter of editorial judgement as to which op-eds are published. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 17:01, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
I feel myself drifting back into "fruitless conversations about paid editing," which proves my point about Wikipedia being in its own bubble, incomprehensible to the rest of the civilized world. Coretheapple (talk) 19:04, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
It's only "incomprehensible" because some people make ridiculous claims about what they wish policy was and misrepresent their wishes as actual policy, rather than actually explaining what the real policy is. Paid editing is acceptable, given certain conditions are met. Full stop. Carrite (talk) 19:47, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

' “All paid editors must declare that they are paid and who is paying them, thus allowing volunteers to monitor and change any paid edits. Undeclared paid editors are not allowed to contribute to any of these sites. Advertising, marketing, and public relations text is prohibited by Wikipedia policy.” Which is true.' That's you quoting me quoting policy - so are we agreed that this is actual policy?

Now let's leave out the museum and GLAM folks, and the college professors. Let's also leave out the small-fry donut shop guys who stumble in here without ever knowing our rules. Let's concentrate on the commercial paid editors, like your friend who advertises on 'pediocracy, or the Morning277s and Wiki-PRs of the world that you love to defend. How many of them actually follow the ToU and Wikipedia policy? I can think of perhaps one commercial paid editor, who follows the rules from start to finish. I won't mention his name because sometimes I think he is a bit pushy. And I'm not talking about CM, who was pretending to follow the rules for a long time - I think he found out that following the rules as stated above is inconsistent with the demands of his usual clientele.

Commercial paid editing as practiced on Wikipedia now is inconsistent with our current rules and inconsistent with how any reasonable outsider would design a system to prevent blatant advertising from being included in our articles. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:30, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

(ec) That's correct. I was about to commend Carrite on his achievement in twice misconstruing my point. That takes real intestinal fortitude. Coretheapple (talk) 20:36, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
Ha ha, actually, not so much. Carrite (talk) 23:43, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
...or the Morning277s and Wiki-PRs of the world that you love to defend... — Excuse me?!? You seem to be hallucinating. Please provide a solitary link where I do anything of the sort. Stop with your false intimations. Carrite (talk) 23:45, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

Just to be clear - you're saying that you never have defended The Khoser, Morning277, or Wiki-PR in discussions about paid editing?

at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony. I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public.

— Mark Twain in Roughing It

here's your example

Smallbones(smalltalk) 03:51, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

I've never said I didn't defend my friend Greg Kohs, who isn't actually a content problem when he's "on the job" since he knows the rules of the road about notability and sourcing and colors within the lines, even if he choose not to wear a "kick me" sign, in violation of recent WMF rules (I will put that in the past tense since he is now SanFranBanned and I have no information as to whether he continues to edit around the ban). What I am saying is that you are being intellectually dishonest when you conflate my defense of him as a person and his editing in actual practice — true — with "...or the Morning277s and Wiki-PRs of the world that you love to defend..." — which is absolutely false. It's similar to the binary thinking that is exhibited so frequently by fanatics: "all Muslims are terrorists, all Westerners are evil, whatever, if you support one you support all." That's a completely reactionary mode of thought, the means of thought exemplified by religious zealots and ultranationalists and racists and political extremists of the fascist right and the communist left. Guess what? Not all paid editors are equal. Not every "sinner" against WMF rules is equally culpable. Some are defensible. Some are not. Stop intimating that I now or have ever defended them all. That is a complete fabrication. Carrite (talk) 15:31, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Misquoting me (by leaving out Kohs), then moving the goalposts by saying the solitary example (that you asked for) can't be used to say anything about "all paid editors". Then accusing me of having a "mode of thought" similar to "religious zealots and ultranationalists and racists and political extremists of the fascist right and the communist left." As far as I'm concerned there's no reason ever to have a discussion with you again.

The 2nd and last "solitary link where (you) do anything of the sort."

Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:38, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Well, you are very skillful at obfuscation, I will give you that. Perhaps there's a barnstar available, I will check. Perhaps I can also teach you about the use of elipses and point out how they were used to highlight the objectionable part of your allegation. Carrite (talk) 21:02, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
  • @Carrite: I don't see a distinction between "good" and "bad" paid editors, as you seem to be making. I find that distinction arbitrary at best. Every paid editor believes he is abiding by the rules, when every one cited above has violated the rules, at least by socking. You yourself indicate uncertainty on that point. Furthermore, since you are a principal defender of paid editing in the drama boards, you seem to be avoiding responsibility for your own words. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 20:32, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
Of what "drama boards" do you speak? This page? Your precision leaves much to be desired, as this is not a board, less still is it multiple boards, it is a general community discussion page. I discuss. You are entitled to your opinion that there is no gradation of qualitative difference between a sole proprietorship who edits according to notability and verifiability policy in a more or less NPOV manner and large firms that hire multiple employees who conduct their commercial activities with no such scruples. I do not share it. I am no fan of sockpuppetry; I have never engaged in it and would like to see real registration and sign-in-to-edit at WP, as I have indicated again and again at WP over a number of years. Only with this are real bans possible, and only with real bans can vandalism, harassment, and POV editing be stamped out. So, let's not argue about sockpuppetry, because on that we agree. "Every paid editor believes he is abiding by the rules, when every one cited above has violated the rules, at least by socking." — Three is a statistically insignificant sample size, is it not? Not one of those three believed they were "abiding by the rules," with those rules including sock puppetry restrictions. One of those three cited above has produced paid content more or less kosher; two of those three cited above has provoked allergic reaction with their content. The work of one of the three is not worth worrying over. The work of two of the three is problematic. Carrite (talk) 21:18, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
I hope you realize that you are proving Smallbones's initial point. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 22:05, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

An archived discussion which you might not have seen

There was a discussion in length (which involved a few, experienced editors) about Turkish censorship, and use of other protocol(s), and costing in this discussion. I am not sure if you saw it as it was archived by a bot before your activity. —usernamekiran(talk) 19:21, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. For obvious reasons I can't speak publicly right now on the particular details of the state of our discussions with the Turkish authorities. In general, I support the use of VPNs and TOR, as well as technological explorations into ways of making a more censorship-resistant Internet. I don't really think most of those latter things really are likely to solve the immediate problem, though, although for some people in some circumstances, they can help.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:07, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
Hmm. I/we were not expecting you to discuss about issues of wikipedia with other nations. We were looking for your opinions regarding use of other technology. :-)
@Wnt, Ianmacm, PaleoNeonate, and Murph9000: Yo guys, Jimbo finally replied!
Do you want to continue the discussion? —usernamekiran(talk) 05:01, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
There are surely people better qualified to propose ideas. I mentioned the InterPlanetary File System before to get it a bit more in view, but it takes a good computer scientist and a businessman to figure out whether the fear of a lack of "seeders" could be counteracted, say, by WMF working with some of the telephone companies offering free Wikipedia to implement a boatload of international IPFS servers. I mean, I think it would reduce the companies' costs while providing a huge anti-censorship infrastructure, but how do I know? I can only hope some folks reading the forum caught sight of something they can run with. Wnt (talk) 12:37, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
@Wnt: I do not know your background. But if you say you arent a scientist, I will take that. :-)
Scientist/experts are usually busy with tackling the problems that they've already got. In some cases, scientists dont have an innovative/creative mind. But these same scientists/experts can work really good if they are given suggestions. Thats where they need guys like you :-) —usernamekiran(talk) 12:53, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Apart from fund raising projects,assignments,donations from donors,users and other organizations,what are the other ways by which Wikimedia receieve money for charitable purposes?

In 2016,Wikimedia Foundation has gained a surplus of about US$16 million as it is a non profit organization.But I also feel sorry to ask this type of a question,because I am presently studying about "Not-for-profit organizations" for my Advanced Learning.If you can give instructions ,it will be a kind of assistance that I could get for my studies. Abishe (talk) 07:09, 2 June 2017 (UTC) Then only I able to get things that products such as pens,bottles,stickers are available with the brand name of Wikipedia.So surplus has been achieved form selling these goods.I would love to buy them but Where I can able to buy them which means do we have these in Sri Lanka?Abishe (talk) 10:04, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

I think you may be looking for [7]? If you are also looking for more general information about our financials, please take a look at [8].--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:56, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
Oh it's there on the right but I've never seen it before, and I was in the top 30 editors by edit count last time I checked. You might want to rethink where it is and what color, make it stand out a bit... I think I just skipped after I saw "donate". 109.144.245.23 (talk) 20:13, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
(I'm talking about the link to the store) For example, it could be at the top of every page with a link to the store to buy a fancy laminated/embossed/framed version after "view history". Then people could put their version on the wall of their bathroom to read at leisure. 109.144.245.23 (talk) 20:23, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

what inspired Jimbo to make Wikipedia.

I've always wondered what his inspiration was. Donald Trung (talk) 00:21, 2 June 2017 (UTC) Donald Trung (talk) 00:21, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

There might be some hints/leads in Jimmy Wales. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:28, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
I was watching the growth of free software, or open source software as many people call it. I saw programmers coming together and working under free licenses such as the GNU GPL to create huge projects, including the software that, for the most part, runs the web. Things like GNU/Linux, Apache, Perl, MySQL, PHP, etc. I realized that this kind of collaboration could extend beyond just software into all kinds of cultural works, including the encyclopedia.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:04, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
Q: Has Bill Gates ever shown any animosity towards you after spending millions on acquiring the rights to Encyclopaedia Britannica, only for you to up-set his apple cart. Or did he take it on the chin? Aspro (talk) 14:38, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
I think you may be confused here—Microsoft has never had any association with Britannica, which is part of Merriam-Webster. In the very early days of Encarta MS licensed some pages from Funk & Wagnalls, but replaced them with content written in-house for most of the life of the Encarta project. ‑ Iridescent 20:49, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
FWIW, Encarta, Microsoft's CD-based (later HTML-based) encyclopedia, is held to have dealt the morttal blow to print encyclopedias: see Randall E. Stross, The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts its Competition (1996) for the details, specifically the chapter "Britannica, adieu". In short, the EB, as well as its print competitors, depended on an elaborate network of salesmen to drive its revenue; when Microsoft produced Encarta, it was able to deliver a product good enough for customers without that network, & at a lower price. (Some would argue that EB never was as good as its reputation claimed.) When Wikipedia came along, EB was already struggling for survival. Microsoft simply recognized that Wikipedia delivered a product arguably as good as EB -- & thus arguably better than Encarta -- & cut its losses by discontinuing Encarta in 2009, instead of imitating EB's futile PR counter-measures. -- llywrch (talk) 19:20, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
Donald Trung: My smart-ass answer: a man. I've got some early Wikipedia history if you spool down far enough on my User Page... Carrite (talk) 15:57, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Theresa May says the internet must now be regulated

we cannot allow this ideology [Islamist extremism] the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide. [9]

Thoughts? Peter Damian (talk) 11:05, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

That's a poor source. The Atlantic, as always, does a good job here. It highlights one of the usual problems with censorship:

... the government’s lawyers couldn’t come up with a proper definition for extremism. The bill originally regarded it, in part, as “the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.” But even the government’s lawyers,considered this language far too vague.

Nonetheless, she is apparently hard at work polishing this turd. We should remember that before taking this office she was already prominent as the creator of the Snooper's Charter. The idea of eliminating "safe spaces for Islamist extremism" implies literally not having any conversation allowed that is not being recorded by the government, and I do believe that that is literally what she and her ilk are trying to make happen. I would say if there are people who you truly cannot allow a basic right to have a private conversation with friends, then it is better to follow Donald Trump and banish them from your country, even if it requires deliberate refoulement in violation of international law, than to treat everyone like you would treat them. Yet she has already moved a long way toward that goal with what seems like substantial prohibition of "end-to-end encryption" (i.e. non back doored schemes). It seems fair to say that every Briton who desires privacy, or even an international company that would not take special efforts to deny it to them, is already a terrorist in the eyes of the state ... it's only a question of when they will be caught out and punished. Wnt (talk) 12:02, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

This might be a good time to start speedy-deleting things we can't read, even with the help of Google translate, in case we are offering a safe space for a nasty ideology. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 12:39, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
We already do. Valenciano (talk) 16:51, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
@Valenciano: 'It does notcover... coherent non-English material, or poorly translated material.' FYI. — O Fortuna semper crescis, aut decrescis 06:39, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi "things we can't read, even with the help of Google translate" wouldn't seem to fit the category of coherent non-English material, or poorly translated material. The latter is possible to read. Valenciano (talk) 12:02, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
The nasty terrorists, etc., are writing in Arabic, etc. So not avoidable by Gtranslate. — O Fortuna semper crescis, aut decrescis 12:06, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Dead in the water. As no modern democracy has successfully managed to curb porn consumption. Its election-winning rhetoric to be seen as taking a pro-active firm stance. With no real ongoing problems. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:01, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
    Which modern democracies have tried to curb porn consumption? The People's "Democratic" Republic of Korea? Siuenti (씨유엔티) 13:25, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Theresa May calls on internet companies to eradicate 'safe spaces' for extremism in wake of London Bridge terror attack isn't much different from things that she has said before. The problem is pinning down what extremist speech actually is. Sites like YouTube and Facebook already have policies prohibiting hate speech and justification of violence, [10][11] but they are also hosted under U.S. law where government officials cannot play the "I don't like it" card as a way of getting rid of something.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 14:24, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Private censorship has less force that government censorship, but it suffers the same problems of vagueness, and indeed, those pushing for it are still never satisfied. [12] Wnt (talk) 14:55, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
It would actually be a lot easier to deal with terrorists if we didn't take any measures against extremist websites on the internet. We could then use more pro-active methods like letting security agencies create fake ISIS websites to recruit terrorists. Because the people who are pro-ISIS are quite rare, the vast majority of these websites would be fake websites. The CIA could set up fake training camps in Syria to scoop up the recruited people. Eventually this would be become a public secret, which would deter the would be terrorists from trusting each other. It would be analogous to how the East German secret service (the STASI) made sure that no one would feel secure criticizing the government, as a large fraction of the population were STASI informants. Count Iblis (talk) 21:30, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Commons goes bonkers again

Banned on Commons!

As noted in The Daily Dot Someone is trying to get Trump’s official portrait deleted from Wikipedia Commons has already deleted the official portrait of President Donald Trump, as not being in the public domain, but there is an undeletion request at [13] The photo is currently on the White House website [14] and their copyright/licensing policy is clear [15]. Apparently the White House hasn't heard that Commons has determined that this is a copyrighted photo that they shouldn't be licensing CC-BY-3.0. And of course what the White House says about the licensing has much more weight that anything Commons, or an anonymous OTRS ticket can have.

Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:46, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

I've long since given up trying to understand the inner workings of Commons, so it's unclear whether it's ok or not to say that this photo is public domain/CC licensed. FWIW, I don't like this photo anyway, but it is up to politicians to decide what their official portrait looks like.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 18:09, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Who cares what the Daily Dot says. The photographer took the photo before there was a Trump administration and both OTRS and WMF Legal have examined the matter. No one has yet shown that the THE PHOTOGRAPHER has licensed the photo under a compatible license. Everything else is noise.- MrX 19:38, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
To the contrary, Smallbones' argument seems quite valid. The White House is a publisher. It says the content on the site is CC-BY unless otherwise noted. It does not otherwise note. Therefore, the publisher of the content says we have a right to reuse it. If we don't accept that material we find published with a license allowing us to reuse it is really reusable, then Commons doesn't have a right to anything. I mean, it could allow only user submissions, but the user is really just a publisher on Commons making an assertion, and usually with less veracity than a well-known site like the White House. So I'm thinking either you torch everything, you specifically come out and accuse the White House of being a pirate site, or you allow the picture on Commons. Wnt (talk) 19:45, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
(EC)I care about what the White House says. For all his faults the president is the chief executive bound to enforce the laws of the United States. If he says the photo is public domain or CC-BY, then for all practical purposes it is public domain or CC-BY - at least until the courts or the legislature say otherwise. You should care what the Daily Dot says however - it looks like they are just laughing at you. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:52, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
I read this today in the Dot, an interesting situation. So let's say you're right, Mr. Coulter owns the rights to the photograph, as he was not performing a "work for hire" for the federal government. But he did provide the image to the federal government, who then published it on a federal government website, whitehouse.gov. It is generally held, though some object, that the President of the United States cannot leak classified information, as the very act of the President's disclosure is a de facto declassification of said material. I feel this falls into a similar situation, in that the federal government, by the act of utilizing the photograph on a government website, has for lack of a better word de-copyrighted the photograph. ValarianB (talk) 19:49, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Hey, that makes perfect sense in this age of alternative facts! Clearly we can close this now as keedy speep- MrX 20:01, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
My area is habeas, not copyright law, but I am nearly certain that the Copyright Act does not work that way at all. Also: the Takings Clause. However, I agree with Smallbones' read on the matter. Rebbing 20:18, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
When someone pays you for an image, the contact may stipulate that you retain all copyright rights but are giving them the right to copy the image under conditions specified in the contract. Or the contract may stipulate that you are selling all of your copyright rights to them (at a much higher price if you are smart), at which point they are free to release it under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License if they choose. At issue is which sort of contract the two parties signed, and if they cannot agree, a court must decide. What is batshit crazy is that there is an OTRS ticket filed by someone claiming to own the copyright rights (we don't know who; the OTRS volunteers cannot say [TOVCS]) who may have provided OTRS with a copy of the contract (TOVCS) or presented other evidence (TOVCS) and from that we are to assume without evidence that reliable source whitehouse.gov lied when they released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Note that the unnamed individual failed to post a DMCA takedown, which would have been published. Allowing one party in a contract dispute to prevail without any being able to examine and dispute his claims is not why we keep OTRS tickets secret! --Guy Macon (talk) 22:49, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
The suggestion that whitehouse.gov 'lied' is unhelpful, the issue raised is much more likely an error, an oversight or a misunderstanding on the part of one or more of the involved parties. The suggestion of 'lying' suggests (to me, anyway) some sort of deliberate attempt to mislead and there's no evidence I can see that anybody has deliberately attempted to mislead anybody else. Nick (talk) 22:57, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Fair enough, but we cannot assume without evidence that whitehouse.gov made a mistake any more than we can assume without evidence that whitehouse.gov is lying. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:05, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Rebbing, how is Smallbones' comment not essentially the same as what I stated? ValarianB (talk) 11:51, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Smallbones said that we can assume that the photograph is available under a Creative Commons license because the White House says it is. Smallbones doesn't suggest that the White House was able to do this under its own power. There is nothing unusual about this: the photographer may have granted the White House a contractual right to sublicense the work, or he may have agreed that it was produced as a work for hire. These possibilities are both recognized by existing law. Your comment, by contrast, argues that the White House's publication of the image unilaterally stripped it of copyright protection—a result contrary to the Copyright Act and something that would have serious Takings Clause implications. Rebbing 12:49, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Ok, thanks, particularly for not being a jerk about it, unlike other users in this discussion. ValarianB (talk) 14:28, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Just so everyone knows what we are talking about, see Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Official portraits of Donald Trump. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:05, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

A similar situation previously happened with c:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Melania Trump portrait.jpg, which was eventually deleted (rightly, IMO). It was posted on the WH website without a licence and taken possibly over a year before, but it was concluded that just posting it on a website doesn't constitute an official declaration of the licence. And actually a similar situation arises with File:Melania Trump Official Portrait.jpg whose copyright is also documented to be not the work of a federal employee (...). -- zzuuzz (talk) 23:09, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
In that case we were comparing one source (Getty Images) claiming copyright, and a later source publishing the image without any claim of copyright. Not the same as a contractual dispute between a photographer and the site he sold the photo to. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:25, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Where are you getting this "contract dispute" from? It's pure speculation and not at all useful.- MrX 23:34, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
The OTRS volunteer said that some unnamed person said he owns the copyright. Whitehouse.gov says that they own the copyright. Nobody disputes that the photographer who took the picture (who may or may not be the unnamed person) was paid for his photo by the Trump administration, who control whitehouse.gov. How is this not a contract dispute about what whitehouse.gov was buying when they paid for the photo? --Guy Macon (talk) 23:54, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
As Finnusertop said at commons, It is abuse of OTRS to deliver takedown requests to volunteers who have signed a confidentiality clause that prevents them from sharing relevant information with the community, who are then asked to come to a consensus while in the dark. Takedown requests should be posted as DMCA Takedown Notices that the WMF has pledged to publish. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:06, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict) No one here has any idea if the photographer was paid, or under what terms. There was no "Trump administration" at 09:54, December 15, 2016 when the photo was taken. Whitehouse.gov does not say "that they own the copyright", here's what they actually say.- MrX 00:35, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
There was a Trump transition paid for by the US government on December 15, moreover the release you link says all content, if contributed to the site by others is under free licence. That's an express release by others. In fact, Wikipedia works just the same. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 01:42, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@MrX:, you're being a bit of a boor throughout these discussions, directing unbridled sarcasm and derision towards myself (here) and others in the course of these discussions for expressing opinions that you disagree with. This is a complex issue made worse when dealing with the privacy of the ticketing system and the lack of any response or clarification by the White House to wikicommons admin's queries. As the user above pointed out, the photographer in question may very well have been working on the taxpayer's dime, and you don't get to apply your own interpretation to the very black & white copyright notice on the whitehouse.gov website, so you do not know nearly as much about the situation as you think you do. Kindly, tone it down. TheValeyard (talk) 03:01, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@TheValeyard: Kindly step back. I've been careful to separate established facts from my own speculation. In contrast, several others have made wild guesses, sweeping generalizations, careless assertions, and blatantly inaccurate claims about copyright. An OTRS admin should have deleted the photos once they determined that they were not properly licensed, especially after they consulted with WMF legal. See also: COM:PCP- MrX 03:25, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Stepback yourself, bucko. I stand by my comments; you have come across as aggressive and demeaning throughout these discussions. TheValeyard (talk) 03:27, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
TheValeyard is correct in his assessment of MrX's behavior. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:43, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@Guy Macon: As I have stated elsewhere (and I am both a commons OTRS agent, and the Commons admin that closed the DR) the request made to OTRS was not a DMCA takedown notice. It was a request by a third party for a correction to the file pages that included information, since verified, that made it clear both that the previously claimed license and authorship of the images was incorrect, and that the stated license on the file pages was wrong. The White House makes a generic claim about the status of 'all' third-party images published on their website... such claims are subject to verification, and OTRS has communicated with the copyright owner and not received such a verification or a new compatible license (and one was specifically requested by OTRS). In such a case, Commons policy is that the images are eligible for speedy deletion under 'no permission', after a one week waiting period. The requests for either a verification of the license claimed by the White House, or a new license, were made well over a week ago.
Unfortunately, many of the assertions made by various people about this image are simply wrong. Specifically, several people have claimed that some detail is 'unknown' when it is in fact known to any OTRS agent that reads the ticket, and simply cannot be disclosed publicly because it is only known to that agent from reading communications that are under a privacy agreement. The main point to realize here is that every OTRS agent who has read the ticket and commented (5, that I know of, including 2 Commons administrators) agrees that the files are eligible for speedy deletion under Commons policies.
Guy Macon, you said "The OTRS volunteer said that some unnamed person said he owns the copyright." This is an example of a statement made by someone without access to the ticket that is completely wrong. The information given to OTRS by a third party indicated the correct attribution and who owned the copyright, the owner provided evidence of ownership, and we were unable to either verify that the license claimed by another third party (the White House) was correct, or obtain a new license. Reventtalk 04:17, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Please note that I !voted for deletion and repeated my opinion that the file should be deleted at least half a dozen times. My objection is to commons admins invoking a supervote to close down an ongoing discussion where the community is making a good-faith effort to gather enough information to change the copyright status from "unknown" to "known".
Also note that common usage and the context of the conversation made it clear that "unknown" means "unknown to those who cannot read OTRS tickets". The editors who took the time to try to resolve this issue are not stupid. Please don't stuff words in their mouths that assume that they are.
Given the information you provided above, it was clearly right and proper for any Commons admin with OTRS rights to delete the files, not to be undeleted until someone shows actual proof of who owns the copyright and that they gave the proper permission.
It was not right and it was not proper for any Commons admin to shut down the discussion when there was still progress being made toward determining -- using information that anyone can access -- who owns the copyright and whether they have released it under a compatible license. It is not the role of an administrator to use his tools to impose a supervote or to shut down conversations, especially conversations that criticize Commons admins or OTRS volunteers. This is a clear conflict of interest. Deleting the files met every requirement of OTRS. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:18, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@Revent and Guy Macon: I believe Revent when they say this was not a takedown request. But I think one of the lessons to learn from this case (and there are many is) is this: the OTRS system could be seriously abused to deliver what effectively amount to opaque takedown requests. WMF publishes formal DMCA Takedown Requests to uphold the transparency that is vital to its mission, and I can imagine that those who want content to be taken down for one reason or another would prefer not having this transparency. Someone who knows how the community works could deliver OTRS, perhaps via a "third party" (ie. their lawyer), messages that question our right to host some content. If they have a valid concern, OTRS will have no other option but to pursue the deletion of the content without ever disclosing who told them and what. Successful or not, it would be delivering information in complete anonymity and therefor impunity of the possible chilling effects of frivolous takedown requests. If I wanted to censor Wikipedia, I would contact the OTRS. Every shot is worth a try, because no one will ever know, and the merits of my case will not be debated publicly so as to save me from embarrassment. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 07:35, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
There are still two pictures left with the official portrait in the background, these can be used to create a new one with some work (removing reflections and image stacking with each other to remove noise and improve resolution), the result will then no longer fall under any copyright due to the nontrivial work performed in getting to the end result. Count Iblis (talk) 05:57, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
That sounds a lot like using a technicality to violate the spirit of our copyright policy. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:18, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
The effort is verifiable because the original pics and the new one are for everyone to see. So, people can judge whether or not it's just a matter of importing the pics in Photoshop and hit a few bottoms and be done in one minute, or if this requires a lot of non-trivial post processing work. Count Iblis (talk) 08:36, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Iblis, you sound as if you are trying to use logic against copyright law. Logic does not apply to copyright. Truth is born from the barrel of a gun. See Commons:Commons:De minimis -- it is already well established that a picture might be allowed yet a piece of it is banned. There is nothing you can do, with any content you find or think of, that is safe; intellectual property means that you yourself, inherently, are property. Wnt (talk) 13:23, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
  • The OTRS volunteers are arguing that White House.gov is committing a crime. Nothing in any OTRS ticket can show that. Moreover, the recourse for anyone claiming White House.gov is committing a crime is not against downstream users of the government website's material, which is indisputably and publicly CC licenced. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:19, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
No. The OTRS volunteers have stated correctly according to the relevant process that someone has contacted them (through the correct channel for such requests) and provided them with enough verifiable information to confirm that the copyright holder has not released the photograph under the license it was uploaded with. There are many reasons the White House may have included a picture on its website with an incorrect license, simple ineptness is probably the most likely. Either way it does not mitigate that the license holder has confirmed they retain the copyright. So yes, its subject to summary deletion. If the white house wishes to dispute the status of the copyright with the copyright owener, they would have to provide evidence that disputes the copyright holder. A disclaimer on a website is not 'evidence'. Its a position statement. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:44, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
No. They have specifically said on Commons, White House.gov is committing "copyfraud" (not only that, that's what, "the copyright holder has not released the photograph" under the indisputable CC licence is) and that is why it needed to be deleted. The OTRS ticket cannot possibly show that. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:58, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@Only in death: Let's be clear then: there is no evidence that anything on Commons is validly hosted, (or at least not unless the person who created somehow registered their camera identity documents with OTRS out of our sight perhaps). If anyone comes to Commons with a reasonable-sounding allegation that whatever image we have is actually under their copyright, Commons will delete it - doesn't matter what it is. The only conceivable recourse would be to go to President Trump or whoever, ask them to submit their own evidence. Then we can have a little court, maybe they can each send a lawyer, and we come to a decision. Except of course that since any decision might be wrong, might as well just cut to the chase and delete it every time. Think of Commons as the free image database anyone can censor. That's what you want?
I would suggest the obvious alternative is that so long as the White House has the image up with a CC-BY license, we have a good faith belief that it is in fact validly licensed. If there is a concern we can notify — notify as in "we don't expect to hear anything back, or even a confirmation that this didn't go to the same roundfile in the sky as the billion other prayers sent to Trump daily, but that's his choice — notify the White House that we heard there was a copyright problem and if there's an error please let us know. And then we go about our business and hope that the alleged owner will sue the White House rather than everyone who believes a CC license they read on the Internet.
I mean, if people aren't safe to believe a CC license they see on the internet, what is Commons? What is Wikipedia? If the reader's good faith belief that we mean it when we say something is CC-licensed doesn't give them any protection, then this site is only a web destination, a distraction for pirate-minded consumers that may be a ruin tomorrow, but not a resource people can reuse and rework. I say a CC license should be as good as any other license -- if we get a free picture off the White House website, that should be just as much ours with just as secure a license as if our site had forked over money to Getty Images or some other image owner (if there are any) to get a license for money. A license is a license. Wnt (talk) 13:41, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
We have a good faith belief that yes, the disclaimer on a website is valid - absent any contradictory information. OTRS has received a request with contradictory information that satifies the criteria for asserting ownership. If whitehouse.gov wants to dispute that, that is their issue. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:54, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
It's not a disclaimer, it is a licence. There is no possible contrary information in any OTRS ticket. That free licence exists today, just like it existed yesterday, and ever since the material was placed there. One cannot have work published on a free licence site and claim its not published with a free licence.Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:06, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
"The information given to OTRS by a third party indicated the correct attribution and who owned the copyright, the owner provided evidence of ownership, and we were unable to either verify that the license claimed by another third party (the White House) was correct, or obtain a new license." Feel free to take this up with the whitehouse. But frankly this conversation is done until whitehouse.gov provide evidence they have ownership in order to release the content under a free licence. Merely stating something is published under a free licence does not make it so where they lack the permissions to do so. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:32, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
No. One cannot assert or claim a licence does not exist - the license does, it exists for the whole world, and it is a complete lie to say it does not. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:50, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Well you are legally wrong (an assertation of a valid licence is not defacto proof of said licence), you are wrong with regards to commons policies regarding proof of copyright, and you are wrong in the eyes of WMF legal who confirmed that OTRS were correct. So unless you are willing to take it up with the whitehouse and get them to provide a valid licence, you are wasting your time bleating about it here. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:26, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Re: "...WMF legal who confirmed that OTRS were correct", where did they confirm this? All we have is someone from OTRS saying that they confirmed it. I am not implying that the OTRS member is lying, but legal opinions often contain qualifiers or additional explanations. I would be a lot more comfortable if we had the actual words of someone from WMF legal instead of a paraphrase by someone with the appearance of having a COI. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:37, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@Guy Macon: I'd like to hear this directly from WMF Legal as well. We've been told in both the deletion and undeletion discussions that the WMF agrees with the concerns of OTRS agents – according to OTRS agents. We're also told that asking the WMF about this is unlikely to result in a public statement, because it would involve them acknowledging that they were hosting content without permission. On the other hand, I was told to "ask them". I don't distrust OTRS agents, but their confidentiality is with regards to tickets because they often involve personal information. WMF on the other hand, should live up to their ideal of transparency. The WMF should come on the record. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 04:16, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
Indeed, and OIDDE, your absurd claim that a written licence is not proof of licence and that people cannot rely on written licence is absolute nonsense. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:55, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

And now, having shut down the discussion at c:Commons:Deletion requests/Files in Category:Official portraits of Donald Trump, the closing commons admin decided to continue the discussion on my talk page on commons: c:User talk:Guy Macon. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Guy Macon (talk • contribs) 16:27, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Can you translate the bureaucratic gobbledygook at the bottom of the discussion? Coretheapple (talk) 16:32, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
"The files were deleted as per the process for where there is reasonable doubt as to the claimed license. This 'Deletion request' was re-opened out of process because it should have been raised as a 'deletion review' because the files were already deleted. The files would have been speedily deleted as a result of the OTRS tagging". Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:37, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Two different issues. You are talking about deleting the files, which I have always supported (we don't keep files when there is a question about who own the copyright and/or whether they released it under a compatible license). I am talking about closing down the discussion based upon the demonstrably untrue assertion that deletion is the only thing that we could possibly discuss. There is plenty left to discuss. If allowed to continue the discussion, ordinary editors could:
  • Determine using non-OTRS information that the photographer owns the copyright and did not give permission, thus giving everyone more confidence in the OTRS system.
  • Determine using non-OTRS information that the photographer owns the copyright and did give permission, thus allowing a commons admin to undelete the image.
  • Determine using non-OTRS information that the whitehouse.gov bought the copyright rights, thus allowing a commons admin to undelete the image.
It is not the place of any commons administrator to unilaterally decide that a discussion is pointless when the clear consensus of the community is that it is not. Just because it did not occur to the admin that the point of the discussion might be to obtain compelling non-OTRS evidence as to exactly who owns the copyright and what permissions they released it under, that does not justify him shutting down an active community discussion that is clearly working towards that goal. We give admins a lot of powers. Supervotes are not one of the powers we give them. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:51, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Thats a discussion for a deletion review, not a deletion request however. Since the files would have been deleted *regardless* due to the OTRS tagging. Its also largely pointless because points 2 and 3 of your above would be highly unlikely to supersede an OTRS ticket by the copyright holder. You would need unambiguous proof that the copyright holder has transferred ownership rights (or licensed the pictures to the Whitehouse with the ability to release them) - which short of a copy of the contract between the two or a statement by the photographer - is just not going to be forthcoming without contact with either the Whitehouse or the photographer. And even *should* the whitehouse respond and say yes, they have the rights, and the photographer still says no they dont, it would not be undelete anyway as the wikimedia projects are not about to get into the middle of a copyright fight between two parties claiming ownership. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:59, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Do you have a statement by someone who can read OTRS tickets that there is an "OTRS ticket by the copyright holder"? I can check if you want, but as I recall, OTRS members have stated that it the ticket was filed by a third party and that neither the photographer or whitehouse.gov have responded to inquires. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:46, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Only in death, you just made the claim that if I provided indisputable proof that the photographer who took the picture owns the copyright and released it under a CC BY-SA 3.0 License, it (in your words) "would not be undelete anyway". Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds? I suspect that you may be making an error that I myself have made in the past, which is to get a false idea in your head about the arguments other people are posting and then arguing against that false idea rather than their actual arguments. I'm just saying that you should think about that possibility. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:46, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Sorry you may have misunderstood (or I was not clear) the last sentence was specifically referring to a situation where the whitehouse says one thing, and the photographer/owner says another. Of course if there is proof the *photographer* who holds the copyright released it, that would be a different matter. Re third party: I read Revants comment above of
"The information given to OTRS by a third party indicated the correct attribution and who owned the copyright, the owner provided evidence of ownership, and we were unable to either verify that the license claimed by another third party (the White House) was correct, or obtain a new license."
as it was raised through a third party to OTRS indicating who owned it, and contact with the owner provided the evidence to confirm it and were unwilling to provide a new compatible license. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:54, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
Don't be silly. Wikimedia saying, look world, White House.gov provides government work under PD and third party work under CC is not getting in the middle of anything - it's just true. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:07, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Jimbo is not here

Jimbo is of course in favour of building an encyclopedia, but it seems like he's not here enough to help very much. I think he should nominate someone else to be, like, "governor-general" of Wikipedia so we can nag that person instead. It might be important in terms of "checks and balances". Siuenti (씨유엔티) 15:28, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

When was the last time Jimbo made a statement here that affected our "checks and balances"? He's been hands off for years. --NeilN talk to me 15:37, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
"That government is best which governs least" - Civil Disobedience (Thoreau).
"The supreme rulers are hardly known by their subjects. The lesser are loved and praised. The even lesser are feared. The least are despised." - Tao Te Ching chapter 17.
Wnt (talk) 15:39, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
He says things sometimes, I think he'd probably say more things if he had more time. I think designating someone to speak for him would be better than relying solely on self-appointed "talk page stalkers". Siuenti (씨유엔티) 16:18, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
The Tao is notoriously difficult to translate and subject to many interpretations. This chapter may be among the most difficult. The following is more to my liking, and perhaps less relevant here:

The Supreme stays with the one who is least clever.

Others, who merely pays tribute to the Supreme verbally,
stay further away from the Supreme.
Still others, who fear the Supreme,
are more distant from the Supreme.
Still others, who live in defilement of the Supreme,
are the worst.
There are people who believe inadequately.
There are people who do not believe at all.
Take things easy and spare your words.
When what needs done gets done

People will say “How natural and easy it is!”

— p.24
Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:28, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
Here are a number of versions, and the original Chinese. I think more of them favor the version I gave... if that's not what you think it says though, well, then use some other quote that favors this idea! ;) Wnt (talk) 19:04, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
An amusing discussion. :-) I actually do think that I am most effective in a "reminding" capacity. I've been around a long time, I know a lot of things, and I know how easy it can be in the heat of the moment to forget some of our most fundamental and cherished principles. It's not for me to decide whether to (say) accept a certain source, but to remind that we are seeking quality. It's not for me to decide whether to (say) delete a BLP, but to remind that we have a moral responsibility to not have biographies that are low quality and may cause harm. And so on.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:53, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Yeah sometimes reminding, almost never dictating. Do you feel you have enough time to remind every time it would help? Siuenti (씨유엔티) 19:10, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
BTW if this gets archived with no reply I'll take that to mean "no, not here enough" hehe. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 10:40, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

"The decline of Wikipedia" - MIT

Have you read this? What's your opinion on the matter? Thanks. - Alumnum (talk) 05:49, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Not sure why a commentary piece from October 2013 has suddenly become relevant enough for Jimbo to comment on here. It makes a familiar range of criticisms (the number of Wikipedians is declining, most Wikipedians are male etc) and there are various threads which have discussed this in the past.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 06:00, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
.......especially since the central assumption, that the size of the WP core volunteer community is shrinking, is incorrect. Carrite (talk) 17:06, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
I read it with great interest a while back, and I think that each of the concerns that it raises is a concern that we should take seriously and that I think we are taking seriously. The thing about "community health" is that it is never, ever, a "settled issue for all times". We'll always want to revisit it and think about what steps we can and should take to test new ideas and try new things (with safeguards of course in case some new idea really sucks once we try it).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:50, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

A serious problem with Wikipedia is that they seem to focus on fringes than on the centre.(ex:Donald Trump is heavily edited but the Federal government of United States has refimprove tags on it,Narendra Modi is a good article Government of India has refimprove ta:: that these were featured articles but I got a nasty shock when I opened them FORCE RADICAL (talk) 09:58, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

If you stopped biting newbies so much the community might start to grow again, or at least get smaller more slowly. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 10:41, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
@Siuenti: Who, there, is 'you'...? — O Fortuna semper crescis, aut decrescis 11:00, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedians in general I guess, not Jimbo himself probably. I try not to bite helpful newbies but I probably do sometimes. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 11:08, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
Newbie edits have like a "Mark of Cain" on them in recent changes, people assume they are poor quality and give them little to no consideration in my experience. Siuenti (씨유엔티) 11:22, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Steward_request labeled "Done", when nothing was done!

Hi Jimbo, at Steward_requests[16], one of Stewards labeled request for deletion of Janevistan "Done" without any change or deletion of page Janevistan!? Instead of labeling "Notdone" because nothing was done, he placed "Done", and gave the comment: "delete it yourself"!(i.e. "Go make a deletion request yourself."). Just to remind you that page is and was admin. locked. May I ask you to delete this page, please. Sincerely yours, 178.223.47.97 (talk) 12:54, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 9 June 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:18, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

To Whom It May Concern

(Image not added by Jimbo)

Look. I won't waste your time. I just want to let you know that I (and undoubtedly many others) am very pissed off by the fact that you plaster a huge "donate" sign at the top of the screen, basically telling us that you give us 'facts' instead of "fake news." Nothing could be further from the truth. This is coming from the mouth of a former Wikipedia editor, someone who tried to work with other contributors for quite a long time. I know your little system from inside out. You are a profoundly biased sandbox, not an encyclopedia, and no one who doesn't agree with the views of the WikiMafia can edit it. (In fact, your minions will probably delete this in a few hours or minutes.)

I will not waste my money, nor will I waste my time "contributing" (i.e., squabbling) to a bunch of nonsensical rhetoric any more. I will not use Wikipedia except for trivialities such as "what is the average size of an Ecuadorian sheep" (maybe not even that).

You are the epitome of fake news, and you and everyone else knows it. - (Former Wikipedian) 187.193.26.56 (talk) 01:40, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

This would be hilarious if it wasn't really sad that people actually think this way. Gatemansgc (talk) 02:08, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Sad but true, otherwise Trump could not have been elected. Count Iblis (talk) 02:15, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
How I wish he hadn't been elected...
Also, this person was probably one of those people angry over Pizzagate related garbage, like the deletion of people who they thought were notable merely because they covered Pizzagate. Gatemansgc (talk) 03:00, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Rather than speculating on what the heck the original poster is talking about, I'll just ask. Could you point us to your former contribution history and explain just what topic you think is "fake news"?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:23, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Just for good faith, User:Green547 is my ex-user page (though I blanked it). As you can see, I contributed quite extensively in copyediting, revising, and anti-vandalism efforts, and I tried to work with other editors to fix issues. But the liberal bias throughout the whole encyclopedia made it moot to me. After trying to fix a pro-American bias issue in a historical article without success, I left. I'm sorry, but I won't waste time or money here. Instead I will spend it on propagating truth. I find it ironic that you allude to "fake news" in your donation notice, seeing as most of your content and editors are anti-Trump, or generally liberal. Frankly, it is dishonest. That is my problem. BTW, I am quite used to getting talked to like that in a talkpage, and this will be the last time. Green547 (talk) 16:03, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Oh your this guy. An accurate summary would be 'I tried to enforce a bias that existed only in my head, but failed to find consensus amongst other editors'. Let it goooo, let it gooooooo. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:26, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
I wish I could thank your edit multiple times. Gatemansgc (talk) 00:26, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
Yeah, that guy. Actually, it didn't exist only in my head; a lot of editors had previously tried to make the same point I had. Furthermore, in other places I did find almost unanimous consensus. My problem is that you ask people to donate to a source of 'reliable, neutral' information, and it's not, thanks in part of a small group, the WikiMafia. Green547 (talk) 16:33, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Oy vey. You are aware that Richard Jensen is a conservative historian, are you not? So much for the "liberal" monolith... (facepalm) Carrite (talk) 17:07, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
My concern with that article was not liberal bias. I hope you see why I have left. Have fun asking people for money. 187.193.59.79 (talk) 17:47, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

I'm confused. So there was no liberal bias concerning the War of 1812 (which is kinda comical to think what such a bias would look like anyway), yet there is a Pro-American bias AND anti-Trump bias and that's all liberal bias in regards to those last two subjects? I'm having a hard time tracking which bias is you think is an issue because all those bias don't add up. Capeo (talk) 02:29, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

RfC Announce: Wikimedia referrer policy

In February of 2016 the Wikimedia foundation started sending information to all of the websites we link to that allow the owner of the website (or someone who hacks the website, or law enforcement with a search warrant / subpoena) to figure out what Wikipedia page the user was reading when they clicked on the external link.

The WMF is not bound by Wikipedia RfCs, but we can use an advisory-only RfC to decide what information, if any, we want to send to websites we link to and then put in a request to the WMF. I have posted such an advisory-only RfC, which may be found here:

Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Wikimedia referrer policy

Please comment so that we can determine the consensus of the Wikipedia community on this matter. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:53, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Golden handshakes at WMF

In The Register today [17]. By our own Andreas Kolbe. Peter Damian (talk) 17:57, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Pretty sure there is no such thing as "transparency" at Wikimedia and never will be....--Stemoc 20:43, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
@Stemoc: Oh really? Then what is this??? TransparencyDoABarrelRoll.dev(Chat!)(Contrib's)(Email)(???) 00:06, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
Hey, they used the image I updated and made colorblind-friendly for my WP:CANCER page! --Guy Macon (talk) 03:11, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Foundation follows very normal nonprofit practices regarding transparency, disclosure, and employee privacy around salaries. It may be fair to criticize the Foundation for not doing more, but "no such thing as 'transparency' at Wikimedia" is so far from the truth that no one serious will take it as a valid criticism. I'd prefer that we have a serious and "assume good faith" discussion of real proposals. One valid question that we might ask ourselves is this: should Wikimedia endeavor to follow good practices around treating employees ethically in terms of things like severance pay, or should we seek at all costs to pay people as little as possible, and cut them off with nothing in case their job goes away. I trust that no one would argue that we should hand out lavish severances for no reason, but I suppose that's an option as well. My view is precisely the middle view, which I think is exactly what the Foundation does - we strive to be a good place to work that treats employees well, within the constraints of a nonprofit model.
I remember a discussion once in which someone put forward the notion that no one at WMF should get paid more than $60,000. I ask then that people reflect on what that would mean - that a software developer who could earn $120,000 elsewhere should, in effect, donate half of their salary just for the privilege of working for Wikimedia. I trust we see that this would be silly. We should pay fair market rates and provide proper benefits, including standard proper severance pay as is the standard at other ethical organizations. Yes, some types will criticize - but I think we all know that they always criticizes no matter what. If we paid poorly, they'd write a nasty essay about our exploitation of workers.
In summary, I think we should take a thoughtful and balanced approach to issues like compensation, and we should make sure we have procedures in place to review those practices appropriately.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:48, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
From the article: "Transparency, to quote the Nonprofit Quarterly's late Rick Cohen, "means going beyond what is required by law. To reveal what the law requires is simply the law." Jimbo, your comments above conflate two seperate issues; how much Wikipedia pays and how transparent Wikipedia is about finances. If you want to pay software developers $120,000 (I make more than that developing assembly language software for embedded systems), fine. Just be transparent and say that that is roughly what you pay without going into specifics about any one employee. If you want to pay Sue Gardner $100,000 after she resigned, fine. Just be transparent about it. If you want to pay Damon Sicore $100,000 in severance pay after working for the WMF for eleven months, fine. Just be transparent about it. (Being transparent might include revealing whether that was something he negotiated during the hiring process or whether you decided to pay him that much after he left.)
Jimbo, you personally need to be more transparent. I remember well when you told us
"To make this very clear: no one in top positions has proposed or is proposing that WMF should get into the general "searching" or to try to "be google". It's an interesting hypothetical which has not been part of any serious strategy proposal, nor even discussed at the board level, nor proposed to the board by staff, nor a part of any grant, etc. It's a total lie."[18]
If you recall, I said at the time that
"As an outsider looking in, I am seeing two incompatible stories, one from James Heilman and another from Jimmy Wales supported by the rest of the board. IMO the stories are too different to be a simple difference in interpretation. So, who do I believe? Well, there are two individuals involved who's public actions and decisions I have been following closely for many years -- Jimmy Wales and Guy Kawasaki. (I simply don't know the rest of the individuals involved very well.) In a nutshell, both of them have earned my trust. I believe, based upon the evidence available to me, that both of them are honest, truthful and are working in the best interests of Wikipedia."[19]
and then I saw in the Knowledge engine grant agreement[20] which said
"Risks: ... Google, Yahoo or another big commercial search engine could suddenly devote resources to a similar project ... The main way to mitigate the first challenge: Proceed with the search engine as deliberately as possible, which is what the Wikimedia foundation is doing" (emphasis added).
That document was in your hands five months before you claimed "It's a total lie", but wasn't revealed (again, we need more transparency) until after you made that claim. Full details of the timeline are here:[21].
I still believe that you are working in the best interests of Wikipedia. Honest and truthful transparent, not so much. If you want to earn back my trust, start by being as transparent as possible about where the money I have donated is being spent. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:47, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
Let me reiterate now: To make this very clear: no one in top positions has proposed or is proposing that WMF should get into the general "searching" or to try to "be google". It's an interesting hypothetical which has not been part of any serious strategy proposal, nor even discussed at the board level, nor proposed to the board by staff, nor a part of any grant, etc. It's a total lie. That was true then, and is true today. That Google, Yahoo, or another big commercial search engine might devote resources to a project similar to the Knowledge Engine was in fact a risk, but that in no way implies that the WMF ever had any intention of getting into general searching or to try to "be Google". If you want to berate me for honesty, then please, at least acknowledge that you've made a huge conceptual error here. I was honest and transparent then, as I am now.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:35, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
You are right, That was not accurate. I have stricken "Honest and truthful, not so much" and replaced it with "transparent, not so much". I still think that your "It's a total lie" comment was way out of line when we are talking about two interpretations of what the Knowledge Engine docs are really saying, and neither interpretation is obviously wrong. Again, I want to talk about the secrecy and lack of transparency, and looking at my comment above I can see that I am the one who sidetracked the conversation to be about calling other editors liars. For that I apologize. Can we get back to talking about transparency, please?
You may want to read Knowledge Engine (Wikimedia Foundation). All the content is sourced. QuackGuru (talk) 18:39, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
@QuackGuru, Jimmy is technically telling the truth here. KE was intended only to search WMF-run and WMF-vetted sites, not teh interwebs as a whole, and thus wasn't general "searching" or to try to "be google". His answer is evasive, but isn't actually lying. ‑ Iridescent 18:49, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
In what way, pray tell, is pointing out that incredibly important fact "evasive"? KE was never intended to be a general search engine for the entire web, and when people pretend that it was, then that is clearly evasive and misleading. Wikipedia already today has a search engine - go to any page and enter a search term in the search box and you get the results - and they are not very good and could be improved dramatically with some investment.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:21, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Leaked internal WMF documents stated in part: "Our new site will be the Internet’s first transparent search engine, and the first one that carries the reputation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation"[22] The original Knight Foundation grant agreement described the project as "the Internet’s first transparent search engine".[23][24] QuackGuru (talk) 20:29, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
So? Wikimedia projects are on the internet, so yes you have search across sites on the internet, which is transparent because the code is public, open and free licensed.[25][26] And your source has this quote from a Wikimedia engineer: ". . . There has never been any actual technical work on this project. The whole project didn’t live long and was ditched soon after the Search team was created, after FY15/16 budget was finalized, and it did not have the money allocated for such work (umm, was it in April? in such case, this should have been soon after the leaked document was created). I don’t think anybody but the certain champion of the project has considered competing with Google with any degree of seriousness. No, we’re really not working on internet search engine. And will not work in the future. For shizzle.”[27] Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:56, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
The claim "There has never been any actual technical work on this project. The whole project didn’t live long and was ditched soon after the Search team was created, after FY15/16 budget was finalized, and it did not have the money allocated for such work: may be technically true, but the fact is that here were plans to spend millions of dollars on this before the shit hit the fan, as can be seen on page 9 of the Knowledge Engine grant agreement, appended to which is the following:
"We anticipate future years’ budgets to increase by 20% per year as we accelerate the growth of the program.
*Projected future budgets
*FY 16–17: $2,900,000
*FY 17–18: $3,500,000"
There is a basic difference between "we planned on spending millions of dollars but canceled it before spending anywhere near that amount" and "we never planned on spending millions of dollars". --Guy Macon (talk) 01:06, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Those small amounts? No one builds a free open competitor to Google for that. No doubt they are spending that money for better Wikimedia search, even now - community consultations alone does cost money. Not only that, there is no difference between someone spitballed ideas that never got traction and "There has never been any actual technical work on this project. The whole project didn’t live long and was ditched soon after the Search team was created, after FY15/16 budget was finalized, and it did not have the money allocated for such work (umm, was it in April? in such case, this should have been soon after the leaked document was created). I don’t think anybody but the certain champion of the project has considered competing with Google with any degree of seriousness. No, we’re really not working on internet search engine. And will not work in the future. For shizzle." Alanscottwalker (talk) 01:17, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Precisely. Thank you. For saying this clearly, I'm accused of being "evasive". Geez.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:21, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
"Those small amounts" are roughly comparable to what Google started with in their first two years (1998 and 1999). The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998 in the form of a US$100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist. It wasn't until two years later when a round of equity funding totaling $25 million was announced, based upon expected advertising revenue. --Guy Macon (talk) 09:53, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
So, you have just shown Google needed 25,000,000, and that it got 100,000 seed to work on getting 25,000,000 for commercial application. Not at all the small change spent and currently being spent to improve Wikimedia search, which can have no commercial benefit to WMF because it is free and open source. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:42, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Knowledge Engine started as a search engine, any only later, when the shit hit the fan, was it transmogrified into improving Wikimedia search. Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect for the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote
"I know that former VP of Engineering Damon Sicore secretly shopped around grandiose ideas about a free knowledge search engine, which eventually evolved into the reorg creating the Discovery team. From leaked documents, we know at least some of those grandiose plans went into the early drafts of the Knight Foundation grant request, which eventually became a smallish grant to support Wikipedia's search capabilities. What we don't know is to what degree Executive Director Lila Tretikov was supporting the secretive "compete with Google" plan without putting it into WMF's public plans. It seems this would all be a simple case of "yes, there was some talk and we decided against it", so why the secrecy and stonewalling?"
Max Semenik, software developer on the Search and Discovery team, said,
"Yes, there were plans of making an internet search engine. I don’t understand why we’re still trying to avoid giving a direct answer about it... The whole project didn’t live long and was ditched soon after the Search team was created... ideas and wording from that search engine plan made their way to numerous discovery team documents and were never fully expelled."
Knowledge Engine started as a search engine. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:02, 9 June 2017 (UTC)"
If by "shit hit the fan" you mean, --- no one takes it seriously -- no one works on it -- it dies quickly in 2015 -- and it gets no funding: "There has never been any actual technical work on this project. The whole project didn’t live long and was ditched soon after the Search team was created, after FY15/16 budget was finalized, and it did not have the money allocated for such work (umm, was it in April? in such case, this should have been soon after the leaked document was created). I don’t think anybody but the certain champion of the project has considered competing with Google with any degree of seriousness. No, we’re really not working on internet search engine." But that's not shit, that's just no pursuing something. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:55, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Looks like Andreas Kolbe could write an entire encyclopedia about Wikipedia :) . Count Iblis (talk) 22:18, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
Sadly he is banned from this page. Peter Damian (talk) 05:56, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

The June 24 draft proposal for the Knowledge Engine project said that Knowledge Engine "will be the Internet’s first transparent search engine, and the first one that carries the reputation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation."[28]

What is sauce for the Goose is sauce for the Gander

From the same article: "The specifics of the Knowledge Engine's design don't necessarily matter, the secrecy and changing story surrounding it does... More important is that Wikimedia never made any of these proposals public to the Wikipedia community at large and instead moved forward with a project that Wikimedia says will cost at least $2.5 million over the first couple years, and will take, at minimum, six years to complete. The search engine project is also not mentioned in any of Wikimedia's annual planning documents, which are available to the public". The point here is not whether Knowledge Engine was intended to search all of the web or just part of it (including Fox News?) The point here is the lack of transparency. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:24, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Just silly. You don't run expensive consultations on people's still-born ideas, and you don't punish people for having "crazy" ideas that don't pan out. Thinking about crazy ideas, and making plans that will be adjusted, discarded and revised, needs to continue for all creative people, and they have to have room to do it. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 01:29, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
...and "having room to do it" requires secrecy -- to the point of kicking someone off the board for wanting to reveal it -- how? And what of all the other projects where they are transparent even in the preliminary stages (including being transparent about the fact that they are preliminary)? Do they need extreme secrecy to have "room to grow" as well, and if so has the WMF been screwing up by not keeping those other projects secret? --Guy Macon (talk) 04:14, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
What don't you get about ". . .The whole project didn’t live long and was ditched soon after the Search team was created, after FY15/16 budget was finalized, and it did not have the money allocated for such work (umm, was it in April? in such case, this should have been soon after the leaked document was created). I don’t think anybody but the certain champion of the project has considered competing with Google with any degree of seriousness. No, we’re really not working on internet search engine. . . ." Not only that, the so-called "secret" had a public project public page, which dates from early November 2015 [[29] that is not keeping it secret, and it was before anyone was "kicked off a board". Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:42, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Evasion noted. I asked a reasonable question, and you pretended to to hear it I think that the anwer as to why this project and this project alone was kept secret is clear to everybody who reads the timeline above, or who reads what the press had to say about it (Wikimedia Foundation director resigns after uproar over 'Knowledge Engine'Wikipedia Takes on Google With New 'Transparent' Search EngineWikimedia Foundation Secures $250,000 Grant For Search Engine Development) --Guy Macon (talk) 03:06, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
No. You just don't want to hear the answer. There was never any work done on what you imagine. No secret because what is worked on is disclosed. That's all. Alanscottwalker (talk) 09:43, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
I'd like to note that "to the point of kicking someone off the board for wanting to reveal it" is factually incorrect. Guy, you may be misremembering that episode.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:37, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Alanscottwalker, I am still waiting for an answer to the question I asked. The very fact that you used the word "leaked" is evidence of a lack of transparency. Why was this one project kept secret when so many other WMF projects have been publicly documented from the initial rough concept stage?
Jimbo, I agree that I may be misremembering that episode. I wasn't there and there are conflicting reports about what happened.
Getting back to the topic of transparency, Here is a partial timeline of events regarding the Discovery Engine (corrections welcome):
  • April 30, 2015: The Search and Discovery team came into existence with eleven members.
  • May 30, 2015: Risker, a member of the Funds Dissemination Committee, posts review from current FDC member, saying "Search and Discovery, a new team, seems to be extraordinarily well-staffed with a disproportionate number of engineers at the same time as other areas seem to be wanting for them. I don't see 'fix search' in the Call to Action document; even if it fell into the heading "Improve technology and execution", this seems like an abnormally large concentration of the top WMF Engineering minds to be focusing on a topic that didn't even rate its own mention in the CtA. More explanation of why Search and Discovery has suddenly become such a major focus is required to assess whether this is appropriate resourcing."
  • September 1, 2015: Knight Foundation grant awarded for stage one development Knowledge Engine.
  • October 1, 2015: Knight Foundation grant presention to the board, some board members told that they could not see the grant documents.
  • October 7, 2015: All board members allowed to see grant documents. At this point 10% of WMF engineering resources are already dedicated to Knowledge Engine. Board approves the Knight Foundation grant. Pressure put on board members to approve it with comments about removing members of the board who oppose.
  • November 9, 2015: (not revealed to the public until February 24, 2016): Asaf Bartov, Head of WMF Grants and Global South Partnerships at the Wikimedia Foundation, challenges Lila Tretikov's KE statements as "a lie" in an all-staff meeting
  • November 23, 2015: Funds Dissemination Committee criticizes lack of transparency from the Wikimedia Foundation
  • December 28, 2015: James Heilman removed from board.
  • January 6, 2016: Wikimedia Foundation announces grant from the Knight Foundation
  • January 8, 2016: Request for release of the grant application and statement by Wales that he will look into it.
  • January 21, 2016: Request repeated.
  • January 25, 2016: Archiving of the page per Wales' request without the question being answered, Jimmy Wales describes James Heilman's statements as "utter fucking bullshit".
  • January 29, 2016: Lila Tretikov says that the grant paperwork could not be released due to "donor privacy".
  • February 10, 2016: The Signpost asks the Knight Foundation whether they would have any objection to the grant application being published.
  • February 11, 2016: The Knight Foundation responds to The Signpost and the WMF saying they never had a problem with releasing the grant application and that the decision whether to release it is up to the WMF. Juliet Barbara, Senior Communications Manager, publishes the PDF of the September 18 Knowledge Engine grant approval document publicly on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki. Juliet Barbara, Senior Communications Manager, publishes the PDF of the September 18 Knowledge Engine grant approval document publicly on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki.
  • February 12, 2016: James Heilman states that cost estimates provided to the board for the Knowledge Engine were in the "10s of millions range and were still likely conservative", later mentioning $32 million as a proposed amount.
  • February 16, 2016: Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect for the Wikimedia Foundation, writes "I know that former VP of Engineering Damon Sicore secretly shopped around grandiose ideas about a free knowledge search engine, which eventually evolved into the reorg creating the Discovery team. From leaked documents, we know at least some of those grandiose plans went into the early drafts of the Knight Foundation grant request, which eventually became a smallish grant to support Wikipedia's search capabilities. What we don't know is to what degree Executive Director Lila Tretikov was supporting the secretive "compete with Google" plan without putting it into WMF's public plans. It seems this would all be a simple case of 'yes, there was some talk and we decided against it', so why the secrecy and stonewalling?"
  • February 17, 2016: Max Semenik, software developer on the Search and Discovery team, says, "Yes, there were plans of making an internet search engine. I don’t understand why we’re still trying to avoid giving a direct answer about it... The whole project didn’t live long and was ditched soon after the Search team was created... ideas and wording from that search engine plan made their way to numerous discovery team documents and were never fully expelled."
As you can clearly see, I am not alone in my concerns about transparency. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:59, 9 June 2017 (UTC), Edited 20:44, 9 June 2017 (UTC) (February 10 and 11 have changed)
Still silly. It's a bunch of "conspiracy theory" over stuff, which is all rather mundane. Only those who are inclined to conspiracy theory, and assuming the absolute worse, can take any of that and weave some nefarious plot, which of course is what many corners of the internet seem to be for. You've weaved your breathless narrative, it does not make any of it worthwhile. The project was never going to be "secret" and only a foolish conspiracy fantasy, could imagine it so.Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:52, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
That's because Jimbo and his chronies can't handle criticism and refuse to do anything about the problems on this site. It's much easier for them to stick their heads in the sand and pat each other on the back. When the culture on Wikipedia and the WMF stops rewarding editors and admins for bad behavior and stops blocking and banning the people doing the work to improve the site, the WMF sites including Wikipedia will be a lot better for it. Unfortunately that won't happen because the WMF people like James Alexander are incompetent. Just look at the new Wikimedia blog post about the Code of Conduct for the Software community, it's a complete joke and a waste of time. All this Code of Conduct does is continue to expand the rift between classes of editors and gives more power to a few to push their own POV and maintain control over their pet projects. 138.162.0.41 (talk) 16:58, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Note: the timeline above has changed slightly, February 10 and 11 have changed.
138.162.0.4, you are coatracking. This conversation is about the Wikimedia foundation, not about Wikipedia. Please post your complaints about Wikipedia's unpaid volunteer editors and administrators in a separate section. They don't belong here. I advise others here to not respond; please don't feed the trolls. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:44, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
  • All of the bad things that went down around the knowledge engine, the Leila stuff, and James Heilmans' getting kicked off the board have never been addressed by the WMF. Don't know if it is incompetence or cowardice, but the WMF has no effective leadership. Jimbo you continue to aggressively obfuscate about the Knowledge Engine on the level of parsing what "is" is. That is not "transparency". Jytdog (talk) 01:47, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

Protologisms

Protologisms and neologism has a different definition. However, on AfD discussions many people interpret them as meaning the same thing. This not only affects citeable new terms being deleted but even ancient concepts that have only recently been afforded a coinage. Therefore i propose a slight revision to wp:neo and mos:neo to clarify this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.29.134.136 (talk) 12:56, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

Follow discussions at WT:NEO to allow faster coverage of new terms. Perhaps ppl imagined they could deter WP's 1,000-new-pages-per-day growth by banning neologisms, but reliable sources have noted rapid additions of new terms in society, as reason to add new pages ASAP. Recently, U.S. Trump tweeted phrase, "negative press covfefe" where many reporters concluded "covfefe" to mean "coverage" but the new misspelled word became an instant Internet meme (mimicked theme) to similarly corrupt other words, or serve "covfefe cocktails" at local nightclubs, etc. For Wikipedia to ban such widespread new words is just a burden to keeping Wikipedia updated for the fast-evolving world of the current era. It is a crucial issue of editorial judgment to decide how to proceed in high-profile cases which exceed ttpical norms. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:16, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
The way to avoid that is by clarifying a distinction between neologisms and protologisms in our guidelines. Are you willing to do that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.29.134.136 (talk) 18:24, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
@2.29.134.136: I'd suggest you to suggest that over at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is not a dictionary. (You could also create an entry at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy).) This is how policy changes/extensions are usually handled. Note that if you get no replies over the span of many days there you can be bold and add it yourself. I'd support the distinction being made there − good find!
Concerning articles about protologisms I'd like to note that WP:RS would also apply to these and that it imo would also be fine to create an article about a concept that is widely recognized but which doesn't have a proper name except for the protologism. --Fixuture (talk) 00:47, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
............say, for example, the term protologism. (Ah, I see that the link for this neologism is already blue. It ruined my joke.) Carrite (talk) 14:36, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, and it seems a "protologism" is even worse than mere neologisms, where a protologism could be defined by a very narrow subculture, while many mainstream neologisms could be used in thousands of webpages. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:20, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Have looked further into it now and you both seem to be right. And 2.29.134.136's description of it here doesn't seem to be accurate. While I'd support pages for concepts that are widely recognized but don't have a uniform or proper name I don't think there are any cases where only protologisms exist for them and that WP:NDESC would apply to those. I agree with your earlier points, Wikid77, and support the faster coverage of new terms. (However this discussion probably shouldn't take place here but at VP or the relevant talk page.) --Fixuture (talk) 00:57, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Janevistan as a "joke" of racial character! It has no place on any Wikipedia

Status: page sh:Janevistan replaced as {deletedpage} 06:30, awaiting re-index by Google/Bing to omit WMF "sweatshop" text "sve zbog belosvetske zavere Ujedinjenih nacija u sadejstvu sa Wikimedia fondacijom". -Wikid77 (talk) 15:52, 11 June 2017 (UTC)

Dear Sir, you should not hesitate about deletion of Nazi site "Janevistan". One should mention here that as a result of Nazi ideology more than two million people died in former Yugoslavia during Second World War, and as a result of racial extremism (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro) there were hundreds of thousands of victims after Second World War to the present day! "Janevistan" is a racial Nazi "joke" and has no place on any Wikipedia. Not now, and not ever! Please, Delete it now!178.223.25.122 (talk) 23:32, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

For anyone stalking, this is most likely about a shwiki article with a steward request, it has nothing to do with the English Wikipedia. — xaosflux Talk 02:00, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
There were at least four requests to delete the "Janevistan", without any results, but instead the outcome was blocking of initiator(s) of requests by SH. administrator. Also talk page for Janevistan was admin. removed, and the page itself was protected to the maximum possible level by administrator. See this at Steward requests[30]. Now Office Action should take place. Jimbo (or James/Dennis) should use his rights and delete the Nazi article/page.178.223.25.122 (talk) 08:32, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Not an English Wikipedia issue, but according to Google translate[31] the page at sh:Korisnik:Orijentolog/Janevistan has content that translates as "because sweatshop conspiracy of the United Nations in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation". That seems like something that might be against the rules at the Macedonian Wikipedia. Also, Wikidata[32] says that Igor Janev is a Macedonian diplomat. It would be nice if we could get someone who speaks that language to look into this. --Guy Macon (talk) 11:20, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Stewards are in stalemate. It should be deleted immediately. Wiki is not supp. of Nazism.77.105.61.187 (talk) 11:45, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Target of SH.Wikipedia was not Igor Janev, but for the most part Republic of Macedonia!178.223.25.122 (talk) 13:10, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
No more excuses and tricks. Delete it.93.87.226.77 (talk) 15:11, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
My, my. Aren't you the bossy one! --Guy Macon (talk) 16:08, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Could redirect sh:Janevistan to another page: It is unusual that a mainspace redirect would link to a non-mainspace page. So, perhaps we could go to shwiki (Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia) and re-redirect ("#PREUSMJERI") the "sh:Janevistan" pagename to disambiguation page "sh:Makedonija" (Macedonia) or some other related topic. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:12, 10 June 2017 -  Done-- After seeing both Google/Bing index word "Janevistan" to that "sweatshop...Wikimedia" page (sh:Korisnik:Orijentolog/Janevistan), I edited sh:Janevistan to re-redirect to disambiguation page "sh:Makedonija" (Macedonia). I was not aware other wikipedias were defaming the WMF in mainspace pages indexed by Google/Bing etc. Thanks to the OP for heads-up about "joke" page re Janevistan & WMF. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:28, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
Is there any criterion in sh.wiki that disallows mainspace-titles to be redirected to user-space?(Esp. given that an admin allowed the redirect to be in place?).It ought to be but........Anyway, I think too that re-direction to a proper target was the best possible way-out.Winged Blades Godric 17:42, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
If the reason for deletion of https://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janevistan is/was {{Brisanje|Neprikladan_sadržaj|datum=}}, than for the same reason (Neprikladan_sadržaj or in eng. "Inappropriate content") delete the same text https://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korisnik:Orijentolog/Janevistan. "Inappropriate content" (see Template/judgment) was admitted by the SH.admins. in case of Janevistan, and should be applied (as a rule) to every copy of Janevistan, regardless of the place in sh.wiki.77.46.173.24 (talk) 20:12, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
See particularly justification of the Template for deletion of Janevistan: https://sh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Posebno:Evidencije&page=Janevistan (Nije za enciklopediju: sadržaj je bio: {{Brisanje|Neprikladan_sadržaj|datum=}}), by admin. https://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korisnik:OC_Ripper who deleted https://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janevistan . (See justification “Neprikladan_sadržaj“ and “Nije za enciklopediju“ (eng. “not for Encyclopedia“)).77.46.173.24 (talk) 22:29, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
@Wikid77: I think you've been had. I don't think "Janevistan" exists beyond that joke, so it has no business being a redirect to Macedonia. Creating that redirect only allows the troll to cite "Janevistan" in Wikipedia elsewhere -- precisely the wrong outcome. In the archive I cite below, Igor Janev is a real person who raised a real, cogently argued four-page objection to the UN attempt to restrict Macedonia from using its name as a condition to membership ... and I didn't see anything else but that. Wnt (talk) 18:48, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
This has been brought up here about a dozen times before - I reviewed these here; there are two more threads about it in that archive. We shouldn't let someone make policy on another wiki in a language most of us don't understand simply by asking the request here over and over until they get what they want -- if indeed they want it, and it is not the same troll behind every aspect of this. Wnt (talk) 18:44, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
Only deletion by Office will do. See[33] : „Hi James,I would like to bring to your attention the case related to recently banned user Kolega2357 [7] from Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia [8] who actively contributed in the creation of the admin. protected page "Janevistan" [9]. I was surprised to learn that one of the Wiki. projects, was involved in harmful and politically (Nazi) motivated actions with the apparent serious offences against the national symbols of the Republic of Macedonia and particularly insults relating to the Constitutional name of the Republic of Macedonia. May I kindly ask you James to place a template for deletion on the page "Janevistan” [10], on the grounds of serious/blatant BLP violation of the Wiki rules and insults to the Macedonian state (Republic of Macedonia) and Macedonian people, as well as personal offences (Wikipedia Terms of Use offences, insults and mockery about Macedonia and Macedonians, misuse of Wiki. space etc.). If you place that template for deletion on harmful “Janevistan”, I am convinced that User:Orijentolog (the author of the text) from Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia will perhaps show a minimum good will and delete this (search visible) insulting page. Sincerely yours,IMPP-Dragan (talk) 22:49, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

What I found very offensive to Igor Janev (see salted BLP on eng.wiki [11]) was a statement found in the footnote no. 16 of "Janevistan" [12] where it was suggested that Igor Janev was a spy! (sh. "Obaveštajac") presumably Macedonian spy located in Serbia. This kind of statements should not be tolerated or interpreted as a jokes! As for trolling, I don't see anything funny by describing Macedonians in "Janevistan" as a wild savages constantly attacking other people and countries with their shadow "Tsar" Igor Janev, an extremist and expansionist. Apparently the country only exists "because of the conspiracy between the United Nations in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation". Plus, the inhabitants are mostly overweight, and their most famous athlete is a dog, owned by Igor Janev himself. Finlay, and very provocative to the Greek state was the suggestion that "temporary occupied" Greek city was Thessaloniki (sh. "Solun" under Capital of the state) i.e. the "capital" of Janevistan, that should be retaken and liberated (presumably by army, implied by sh. editors) and that it was allegedly the plan of "Janevistanian"/ Macedonian government. These inflammatory nonsenses are of very sensitive nature here in the Balkans and should not be tolerated on any Wikipedia. Wikipedia need not ever tolerate nasty behavior. Wikipedia should apply some universally accepted standards, particularly the rule of civility. Insults on national symbols are prohibited in almost every state in the world and in the Customary International Law. The general idea of "Janevistan" to make a "joke(s)" about the Name-less country of the FYROM (UN designation for Macedonia) is equally extremely offensive for every citizen of the Republic of Macedonia. So the country is, according to "Janevistan" not only Name-less, but also Nation-less! Libertarian Macedonian (talk) 19:28, 23 March 2017 (UTC) I would also add here that state Coat of arms that was deliberately here replaced with the Greek one, not official Macedonian one suggesting expansionism, than national flag was modified into Japanese war flag, suggesting Macedonia will start the new Balkan war or even the Third World War, than insulting allegedly national anthem name "Bread and chutney"??!!, suggesting Macedonian were good only in producing pepper and potatoes (i.e. they are/were good for nothing!), and finally message in the label national motto("You will be killed"!!??).79.175.66.231 12:45, 25 March 2017 (UTC) P.S. not to forget currency Macedonian Denar replaced with label "Macedonian Dollar"!, implying that behind all that war games was US Government (CIA) messing with Balkan stability and security.79.175.66.231 14:05, 25 March 2017 (UTC) Janevistan was not created by normal editors. Clearly, it was made by experts. Certainly, politically motivated experts. Nazi text Janevistan should vanish as soon as possible.Libertarian Macedonian (talk) 17:11, 25 March 2017 (UTC)“ or here [34] „Case for possible use of the Office Action at Nazi page Janevistan”. 212.200.205.104 (talk) 19:09, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Shortly:"Janevistan we have blatant violation of the rule of civility enshrined in the Terms of use, by blatant BLP violations of rules of Wikipedia, and blatant insults and offences of mockery about Macedonia and Macedonians, dignity of the State and people, including individual rights, with messages of death treats and clamming that Macedonians were fat and nation-less, name-less and prone to attack other nations, peoples and groups. All national symbols were subject to attack and humiliation, including Name of the State: Janevisan. The government was dictatorship with the Tsar in exile. Nation was created by cloning of Igor Janev, and was not larger because of the conspiracy of the UN in collaboration with Wikimedia! And Igor Janev himself was a spy! (never proven or stated, except by socks). I would also add here that state Coat of arms that was deliberately here replaced with the Greek one, not official Macedonian one suggesting expansionism, than national flag was modified into Japanese war flag, suggesting Macedonia will start the new Balkan war or even the Third World War, than insulting national anthem name allegedly "Bread and chutney"??!!, suggesting Macedonians were good only in producing pepper and potatoes (i.e. they are/were good for nothing!), and than message in the label national motto("You will be killed"!). Currency Macedonian Denar was replaced with label "Macedonian Dollar"!, Macedonians never had any science and culture implying incapacity for cultural development, as inferior race, and so on...I think that you have enough material to make a case."212.200.205.104 (talk) 19:13, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
212.200.205.104, from the above it appears that you speak both Macedonian and English. What happened when you took your complaint to the Macedonian Wikipedia? (Do they have something like WP:ANI?)
I speak Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian and all former Yu lang. I didn't make any complaint to the Macedonian Wikipedia, its not my business and its because everything happened at Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia or SH.Wiki. What I know is that Macedonian Administrator made complaint to the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, and that he was ignored. But I don't know details about it. I am not troll and I am not Igor Janev. From media I know the urban gossip that Janev has passports of all former Yugoslavian nations. But again, I don't know much about him.212.200.205.104 (talk) 20:53, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
@Guy Macon, just to answer your question. The complaint was made by Macedonian mk.wiki administrator Ehrlich91 to sh.wiki under section “Објаснување“ [35], were he was not only ignored, but they made fun of him too. He said: “Откако ми ја посочија статијава која денес е создадена на корисничка страница, ве молам за објаснување за статијава и како воопшто вакво нешто може да постои на една Википедија?“ that translated in Eng: “After I was informed about article at the user page, please explain your action how something like this thing could exist on any Wikipedia?“. The final answering statement was: “Zašto neće definitivno ostati vječno?“ that translated in Eng: “Why it should not stay there forever?“212.200.205.104 (talk) 23:35, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
Clearly, they wanted to humiliate nation, not individual. And just I wonder, what would happened if someone release list of US spies, would you than go for office action if nothing else works?77.105.61.187 (talk) 10:15, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
According to mk.viki [36] Janev is a very important official with special duties and powers relating to the most important priority of the foreign policy of Macedonia. That could mean that he is a very powerful individual in that country.212.200.205.104 (talk) 21:35, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
Just to add here that there is a history and pattern of unusual behavior by sh. admins of attacking not only individuals, but nations as well. Their jokes at sh. wiki goes far beyond standards for "Humor", assuming that even Humor has some boundaries and limits.178.222.113.84 (talk) 09:07, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
Not that this matters, but I found from Macedonians (mk.Wiki) that the reason for hiding rev. on jan. 2016. see history[37] was that, presumably those people replaced the normal photo of Igor Janev with the pornographic pic. (from Commons). I can see that one of sh.users twice placed template for deletion on mk. article of Janev (https://mk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%98%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%80_%D0%88%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B2&action=history), and I heard that the other sh. user, author of Janevistan, initiated deletion camp. of all Janev's pets/dogs from Commons. So, this the history of misunderstanding between two sides.93.86.82.204 (talk) 15:21, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Humor page still shown by Google/Bing searches

  • The main page has been deleted. Now someone at Office needs to delete [38] as well, and protect it. They probably also need to remove +sysop from all the editors that have been retaining it, but that's a separate issue. Black Kite (talk) 22:36, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
The language of user-space page "/Janevistan" is identified as "Bosnian" in Google Translate. Is there a recommended admin at shwiki we can contact to replace the humor user-space page? Both Google/Bing continue to high-rank that page for search "Janevistan" even though the mainspace redirect page was rewritten as {deletedpage}. On shwiki, {NUMBEROFADMINS} shows "10". -Wikid77 (talk) 00:14/00:25, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
There is no a recommended admin. at that wiki. There are two admins, Edgar and Ripper. The second one is more open to communication. You can try with Ripper, but generally they are both very unco-operative. They will never admit any mistake or wrongdoing at sh. wiki and they will protect Janevistan at any cost. To start discussion with them you should perhaps know the motives of their retaining or supporting Janevistan. If its something more in the background than just hate against Janev, i.e. some deeper motives than its not going to be easy. I mean look at the art. Janevistan itself, who normal would spend days and hours to create such page full of attacks in each sentence, just to humiliate someone.178.222.113.84 (talk) 08:04, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
I looked now into the last talk between sh. admin. Edgar and author of Janevistan sh. user Orijentolog here[39], under title "Članci" particularly this part when they speak about "Nazi" people "Kandidirao bi ja i beduine, ali sav tvoj doprinos svodi se na ono što su ti matični nacifašisti već uzdigli na pijedestal :P Za njih su ovi moji bili previše vulgaris, nedostojni njihove uzvišenosti...". They gave the link here for "nacifašisti" ("Nazi-Fascists")[[40]] where I found the photo of Jimbo Wales with Croatian Wiki (WMF) members. So they made fun of local WMF (and Jimbo) too.178.222.113.84 (talk) 08:36, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
The Office should send them a strong message, just to prevent them from future wrongdoings.178.222.113.84 (talk) 12:02, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

A SUPER BARNSTAR for you!

SuperTurboChampionshipEdition (talk) 14:32, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

New awesome diff-in-context handles split lines

The new, alternate History diff-display, as an inline diff-in-context, can finally show changes within long split lines. Formerly, when a long line was split into multiple parts (by adding newlines), the diff utility could not highlight split-line changes within a massive wall-of-text, and it was possible to embed hacked data or fake text as very difficult to detect and remove. Now it is possible to rapidly highlight and pinpoint any hacked text within split lines or rvv any malicious joke text intended to embarrass.

This new diff-in-context is likely in the top-ten improvements of the past 15 years, ranking up there with parameterized templates or the 6x-faster template parsing of 2014, due to the increased ability to protect Wikipedia's reliability against hidden hack text in split lines. It is now workable to split long paragraphs into half-sentence phrases, or indent cite templates, without losing detection of spurious typos or glitch text, while making other changes across a page. Awesome reliability, finally. Now, if we could just nest templates 70 levels deep, or pass global variables between templates, it would be like the 1960s programming language revolution. -Wikid77 (talk) 13:36, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

Note: The diff-in-context display appears in mobile phone edits, but perhaps not yet in some desktop browsers. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:12, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia Review: "WMF: Macedonian Govt protests vandalis from Serbia+Croatia"

Dear Jimmy Wales, hope I am not taking much of your precious time. I found request of the Government at Wikipedia Review: "WMF: Macedonian Govt protests vandalis from Serbia+Croatia" [41]. I learned that a diplomatic note was sent from the Macedonian government to you and the WMF. Now, my question is whether WMF will honor that request? There is an undergoing discussion about removal of Janevistan at Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia[42][43]. Accept, Sir, the assurances of my highest consideration. Thank you for your time and patience, Sir.79.101.145.68 (talk) 18:50, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

I am personally unaware of any such note.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 03:42, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

What’s Wrong with Wikitribune?

What’s Wrong with Wikitribune? The Press Knows.

Article from The Loyal Opposition with links to The Atlantic, Wired, the London School of Economics, Fortune, Yahoo! Finance, MediaPost, Al Jazeera, plus a couple of sources that have a clear COI which I didn't list. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:29, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

  • Sounds like start of Wikipedia: Some of those Wikitribune concerns did sound like, "What's Wrong with Wikipedia as it will fail in first 2 years?" Perhaps those journalists have underestimated the impact of 5,000 active users, and the methods where Wikipedia tends to be "self-correcting" where problems would be most obvious. Also, the naysayers should consider interactive "original research by request" where readers ask, "How did the fire start?" and the reply expands from, "Official cause unknown" to 9 witnesses agree, "started near 3rd floor" and "spread along north face of tower" or "strong breeze pushed flames across east+south sides" etc. As an interactive-news website, both the accuracy of details, precision of pinpoint numbers, and acceptable answers could evolve to answer the moving "Top 10 Frequent Questions" (FAQs) voted by readers during the major news-cycle period for each type of event. For a fire, the expected FAQs could be pre-loaded with typical questions about the cause, location, deaths, injuries and burn damage, while allowing reader requests to expand/vote on more questions while minimizing influence of fringe/freak comments from readers. Also, defining more like "Seven Pillars" (wp:5P) with "50-user" quorum limits to vote major changes, and a "Progress Pillar" to spur continuous improvements could avoid WP's fringe-minority punctuation rules (forced by "8-user" consensus on 20,000 editors) and rabid deletion of new ideas or tools by 3 !votes to remove tools used for years. The lack WP voter-quorums has been horrific to thwart major advances in WP improvements, not unlike U.S. Presidential election rules to vote count plurality, rather than demand runoff election between top 2 candidates, where everyone knows what would happen if they don't vote now. Think "WP with professional ground rules" and no more "mob-rule" by wp:TAGteams of 5-9 people pushing everyone else around. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:48, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
Yes, the press criticism has been devastating. Ha. Key criticisms include "too ambitious", "a fascinating experiment", "another interesting news experiment", "perhaps his brand of crowdsourced journalism is an idea whose time has come", etc. I've actually been pleased that the reception has been overwhelmingly positive, but with enough dissenting voices of skepticism to set the stage for an ongoing public dialog about the issues that I'm raising.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:51, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
COI declaration? Carrite (talk) 19:32, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
At a minimum.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:51, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
I respect the fact that Jimbo saw enough potential in this to take a risk. One of the big problems on here is resistance to change or getting support to do something radically different, which is largely why we still have the same main page since 2006. Wikipedia should never have worked, in principle it would be a catastrophic failure, but despite a hostile community at times what it has achieved is remarkable in terms of content. I would love for Wikitribune to change the way we receive news. I hope you're given the chance to prove the skeptics wrong. A few years back I proposed a Concise Wikipedia edition which I think you supported Jimmy, it had about 40 supports but nothing ever came of it. I would love to see a concise edition based on the old encyclopedia model, somewhere in between Wikipedia and Wikitionary in which there is a set limit on each entry and unlike Wikipedia every article is fairly balanced, concise and easy to digest and highlighting all of the most important points. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 08:33, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
I agree with Dr. B. Jimbo is doing something new, and anything new involves risk, but that doesn't mean we should never do anything new. The journalists quoted all agree that there are challenges, and have helpfully outlined the challenges. Nobody of note has said "this will never work." The opinions of folks who have predicted Wikipedia's demise for the last 10 years can be easily ignored.
WikiTRIB is not being done as a Wikimedia project, and we can all respect that decision. Not everything needs to be done via the WMF, indeed many things consistent with the movement's values would be most easily done outside the WMF. I do disagree with Dr. B's "despite a hostile community" on Wikipedia. Any open community is going to have their nay-sayers and people who try to take advantage of the openness of the community. Perhaps 5% of our community fit this description, but that can be easy to forgotten when they yell 20-30 times as loud as more civilized community members.
@Dr. Blofeld: Can you supply a link to the Concise Wikipedia edition discussion? The idea sounds great, and if there are 40 active supporters, it can be very easily done[44], under the WMF umbrella (after a long approval process) or outside. The key might be to do it in workable stages. Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:23, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

I said "despite a hostile community at times "... Yes, it's a minority, but at times they drown everybody out and gang up together so it seems that way on occasions. Proposal was five years ago now and in 2017 it's still getting supports.♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:49, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

WikiTribune may not only eliminate fake news that's manifestly fake (here "fake" means that a fact check will reveal that the story is false), but it may end up eliminating the more subtle form of fake news that has existed for probably as long as news itself has existed. This is then fake news where the stories themselves are 100% correct but the choice of the news stories is not neutral. Governments have made use of this bias in the news to get their way, e.g. in the run-up to the Iraq war, Saddam's WMD and the alleged threat this posed to the World gradually became a very prominent news story. A threshold was crossed where this story would generate its own news. Governments have gotten used to having this power, despite preaching the free press dogma when talking to countries such as China. I see the recent emergence of "fake-news" more as a fallout of this more subtle manipulation of the news. People have a found a way to make news themselves to set their own agenda, but the results have been worse. Count Iblis (talk) 22:49, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, the line-up of daily news stories has been a major problem in U.S. reporting for many years. In fact, after the Alexandria ball practice shooting had wounded some politicians and police, there was almost no other TV news reported for nearly 5 hours (in 4-hour news shows), on the same day as the pre-warned Grenfell Tower fire had killed over 58 people in London. The U.S. press has had an extreme obsession with over-reporting of micro-terrorism events, which injure a few people, while distracted driving kills many (texting is 23x more dangerous than drunk driving?), or fires injure dozens, or tornados or ships kill many others. The government can overpower television news with agenda-driven fears, as in hyped "weapons of mass destruction" or "one Arab guy had a gun" etc. Even so, current Wikipedia pages already give extensive news coverage, just not the "original reasearch on request" of Wikitribune, as an avenue to get reporters to state judgment opinions which WP can quote in controversial pages which need questions answered soon ("How did the fire spread so rapidly?") when many users are reading current events. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:04, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
If the way WikiTribune would be edited is largely like Wikipedia then wondering why Wikimedia isn't supporting it and including it under its banner? Why does it need to be "independent"?♦ Dr. Blofeld 06:25, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Hot topic crowd-sourced news would need better edit-conflict merge

Another problem, beyond pending-change updates, would be the need for closer edit-conflict merges (or "weave merge"), as the proposed revisions might be updated+refined quickly by several people, as suggested for release with the updated text. I think this can still be implemented by informing journalists to write text as one-phrase-per line (rather than each one-long-paragraph wrapped), and multiple users could then insert changes to various phrases (+new phrases) without edit-conflict on entire paragraphs. This split of long paragraphs could be handled safely now with the new diff-in-context, as explained below in thread, "#New awesome diff-in-context handles split lines". -Wikid77 (talk) 17:24, 17 June 2017, noted diff. 13:36, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

Remember when the Flow team promised us "No edit conflicts, ever"[45] and I pointed out that this was formally proven to be impossible?[46] Good times...
Now that we are once again talking about merging edits (of which our talk page edit conflicts are one example.), I think that it would be worthwhile to once again explain what is and is not possible.
The CAP Theorem, otherwise known as Brewer's theorem, was formally proven to be true in 2002[47]
Wikitribune, like Wikipedia, looks like it will be a distributed system. If you try to edit a page while I try to edit the same page, our two computers are a distributed system.
We know that, in any distributed system. you cannot provide Consistency, Availability. and Partition tolerance. You have to pick two and lose one.
Right now we do without availability -- the property that a request to edit the data will always complete. When I click the Save Page button after writing this, the write may fail and give me an edit conflict message.
We cannot do without partition tolerance. You and I are not using the same computer, nor are our computers in constant communication. Wikitribune needs to work through a satellite phone or from a third-world village sharing a dial-up connection. You simply cannot update the entire page on all the computers used by all of the editors every time someone hits a key. I don't see any way that Wikitribune can work without partition tolerance.
We could provide guaranteed availability by dropping consistency. If you and I both edited a page at the same time Wikitribune could accept our edits and show each of us a different version. This is not a workable idea, but it is at least theoretically possible.
What we (and Wikitribune) cannot do, no matter how hard we try or how clever we are, is to provide Consistency, Availability. and Partition tolerance at the same time. Consider the case where you and I are editing the same Wikitribune page. If we each edit the page, our two versions become inconsistent, thus forfeiting consistency. If we could instantly communicate we could get back consistency, but by doing that we just forfeited partition tolerance. Or Wikitribune could stop one of us from editing and instead give us an edit conflict message, thus losing availability.
One can only hope that this time Jimbo will learn from the past avoid hiring developers who promise that they can accomplish things that are theoretically impossible. As is the case with Wikipedia, I would be happy to advise the Wikitribune team without charging my usual fee. As is the case with Wikipedia, I am about as likely to have that offer accepted as I am to have those nice fellows in Rome elect me to be the first Quaker Pope.
See [ http://ksat.me/a-plain-english-introduction-to-cap-theorem/ ] for more details on the CAP Theorem. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:17, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
The CAP theorem is indeed interesting but really only scratches the surface of the problem. At the same time, it provides a useful framework to have a taxonomy of partial solutions to the problem.
In the Mediawiki world we think of an edit conflict mostly in these terms: "I tried to save the page that I was editing, but while I was editing, someone else saved a different version, so I had to reconcile the differences by hand". In some versions of default Wordpress, Post Locking is used - which in our use case is a significantly worse solution. (But still one which gives up 'availability' but in a more severe way that also gives rise to a rather obvious tool for denial of service - simply open a page for editing and sit on it to maintain your favorite version.)
One of the things we are looking at it git-style merging/branching and trying to be as sophisticated as possible at resolving edit conflicts automatically. This will take some time.
A very very sophisticated solution, which we won't have for some time, can have elements of C, A, and P tolerance at the same time. What do I mean by this? Imagine this: if you and I open the page for editing at the same time from our 1st world computers with fast broadband and modern browsers, we are placed into a Google docs style environment where we see our changes live, so for us, the availability problem is solved. Someone opens the page on a slow connection with an older browser, and they get a mediawiki-style editing environment such that when they hit save, there is a potential for edit conflict. Someone opens the page offline, saves offline, so their current view of the 'live' page is out of step with what others are seeing, only to be resolved (somehow) at a later date.
It is possible to have a mix of all three failure modes (and similarly success modes!) for different people in different circumstances.
For now, this is all very preliminary and very theoretical. The first step is to get to something that works for the empirical pattern of use cases that we experiences.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:23, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
Mediawiki revision storage should just switch to git, a much more natural paradigm for contents built as an aggregation of edits. This would make conflict resolution, merges, history search and attribution of contents much easier, edits would perform faster, and it would save 95% of storage space. Surely some of the foundation's techies have considered this and come up with some good reasons not to do it yet? — JFG talk 15:09, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
Do you mean one repository per article? Otherwise, like other distributed revision systems, Git is notoriously bad at handling per-file/article history, but good at fast whole-tree branching or revisions. Articles are independent units and edits/undo must be specific to that unit, not the whole Wikipedia, for instance. —PaleoNeonate - 22:34, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
I don't see why each article should have its repository; that would ruin the efficiency. Either one repo per wiki or one repo per namespace is the way to go. An edit changing just one article is "specific to that unit". Then we could implement some features like changing a citation in several articles that use it as a single revision. Win for consistency and maintenance. But the greatest benefit to editors would be easy access to the exact history of contributions to an article, seeing word by word what has been changed by whom and when. — JFG talk 07:38, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
Well, I'm spewing nonsense, sorry. I'll walk out and do something else now… — JFG talk 08:18, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

Good day

Have utilize your site for basic information on all kinds of subjects for over a decade. In general the cotent is great. However today was reading over the "Enrique Peña Nieto" entry and found it lacking any authority.--104.249.227.116 (talk) 00:22, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Reliable source

Whould this article here be considered as in a reliable source for the appending of the Wikipedia article The People's Operator? - - - 50.247.188.210 (talk) 17:42, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

I believe the community has decided to deprecate the use of the Daily Mail as a source, so no. But you already knew that.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:45, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
That was a cold burn, Jimbo, damn. -63.231.190.241 (talk) 20:38, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 June 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:31, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Turkish Wiki

Pages view graphic.

Why don't you care Turkish Wikipedia? The labor of all of our users went to waste. We were bored with logging in with DNS and other methods. Please take more steps for our project.--Kingbjelica (talk) 01:44, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

(talk page gnome) It is most unfortunate that the current Turkish government oppresses its people and limits their right to access websites freely, including Wikipedia. Noone else agrees with this, but there was nothing found to be wrong with Wikipedia. Do you have suggestions? Thanks, —PaleoNeonate - 01:51, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

@PaleoNeonate: More communication with Turkish authorities Booking.com sample should be taken. Wikimedia Foundation is not doing anything about it. Or, there is no one who gives us information on this.--Kingbjelica (talk) 02:34, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Defy censorship
The WMF should give a (virtual) middle finger to the Turkish dictatorship and instead donate to assist Turkish citizens in bypassing state censors. TheValeyard (talk) 02:42, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
You're talking empty. Please do not sabotage.--Kingbjelica (talk) 03:04, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
And you're taking like a mouthpiece for Erdogan. TheValeyard (talk) 03:10, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
You're a disrespectful person. You are aware of this.--Kingbjelica (talk) 03:20, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
So what do you want Wikipedia to do? Lie? Ignore the facts? Kowtow to Erdogan? And when that happens this time, the next time, or the next government that finds something inconvenient will do exactly the same thing and then think about what will happen. It sucks, we get that, but in no way should Wikipedia EVER change how it operates to appease a government like this. Ever. Ravensfire (talk) 05:19, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
This. The Turkish government is trying to force Wikipedia to hide inconvenient views and beliefs. There is no negotiation with that. Wikipedia is a deliberate target because if they tried to block the news agencies making the claims, the backlash would be far, far greater. Ravensfire (talk) 02:59, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
Yes, it's disappointing. But Wikipedia is hosted under US law and isn't going to remove reliably sourced material in response to an "I don't like it" response from a foreign government. There is a good article in the New York Times about the current situation here.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 05:12, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
@Kingbjelica: In the interim, what would be great would be for people to massively download, share and host mirrors ([48]), for instance on open Wifi devices using inexpensive hardware and Kiwix-server. A 64GB SD card can hold an English Wikipedia mirror. I suspect that the Turkish mirror is smaller. Another intitiative would be an information campaign on how to evade the block. This of course involves work and some risk-taking. —PaleoNeonate - 05:48, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
As the NYT article points out, one of the problems is that when Turkish people use Tor (anonymity network) or a VPN, they may be able to read Wikipedia, but won't be able to edit because these IP addresses are usually blocked to prevent vandalism (screenshot). So even if Turks were able to read Wikipedia somewhere else, which is fairly easy, it would remain stuck in its current state unless ordinary Turkish people were able to edit it from a range of IP addresses.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 06:19, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
If anyone else is interested helping fight censorship, there's a lot of work needed at Armenian genocide to get it to Good Article Status. The article is currently undergoing GA review... Jclemens (talk) 06:45, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

@Kingbjelica: You actually can help with this. We have a vague hint from a government-associated press outlet in Turkey (are there any others allowed now?) that there are certain articles they don't like. But we don't really know exactly which things they call unfair, and which things they don't. So if you can find out more precisely which claims they object to, you can go through and research those claims. Once we have this data together:

  • If the claims are false, and we can establish this with some research, then we can correct them with our apologies. Who knows, they might unblock Wikipedia, though I wouldn't hold my breath (I think that any censor worthy of the name will never fail to find another thing on Wikipedia to object to, even if we "fixed" a million things rightly or wrongly).
  • If the claims are true, and we can establish this with some research, then we can compile a list of all the stuff that is totally true about Turkey that they don't want anyone to know, and send it out to the press. Once that list is out there all over the world and becomes familiar to everyone, Wikipedia would no longer be so alone in saying these things, so they might not care as much about us and unblock us.

Either way, the odds of success are low, but it would be a chance for you to do something. Wnt (talk) 13:36, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Wired article

WELCOME TO THE WIKIPEDIA OF THE ALT-RIGHT is about Infogalactic, a Wikipedia fork. It looks like a fairly good article, but waxes apocalyptic near the end:

Yet their mere existence is a sign that the appeal of a centralized forum for hashing out the truth is fading. Wikipedia might find that its days at the top are numbered.

— Wired

I like the idea of forks - nobody (not even the WMF or the Wikipedia community) should own our content in practice. If we somehow drop the ball, other people should be able to pick up our fumble and advance down the field. But in practice, this fork looks like the old Detroit Lions playing on Thanksgiving Day against the Purple People Eaters - turkeys being sent to the slaughter for the enjoyment of the American public.

I checked the recent changes log there. There are about 10 edits to articles over the last 2 days. At that rate of editing, for the next 20 years, the site will still be 99% identical to their original version - which was all 5 million Wikipedia articles from early 2016. (You might want to double check the details)

There is an interesting quote on the dominance of Wikipedia:

It’s not much of a stretch to call Wikipedia a miracle. Sure, in the almost two decades the site has owned information on the internet, it’s bred its share of scandals—factual mistakes, conflicts of interest, racism, misogyny, and, of course, the trolls. Yet with limited oversight and minimal funding, it thrives.

— Wired

That's way over-the-top, of course. We should ask folks to tone down the praise. But consider the phrase "in the almost two decades (Wikipedia) has owned information on the internet," I conclude that we have accomplished something important here.

All the best,

Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:33, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

As of Tuesday, 30 April 2024, 15:32 (UTC), The English Wikipedia has 47,331,564 registered users, 122,676 active editors, and 861 administrators. Together we have made 1,216,801,463 edits, created 60,560,420 pages of all kinds and created 6,818,776 articles.
Any fork/replacement for Wikipedia has to solve the problem "where do we get 122,676 editors and 861 administrators?" So far, none have managed to come up with an answer to that question.
That being said, it is theoretically possible for some future Wikipedia or some future WMF to drive away editors and administrators with bad decisions, thus opening the door for a successful fork. Don't think that it can't happen; it happened to Digg. They allowed paid editors to drive out user content with commercials, and they allowed one political group to suppress material favorable to a competing political group. Then over 90% of the users quit and went to Reddit. We don't have even a hint of that here, but times change and we need to watch for the first signs of it happening. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:17, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
Well, we do have a hint of that here which is reducing credibility on political articles, but that alone is small in proportion and not a threat. North8000 (talk) 20:12, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
I agree with Guy Macon, especially concerning paid editing, but I don't think political bias has the potential to drive away users. I think it's more likely incivility, editor misconduct and abusive, inept administrators that will repel people who otherwise would find this to be an interesting hobby. We eliminated the RfCs for problem users and the incivility notice board, both of which were viewed as "wastes of time," which points up the problem in my opinion. Figureofnine (talk • contribs) 12:27, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
I think the most important part of the article is: "But with Alexa regularly placing Breitbart in the top 100 sites in the US (where it is currently 60th, beating out both Fox News and the Huffington Post),..." coupled with the assertion that "Wikipedia is a Democratic tool, run “by the left-wing thought police who administer it,”". If part A is a fact, that leads credence to part B being a fact if Breitbart is determined by Wikipedia to be less useful than Fox News. Realityornot (talk) 23:30, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
I just checked Alexa rankings for Breitbart, Fox News, and Huffington Post and got 59, 60, and 61st respectively in the US. I take that as a non-meaningful difference. The Daily Mail btw was 87 in the US. Which suggests an obvious conclusion - that Alexa rankings are not an indication of reliability. (NY Times and Washington Post were 32 and 41).
One thing that is commonly left out of the discussions of Wikipedia's supposed political bias is that we are not a US site, but an international one. Unless we kick out all Brits, other Europeans (can I still say that?), Canadians, Ozzies, Kiwis, etc. our editorship is bound to be more liberal than the average American. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:02, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
Breitbart or any other site being popular on Alexa is meaningless when it comes to considering whether it is a reliable source. It's just a measure of traffic. 118.148.87.137 (talk) 11:43, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
Then maybe Wikipedia could state on its main page that it's editors, as a whole, have a liberal slant, if that is the case. Realityornot (talk) 20:57, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

http://wikimediafoundation.org/

Why is the logo black? 83.31.43.125 (talk) 12:09, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

It must have changed in the last few days, because web.archive.org on 19 June has the page with the red, green and blue version of the logo. As to why it has changed, answers here, please.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 16:39, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
Viewing the history of the linked page, the black logo shows up as far back as I went (several months). But it's not just the linked page, it's the whole site. At File:Wikimedia Foundation logo - vertical.svg the logo appears black from the original upload. My guess is that it's fairly sophisticated vandalism. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:38, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
Or File:Wikimedia Foundation logo - vertical (2012-2016).svg was substituted for. Regular users can't edit the Foundation website, so I'll ping @Kaldari: to see if he can change it back or has any info. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:44, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
@Ianmacm and Smallbones: The logo was updated to reflect the WMF's official branding for the Foundation. See T144254 and meta:Brand. Heather (WMF) should be able to provide more info. Kaldari (talk) 19:50, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
It seems better explained at this page but I still feel unconvinced. Printing the mark in black and white where convenient is one thing - making it plain like that everywhere is something else. And in general, I don't feel like corporations make the right decision when they rebrand themselves - there's always someone tooting his own horn, but a consumer doesn't want to see change. I mean, among the older readers, have you ever gone into a KFC and gotten something lackluster and thought this sure isn't Kentucky Fried Chicken? A person can resist a brand revision for decades, believe me. Wnt (talk) 13:45, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
Which made me think of [49] (external image link, safe for work). —PaleoNeonate - 14:17, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
It says here: "It’s a nice logo. It’s got a friendly non-gendered vaguely human shape on it. The human looks to be raising their arms in celebration. It’s consistent with the joy of the Wikimedia movement as a whole. These are good things. They evoke the joy that people feel in using the foundation’s projects to give we humans around the globe a hand in writing their own story in their own voice." So now we know that it is a human raising their arms in celebration; be honest now, would you have known this just by looking at it?--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 15:47, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
Or maybe, Heather Walls just likes the colour black, which may or may not be the best fit for Wikimedia. I think there should be a Rfc on a change of this breadth, seriously. I mean, why does stuff like this just come out of nowhere? Do we all have to be on guard all the f'in time? Realityornot (talk) 21:36, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Do you think correct grammar is good?

Dear Jimmy,

The phrase "the race turned of to be his last" is grammatically incorrect, obviously. Based on experience when correcting this error, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions.

  1. under what circumstances should an article contain grammatical errors?
  2. under what circumstances should those who correct them be blocked from editing?
  3. under what circumstances should administrators lock articles containing grammatical errors so that they cannot be corrected?

Very interested to know what you think. 82.132.246.214 (talk) 16:48, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

That should be "I think correct grammar is well". -- John Reaves 16:56, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
It is common to ask me such vague hypothetical questions as a means of setting a trap by making sure that I don't know all the facts, so I will start by saying that for all of these things, context matters. It is better, if you want real advice on a practical situation, to actually show me diffs and explain the actual situation.
  1. In general, articles should not contain grammatical errors. Exceptions would include quotes, especially historically important quotes, even if they contain grammatical errors. There may be other exceptions that I'm not thinking of right now.
  2. In general, correcting grammatical errors should not in and of itself give rise to a block. However, I very much doubt that any blocks (except purely in error) have ever been given for corrected grammatical errors. There are a huge number of reasons why correcting a grammatical error could quite properly result in a block, though - for example violation of an interaction ban, violation of a topic ban, a 3RR violation, etc. The full context matters.
  3. In general, it is best not to lock articles in a poor state, but I can imagine situations in which an admin should lock the article to version A (which has a grammatical error but is otherwise unobjectionable) rather than version B (which has corrected the grammatical error but has introduced some much more important fatal flaws). Again, context matters. (In the example I have dreamed up, the best thing to do would be for the admin to lock to version A, but to make the very minor grammar correction as well - along with a note explaining why the edit was made even though the article was protected.
In equal measure, I both very much hope and very much doubt that these thoughts have been useful to you. If you're interested in a more grounded in fact analysis, versus a mere hypothetical discussion, then I urge you to produce a link to the exact situation you have in mind.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:03, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
'Addendum': I googled the corrected phrase "the race turned out to be his last" and was astonished to learn that the expression appears (according to google) only once on the entire web, here. As this suggests to me that this is actually a Wikia question, I'd like to point out that this is not the right venue for it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:06, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
Thank you very much for your reply. I certainly did find your thoughts very useful and I appreciate you taking the time to respond (I actually thought someone else would most likely simply delete my question). My intention was not to set any kind of trap, but to present the problem as generally as possible, as I doubted you would be much interested in the specifics of a single situation. I very much agree with the position you outlined, and the exceptions you noted, but I observe that many administrator don't. On many occasions I have seen them undoing perfectly good edits, re-inserting basic errors into articles, and blocking those who have corrected them. There are articles that have contained spelling errors for years because administrators prevented them from being fixed. It seems so obviously contrary to the aim of building a quality encyclopaedia that I've been struggling for some time to work out what the motive could be.
The specific situation that I brought up is a representative example. The text I quoted reproduced the error but was not exact; the full sentence is That race turned of to be Wurz's last points finish and especially from now on, teammate Rosberg distanced him, which apart from the obvious erroneous substitution of of for out, doesn't make sense. This is from an article which contained many such writing errors when I happened to read it earlier this year, so I decided to put in some time to improve it. The history is here. The edits I personally made are these:[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]. I do not think you could find anything I did that was not beneficial to the article. And yet I got accused of "long term abuse" for these edits and blocked, the nonsensical text was restored, and the article is now locked until December.
So, there are some more specific details of this situation. If you'd like, I could show you dozens more examples of the general phenomenon of shoddy content being protected by administrators, and improvements aggressively dismantled. Very interested to hear any more thoughts you have on this. 82.132.226.244 (talk) 22:32, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
(talk page gnome) A problem I could see there was uncivil edit summaries and failure to discuss at the article talk page when edits were undoed rather than restoring them (see WP:CONSENSUS, WP:BRD, WP:DISCUSSFAIL, WP:ENGAGE, WP:TEAMWORK for the essence of it). While edit summaries are important, they do not replace talk page discussion when that becomes necessary (this would probably fall under Jimbo's point 2 above). —PaleoNeonate - 23:41, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Conflict on the article on Adolf Hitler

Firstly, I just want more attention on it, not trying to make anyone agree with me. I'm usually impatient, and don't want to wait for arbitration in some future. Take a look: [59] New account 2 (talk) 01:07, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Invitation to join WikiProject Organized crime

Hello, Jimbo Wales.

You are invited to join WikiProject Organized crime, a WikiProject and resource dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of Organized crime topics.
Please check out the project, and if interested feel free to join by adding your name to the member list. North America1000 21:33, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

COI

In a [interview] on Ramnath Kovind Derek O'Brien (quizmaster) said that he logged onto Wikipedia that day. Yet there is no declaration of COI on the article about him.Please look into this matter FORCE RADICAL (talk) 11:52, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

The best place to post this type of COI question is at WP:COIN. I haven't copied it there because I can't verify if there is a real problem. I can't get the article you linked to. The article on O'Brien is seldom edited, the last time was on May 22. A minor point COI logging in is not regulated here COI editing is. But please check the links and WP:COI and the post it at WP:COIN. Smallbones(smalltalk) 03:49, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
@Smallbones and Forceradical: The link was munged (it had a "|" at the end). I've taken the unusual liberty of removing it from the original post to help avoid frustration, hope no one minds. ;) Wnt (talk) 14:07, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
I should add that the context gives me no hint of COI: Derek O'Brien of the Trinamul Congress said: "The name was announced at the BJP press conference. That's how we got to know. Not even informed. How many of you logged onto Wikipedia today? I did." I mean, I'm not sure if he's saying he learned something from Wikipedia or shared a name he'd just learned on Wikipedia to help others get informed, but either way I see nothing improper about that. I mean, there's no COI in posting an important news fact you learn at a press conference you didn't hold yourself! I should add that if Derek O'Brien edited Wikipedia on June 19, it most definitely wasn't to edit his own article, which hasn't been touched since May. Wnt (talk) 14:13, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Edit notice

Hi Jimbo (and others), I've tried fixing up the edit notice for this page, since for some reason no one had bothered to fix the erratic formatting. If anyone else wants to amend it further, I believe it's not protected like other edit notices so anyone should be able to edit it. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 12:11, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Great, I think Jimbo will like the new format, as concise or less-overwhelming, especially for new users here. Could it have a Hide/Show section after the top sentence? During edit-preview of messages, the long edit-notice has been cumbersome and tedious to scroll. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:34, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
The revision [60] removed when you should post (questions about Wikipedia) and another reason not to post (personal questions). Further revision seems necessary to better address those points even than the old version. And my feeling is, if it isn't obvious that we can link to our top level dispute resolution page rather than explaining the various options in a lengthy edit notice ... we probably need to work on that too. Wnt (talk) 17:16, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Nomination of Tony Chang for deletion

Jimmy Wales answers the question about internet censorship in China
Shujenchang and Jimmy Wales

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Tony Chang is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tony Chang until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Sagecandor (talk) 17:51, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

Note: Rationale for notifying this page includes: File:Jimmy Wales answers the question about internet censorship in China.ogv, File:Shujenchang and Jimmy Wales.JPG, and subsequent coverage of topic of question itself including Jimmy Wales on Censorship in China. Sagecandor (talk) 17:54, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

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Hello, Jimbo Wales. Please check your email; you've got mail!
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Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:58, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

Official statement of Wikimedia Switzerland issued (June 2017)

The official statement is posted at meta:Wikimedia CH/Official statement of Wikimedia CH (conflict in French speaking area), written in German, French, English, and Italian. --George Ho (talk) 19:23, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

As I understand this it is about paid editing by board members and staff which was written up in the Signpost last year [61] [62] and a general lack of transparency. From [63], I was surprised to see that board members did not have free access to information on the budget. From the following section, I was surprised to see that "To have a conflict of interest is not a problem." I have to disagree, paid editing by board members and staff combined with a non-transparent budget looks like a major problem.
There was an extensive discussion on this in the French Wikipedia Bistro page about a month ago (sorry I don't have time to search for it now) and there is something going on with the Wikimedia France Chapter now (though it might be completely separate, I'm unclear on it now). If anybody can update this for us, I'd be much obliged. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:08, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

WikiTribune contact info?

I just fielded an interview request for you in connection with Wikitribune. I pointed them to the contact information on your user page. That section identifies contact information regarding Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikia, but does not have any specific information about WikiTribune. If you have specific contact information for that initiative you might add it to your contact page. If not you might identify on that page which email address is best for wikiTribune inquiries.--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:38, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

http://wikimediafoundation.org/

Why is the logo black? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.62.8.1 (talk) 15:14, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Asked and answered here: User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_221#http:.2F.2Fwikimediafoundation.org.2F. Deli nk (talk) 15:20, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
No, it was not answered, other than a "because someone at WMF wanted it black" answer, which is not an acceptable answer, unless we've all become a bunch of castrated sheep. Realityornot (talk) 23:03, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm curious, which logo color would make one an uncastrated sheep? Gamaliel (talk) 23:11, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
It should be left the way it was before, just imagine if you got up one day and the color of your country's flag had been changed to black, what would you say? Nothing? Realityornot (talk) 23:15, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
It was a well established and attractive logo before. Its really stupid from a branding perspective to make this change I think. If WMF is not going to go to the community about this change, at the very least there should be some focus group research to support such a change. That's a no-brainer. Realityornot (talk) 23:22, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
Q: Why is the logo black? — A. Because they are evil. Carrite (talk) 03:10, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
Q: Why is the logo black? — A. Because black won. Buster Seven Talk 11:39, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
Personally I'm not a fan of the black version and preferred the old red, green and blue version. There are also some inconsistencies, because the Wikipedia:Meta logo is still red, green and blue. Perhaps someone was listening to this song.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 17:12, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
Black is Black is surprisingly relevant and features a 16 year old playing a guitar that is larger than himself. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:05, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
It is what it is, not appropriate at all. Realityornot (talk) 00:49, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
Maybe it's an attempt to appeal more to the Global South (though an unintended side effect may be the deprecation of rainbows) wbm1058 (talk) 14:52, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
Did you know that the 1972 #1 Three Dog Night song "Black and White" was first recorded by folk singer Pete Seeger in 1956? The original includes a "bonus verse" about the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. I love it when I learn such things from Wikipedia. wbm1058 (talk) 22:02, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
As someone who grew up watching daily TV news reports giving the impression that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was a jungle-infested backwater, I was struck by how the list of its tallest buildings shows that the country is booming. Check out the Bitexco Financial Tower's helipad. Something for angry white Trump-supporting men who fought there in their youth to consider. Also note that members of Seeger's folksinging group were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. wbm1058 (talk) 13:09, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
Wbm1058 per your edit summary, I think we almost always indulge your various tangents. I particularly enjoyed learning about Pete Seeger singing Black and White and enjoyed that version immensely. The Vietnam tangent night be a bit more controversial, but many of us certainly understand the basic point. I wouldn't characterize Vietnam Vets as "angry white Trump-supporting men" but you obviously didn't mean to say "all Vietnam Vets" With the 4th of July coming up, I might as well include something from the recent Nobel laureate [64]. But another good July 4th song popped up right afterwards [65]. May everybody enjoy the holiday, whatever their political leanings, or even just enjoy the summer! All the best, Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:12, 29 June 2017 (UTC)

I have opened a discussion at the village pump which seems now to be a better place to talk about it. Realityornot (talk) 15:24, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

No, this is the right place to discuss it. Or on the WMF board's page, but I think it was demonstrated that few board members watched their own page. At least we can count on Jimbo to read this and pass it on to the rest of the board if he wishes. The slideshow below does a pretty good job of explaining the rationale. I see the merits of going to black or white when placing the logo on photos for contrast reasons, and for the benefit of B&W laser printers, but there's no need to go overboard with losing the colors on a plain white or light-grey background on a page not generally designed for or intended to be printed to paper. wbm1058 (talk) 15:41, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
The mono-color logo is a very corporate thing to do.
Apple logos, past and present
  • Rainbow
    Rainbow
  • Black
    Black
  • File:First Galactic Empire emblem.png
    • Google still primarily uses color, but surely can lose the color when that's helpful to provide needed contrast.
    Google 2015 logo
    • Color
      Color
    • Transparent
      Transparent
    • File:First Galactic Empire emblem.png
      • — wbm1058 (talk) 16:41, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
      The black version is OK for print media, but the rationale for removing it from the website is lacking. The previous red, green and blue version wasn't clashing with any of the other elements on the web page, and the black version looks dreary on a web page. My two cents' worth.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 16:45, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
      Ugggh. This is exactly the thing I was railing at against Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/RfC: Wikimedia referrer policy (which apparently is open for an extended period if anyone is interested). Wikipedia is not Apple, or Google, or Facebook, or any of the other soulless corporations that exist for the purpose of infringing people's privacy and selling their eyeballs to the highest bidder! We should not copy their culture in the little things, like this logo, nor in the big things, like writing long privacy policies that boil down to keeping all sorts of unnecessary information just in case someone might come up with a use for it. I think their commercial culture has turned computing into a dismaler science, a deceptive art with foul and hidden assumptions to rival economics or study of noise pollution from industrial equipment or any other field where a few big companies are the pipers calling the tune and everybody else is just trying to sing along. But Wikipedia doesn't follow them on it - doesn't use their commercial software, their patents and trade secrets and closed source and "this is only a license, and doesn't give you ownership of the software". And so even on something as trivial as fashion, I would rather not follow along with them because the message of fashion is to show you're with the program, and I don't want us to get with their program. I would rather pretend it's 2000 and the world is a wide open place full of freedom and hope where you feel like Osama bin Laden could never win the culture war. Why not? The whole reason why people give up to the corporate mind-set is because they're getting paid. We're not getting paid. So screw 'em. Wnt (talk) 23:45, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
      Wnt, yes, yes, yes. And I would add that the only difference between the "corporate mind-set" and the slavery mind-set is that one is by choice and the other is not. But this problem is not with the corporate mind-set, its with the "sheepish" mind-set, because the vast majority of Wikipedians are completely unaware of, and not interested in, things like the logo. They all trust the public impression given by descriptions of Wikipedia that it is controlled by the community of editors. Therefore, out of a naïve but understandable misunderstanding of how and by whom Wikipedia is controlled, 99%+ of the community sheepishly continue to contribute their time and work, with no compensation or power, even less than a shareholder. Realityornot (talk) 23:45, 30 June 2017 (UTC)
      Actually, and I'm not inferring any predatory or malicious intent, the real structure and extreme lopsided authority "sharing" relationship between the WMF and the contributors, is , imo, one of, if not the greatest example of a minor form of false pretenses, as described "is not necessarily limited to tangible personal property - some statutes include intangible personal property and services. For example..."false pretense statute applies to obtaining "any .... services.... or any other thing of value" from False pretenses. I doubt an argument can be made that most contributors are aware of the fact the unelected WMF holds all the decision making cards in this organization. Most assume, quite understandably, I think, that Wikipedia is a democracy.Realityornot (talk) 14:50, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
      We have an opportunity to move it a bit closer to being a democracy. Just bookmark Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/RfC: Wikimedia referrer policy, keep your eyes open for the announcement that I have posted an official request to the WMF, and then, if the WMF shows signs of not being willing to do what we have an overwhelming consensus to do, start making a lot of noise about it. It can be done, as can be seen by what happened with superprotect. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:21, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
      • Kirkland, WA lobby
        Kirkland, WA lobby
      • Buenos Aires
        Buenos Aires
      • Toronto
        Toronto
      • Googleplex
        Googleplex
        • Look at some example signs. It's common sense to know when to use white. The Googleplex welcome sign would look less welcoming in black. I don't know what they paid Mule Design for this, but whatever it was, it was too much. I'm quite happy to provide my advice on this matter for free. Much happier than I am to correct misspellings in the 'pedia for free, actually. Appearances Matter. wbm1058 (talk) 02:17, 30 June 2017 (UTC)
        All the other Wikimedia-related logos (Meta-wiki, incubator, labs, etc.) are all still in color; only the foundation's logo has been turned black. [66] Seems like an odd inconsistency, and I'd also like to know why this has happened. Everymorning (talk) 15:45, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
        It's just prep for the next donations campaign:
        — xaosflux Talk 17:20, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
         Info: Always get the latest version of the logo-family using [[File:Wikimedia logo family complete-current.svg]]. wbm1058 (talk) 18:50, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

        New diff-in-context has temporary glitches

        Just FYI update. The new diff display with mobile phones, as diff-in-context (highlights the deleted text as orange and added text as blue) has some unusual, temporary glitches, during edit-preview "Show changes" but the saved revisions seem to always show clean diff-in-context. So far, I have only seen diff-in-context with mobile phone editing, while desktop Google Chrome or Firefox show only the prior diff-side-by-side format. The temporary glitches of diff-in-context appear as large sections of blue-text as if whole paragraphs were added, such as during an "undo" revert of hack-edits, but after SAVE of the undo, then the diff-in-context works correctly to only show orange/blue text of the precise changes. Hence, because the occasional blue-text glitches are temporary, during edit-preview of "Show changes", the overall benefit of diff-in-context is extremely valuable to detect hack text (when long lines are split), although the functionality seems to be available mainly now for mobile-phone editing. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:39, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

        I don't think that Jimbo can do much with this information. You might want to try phabricator, WP:VP/T or mediawiki.org. Also screenshots are often helpful (upload), makes it much easier to interpret what you are talking about. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:20, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

        Issues with 2017 Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice team article

        I'm concerned about the state of 2017 Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice team. Do any of the contributors here have opinions? My attempt to gain constructive input at an AfD was not well-received; however, none of the contributors addressed my concern that the very existence of an article this specific is WP:UNDUE. A few news publications are assuming that "Trump/Russia" will be more notable than Watergate, and a few editors are cramming every single post from these news publications onto Wikipedia. I feel that this violates WP:NPOV and WP:NOTADVOCATE egregiously. Power~enwiki (talk) 01:50, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

        That fact that you posted a notice about that deletion discussion on the talk page of Breitbart News may make some editors question your own neutrality. Not me, of course, but some editors. World's Lamest Critic (talk) 03:32, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
        I'm not sure how that is supposed to violate neutrality. After being encouraged to seek opinions from outside the AfD process, I posted on pages with editors I thought would have opinions, including pages where the editors were likely to oppose deletion on AfD. Power~enwiki (talk) 03:34, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
        I'm sure that you thought you were doing the right thing. You weren't encouraged to do that, though. The suggestion was to "post completely neutral announcements of the AfD on the talkpages of the WikiProjects that are listed on the article's talkpage banners". That would have been a neutral action. World's Lamest Critic (talk) 03:49, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

        How are ya doing?

        Hope all is well and that you still have time to visit the offices in SF. Have you ever stayed at the Palace Hotel. Beautiful and historic place!--Mark Miller (talk) 06:09, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

        I do visit there but not very often - probably twice a year. I think I've stayed at the Palace Hotel.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:41, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

        WikiTribune update?

        Jimbo, please forgive me for asking about WikiTribune on your Wikipedia talk page, but I am curious about the current status of WikiTribune. The WikiTribune site says 10 out of 10 journalists have been funded. I know from following WikiTribune on Twitter that Lydia Morrish has beeen hired as one of the journalists. Is she the first journalist hired? If not, how many journalists have been hired and who are they? Have any managing or desk editors been hired? Has any support or management staff been hired? Again, sorry to ask here but I'm sure many Wikipedia editors (like me) are interested in participating in WikiTribune and would like to know how things are coming along. World's Lamest Critic (talk) 22:15, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

        Perhaps we need another discussion page for WikiTribune, such as to address interaction with WP, the links to WikiTribune in references, and perhaps how Wikipedia editors could vote for top-interest "original-research-by-request" to answer long-standing gaps in WP coverage of subjects, such as suggesting interviews with key people in critical news events. For example, it is likely we can create a clever {cite_Wikitribune} template, with advanced wp:autofixing of parameters (in many major languages), so that almost any text thrown into a WikiTribune reference would auto-generate a reasonable cite reference, rather than nitpick the parameter formats or keyword spellings to micro-gripe while hiding the current data in the cite. Maybe create a wp:WikiProject for this. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:25, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
        We have hired several journalists and they are at work on stories for the launch - since the software isn't ready yet, not even for 'alpha' release, the journalists are working on in-depth feature/explainer type stories. Still looking for a managing editor - it's a key role and I'm taking time to be careful about it. We have 4 tech people hired - 3 developers and our head of digital. 1 partnerships person. We'll be inviting a few people at a time to be the first community members - looking for people to test and try to break things, etc. Holly is working on updates to the blog.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:25, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
        Thanks for the update, Jimbo. I would expect this kind of very basic information to be on the website or the blog. When WikiTribune was fundraising, I was pleased to see some strong statements like "Community and journalists are equals" and "Full transparency – know where your money goes". I know it's early days yet, but if you really want the community to feel like equals, they should have the same information about the project as the journalists have. Can you ask Holly (whoever that is) to do a blog post introducing the journalists who have been hired? World's Lamest Critic (talk) 22:50, 3 July 2017 (UTC)
        She's working on it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:51, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
        I'd suggest taking For Profit commercial ventures like WikiTribune off the Wikipedia platform. This is not the place for rounding up "volunteers" for such a project any more than using this place to hype and promote and direct traffic to the commercial Wikia website would be appropriate; which is to say — it is not. The only thing these three sites have in common is the use of wikis for content-generation and confusingly similar names. By the way, the Jimmy Wales user page still does not include a Conflict of Interest statement with respect to these commercial entities; it needs to. Carrite (talk) 06:12, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

        "fact based articles""The news is broken and we can fix it. We’re bringing genuine community control to our news with unrestricted access for all. We’re developing a living, breathing tool that’ll present accurate information with real evidence," It is a great way to present an alternative to fake news. Unfortunately, Wikipedia, by its consensus driven method of identifying reliable sources and articles, as well as an apparently growing number of paud editors, includes a lot of that fake news which WikiTribune plans to avoid. They can coexist, and Wikipedia can improve by using WikiTribune as a source when appropriate, but????? Realityornot (talk) 15:08, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

        @Realityornot: I understand what you mean about paid editing and related promotional content. What do you mean by "its consensus driven method of identifying reliable sources and articles" and what is wrong with that? Although there is consensus involved, verifiability policies are priority, similarly to for articles, there is consensus-forming at procedures like Articles for Deletion, but here again factors such as notability and the arguments provided by debate participants are more important than vote count. Of course, I'm speaking about my experience with Wikipedia though, I'm not very familiar with WikiTribune yet, other than its general goals. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate - 11:53, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
        Paleo,There are several ways fake news can end up in a Wikipedia article, the most obvious is that our so-called "reliable sources" regularly include content attributed to unidentified sources. WikiTribune, however, according to their website, "means ensuring that journalists only write articles based on facts that they can verify. Oh, and that you can see their sources." Realityornot (talk) 00:22, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

        Suggestion

        I think, as well as a block log, you should add a ban log, to see when a user was banned, when he/she was unbanned, and the banning admin. Your choice. RullRatbwan (talk) 11:37, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

        See WP:List of banned editors Andy Dingley (talk) 13:33, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
        See also WP:RESTRICT. Note also, in general bans are not decided by a "banning admin". Read more about the banning here: Wikipedia:Banning policy. — xaosflux Talk 20:24, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

        WMF techies ride rough-shod over the community as usual

        With no consensus from the community, "magic links" (such as ISBN 1-85306-192-1) are being removed from the MediaWiki software.

        We also now have three bots replacing the magic links with templates, so that this doesn't break the wiki too much.

        Here - cited by some as "consensus" we see the following, fairly well respected Wikimedians speaking out against this step:

        and a good few others.

        On the talk page you can also see the opposition of such people as User:PamD (who I consider a core Wikipedian) User:LeadSongDog, User:Jytdog and User:Strainu.

        By contrast support is almost entirely from WMF employees.

        It would be really nice if we could either ditch this unwanted proposal, or at least have a discussion about it.

        It would be even nicer if we could actually change the culture to make discussion with the community the norm, rather than the exception.

        All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:22, 4 July 2017 (UTC).

        • My reply (from the linked page): I assume this is used by the visual editor people? Typing [[ISBN/0-7475-3269-9]] or {{ISBN:0-7475-3269-9}} instead of ISBN 0-7475-3269-9 is not difficult. Power~enwiki (talk) 21:31, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
        It is however, more difficult, and it is also a magic incantation. Incidentally neither of those syntaxes are planned to be supported, which shows that what is planned is, to some extent, non-intuitive. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:40, 4 July 2017 (UTC).
        Hi, there are more comments on Phabricator, cheers, --Ghilt (talk) 21:33, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
        @Rich Farmbrough: There was a discussion at this RFC and elsewhere, though it certainly was not obvious to editors elsewhere. Do you still think that there was no community consensus? LeadSongDog come howl! 21:40, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
        That discussion was on the basis that the removal of magic links was a done deal. "Magic links are being removed per the outcome of a Mediawiki RFC" The Mediawiki RFC is the one I referred to above, where the overwhelming consensus was against removal.
        All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:52, 4 July 2017 (UTC).
        • Yes I found this to be shitty behavior by the people who take care of the software, getting rid of something they find irritating, and to hell with how editors feel about it. I protested at the relevant discussions. However in my view the loss of magic links is not that big of a deal; this is not disruptive on the scale of introducing Flow -- from a user perspective magic links were a lovely "nice to have" not a "need to have" function. This does not make the arrogance of the coding people any less ugly. Just shrug-off-able. Jytdog (talk) 22:16, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
        Looks like aristocracy.Realityornot (talk) 01:02, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
        • Although my initial reaction to the loss of magic links was dismay, I've become resigned to it - as long as there will be a regular bot crawl to pick up and templatise any new ISBNs added by naive editors in future. I feel much more strongly about issues like the un-usability of Visual Editor because of the way the edit window hides the article content when trying to add a category or DEFAULTSORT, the kind of Wikignoming I often do. PamD 11:48, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
        I also became resigned to losing my grandmother after she turned 90, but that was not because some cruddy WMF employee was holding a knife to her throat. How do we get rid of such WMF'ers? --Hobbes Goodyear (talk) 04:19, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
        Get rid of them? That's easy. Just keep threatening them with pitchforks and torches. Should get rid of the ones that disagree with anyone and the good ones that have to listen to such incivility. Make sure to lump them in with the 'them' group to further the divide. Don't forget to ignore the fact that the WMF staff involved in this decision are also long time community members. Once you join the WMF, any credibility is instantly moot. Oh, and make sure to take your concerns to Jimmy instead of being involved in any of the community methods for recourse. That should do it. Heck this advice works for anyone in the movement you disagree with. Consideration be damned! 107.77.208.34 (talk) 16:01, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
        Wow. Reading the above, one would think that superprotect never happened... I'm just saying. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:02, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
        Superprotect was likely the last hurrah for community influence upon WMF. There is a dramatic shift afoot within all things tech which is much more aggressive and applauded corporate control and scoffing at all things privacy, ethical, and non-monetary. Realityornot (talk) 01:56, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
        • I don't care very strongly about the magic links issue (other than it breaks old page versions, but so do many template changes and TFDs). I do, however, find the complete disregard for the discussion linked by Rich Farmbrough by WMF technical staff quite annoying. As the WMF apparently has too many employees, maybe some more of them could work on making sure communication (both ways) between developers and editors in all of our wikis happens in a productive and respectful way? (They should study what the "community liaisons" did during the Gather disaster and avoid that, and of course everybody should always remember Superprotect and try very hard not to repeat that). —Kusma (t·c) 20:02, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
        • Could we simply restart the RfC, with proper notification on all projects, and a full discussion? I believe we need a discussion whether we want the wikisyntax to simplify wikicode, or whether we want some kind of weird LISP with twice the number of parenthesis. And please, no pitchforks at the developers, usually they do a quite good job! Jeblad (talk) 22:44, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

        Reversing fake news with true counter-propaganda

        Just FYI status re fake news. In researching about "anti-propaganda" I have been finding more about "counter propaganda" as in flooding the viewers with opposite, true information until the saturation has reversed the impact of fake reports. Hence, the strategy is not only quick suppression of fake reports (and avoid repeating those fake details when refuting), but also increased reporting of true issues, to offset harm caused by whatever faked propaganda had poisoned the viewpoints of readers/listeners or viewers. Hence, overcoming the effects of fake news could require more over-reporting of the true issues, to offset the warped or slanted viewpoints. I am reminded of the tactic of dropping thousands of paper notes across the hillsides, to spread the truth about events previously distorted in fake reports. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:49, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

        • Consider the intro/body/recap format: I am remembering what professor Karl Henize advised about teaching a subject: "Tell 'em what you're going to tell them; tell them; and then tell 'em what you told them" (also in ABA Journal, Nov 2002, Jury, page 56). So, beyond correcting major fake points in the intro lede section, also recap those issues at the end, and perhaps a reader/viewer might re-read the middle to rethink more details about the true events. Use intro/body/recap format when trying to reverse fake reports. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:05, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

        Wikimedia and accessibility for the blind

        Hi Jimbo! I think this is my first time actually at your talk page and I'm hoping to bring some attention to an issue the blind experience when trying to become part of the wikimedia community. I'm not asking for your intervention but I am hoping to see if maybe the community can solve the issue.

        • In 2006 a phabricator ticket was authored that brought to light that captcha wasn't able to be used by the blind effectively leaving them without a way to add external links and later create an account. It's partially been solved by directing the blind to use ACC to create an account making them dependent on the account creation team solely because of their disability. I was hoping either you or one of your plethora of talk page watchers might be able to provide a solution that could be impliminted with little issue.
        This is currently tracked in Phab Ticket T6845.
        Thanks for your time!--Cameron11598 (Talk) 04:01, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
        The obvious solution, as mentioned several times in the phabricator page, is to support audio captchas. That wouldn't be very difficult to implement, but apparently it hasn't yet been classified as a development priority. Looie496 (talk) 14:09, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
        Maybe we should buy everyone at the WMF a BB gun. Then, after they shoot their eyes out, accommodating the blind will be a higher priority. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:25, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

        It's not just with WMF, as almost all of society has turned a blind eye to the blind (and sighted people are treated even worse than special-needs groups). So it has become our responsibility to fix everything else. In fact a major reason why WP has 1950s static typesetting, rather than wp:auto-hyphenation of wrapped text, is because some screenreaders pronounce optional soft hyphens in formatted words. I'm not sure if the spoken text has options to quietly skip soft hyphens, but over 10 years ago, long terms in Wikipedia should have auto-hyphenated, such as "deoxy­ribo­nucleic acid" (DNA), but today we still see huge text gaps around long words, which never happened with advanced word processors in the 1970s. Today we have the "computrash generation" who are flooded with sloppy, bug-ridden software, "touch-scream" interfaces, and waiting forever on computers which formerly timestamped replies (to scroll that time in an event log) or warned users when a request would exceed 7-second response time, to check for results later in a batch queue (rather than pretend people don't matter with waiting). It's just rude. The whole situation is rude, backward, archaic and slow, even for sighted people. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:46, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

        The advent of ubiquitous mobile devices may change this.[67][Humor] —PaleoNeonate - 14:38, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

        Attendance at March 30, 2017 WMF meeting in Berlin

        The foundation:Minutes/2017-03-30 state: "Christophe, María, Kelly, Dariusz, and Nataliia, were present in Berlin. Katherine, Michelle, Jaime, and Stephen were also present. Alice joined on Google Hangout for part of the meeting." Your name is omitted. Were you present in Berlin? Inquiring minds want to know. Perhaps the minutes can be amended to clearly state how you were present. Thanks, wbm1058 (talk) 12:30, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

        commons:Category:Jimmy_Wales_at_Wikimedia_Conference_2017. Gamaliel (talk) 15:27, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
        Thanks! Is there an online video of his talk? wbm1058 (talk) 15:48, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

        Wikimedia Cloud

        On June 9, 2017 the WMF filed for the service mark "WIKIMEDIA CLOUD" at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Wikimedia Cloud is "Providing online publications in the nature of articles and reference guides on the use of and contribution to software development" and "Providing virtual computer systems and virtual computer environments through cloud computing; computer services, namely, acting as an application services provider for Internet users featuring remote hosting of operating systems and computer applications; computer services, namely, providing a virtual computing environment accessible via the Internet for registered users to access databases and software development tools; providing a virtual computing environment accessible via the Internet for registered users to create and develop computer software."

        Can you elaborate on what this is about. If there was a formal announcement of this, please link to it (I'm not a religious reader of the mailing lists or the Foundation's blog). Thanks. wbm1058 (talk) 16:19, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

        Please tell me that the WMF isn't starting a project that appears to compete with Google Cloud[68] or Amazon Cloud[69] without telling anyone[70][71][72][73][74]... --Guy Macon (talk) 03:49, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
        Most people wanting information would try putting "Wikimedia Cloud" into Google. Unsurprisingly, it has lots of useful facts. In general, asking someone like Jimbo to dump a help page is not productive. When names are registered, it is standard procedure to use a shotgun approach and name every conceivable thing that might arise in the future. Johnuniq (talk) 04:29, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
        Oh, I see, mw:Wikimedia Cloud Services team. Now, if The Signpost were on top of their game, I would already know that. It's odd how I stumble into learning about new things. Thanks for the suggestion to use Google. Duh. I usually do that, but was blindsided by this slipping by with so little notice. My initial reaction was similar to Guy's. wbm1058 (talk) 04:58, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
        The most useful from a technical details standpoint is this: [75] Basically, we are talking about Kubernetes, which will be made available "within and outside of the Wikimedia Foundation". --Guy Macon (talk) 04:54, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
        It houses Quary among other things I think it's similar to labs see this link--Cameron11598 (Talk) 05:00, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
        If this will finally make Labs / Tool Labs / Tool Forge or whatever they call it a robust, responsive and stable platform. I'm all for it. All of this constant rebranding and reorganizing is confusing the hell out of everyone. I wish they'd spend less time on that stuff and "public relations", and more time getting their hands dirty just making things work. wbm1058 (talk) 05:13, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
        The actual developers have always been pretty competent, and the tiny minority who suffered from terminal arrogance don't work for the WMF any more. The word I hear is that the management problems that have caused recent WMF software to basically be steaming piles of shit despite the actual developers knowing how to do things right are pretty much gone. So I have a lot of optimism regarding software development, but of course the proof will be when we see some high-quality software. I think the next thing we need to focus on is our appalling lack of transparency. Things like secretly keeping Sue Gardner on the payroll - with a $100,000 raise -- as a "special advisor" after leading us to believe that she had left the WMF.[76] --Guy Macon (talk) 06:18, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
        Well whatever gets better software soon, as it seems the "new" diff-in-context (on mobile phone editing) might be a version of wp:WikEdDiff, but at least it works to pinpoint changes hidden within long split lines. I mean even if they use a student's science fair project to reduce edit-conflicts, then that's better than doing nothing for another 15 years, even if they pay the student $2 million for something that works. Now I'm thinking they didn't want templates to test and set global variables so a page could be formatted in multiple concurrent template parts, but we need templates to set global variables such as error-counting or format-mode templates, to autofix errors, or reset default numeric precision from prior measurement conversion templates. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:48, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
        — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
        MediaWiki logo Name: MediaWiki
        Description: helps coordinate work on MediaWiki software
        Website: www.mediawiki.org         		Wikitech logo Name: Wikitech
        Alias: Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS), formerly known as "Wikimedia Labs"
        Description: technical projects and infrastructure
        Website: wikitech.wikimedia.org

        So, best as I can tell, Wikitech ≡ Wikimedia Cloud Services ≡ Wikimedia Labs. It's not clear to me whether Wikimedia Cloud Services is in charge of the "WIKIMEDIA CLOUD", as what exactly the Wikimedia Cloud is isn't clearly defined. WMCS supports three products, but they don't have a product called "WIKIMEDIA CLOUD":

        The WMF should see if they can hire Rowland Hanson. He helped clear up branding issues for Microsoft, when he convinced Bill Gates to ditch names like "MultiTool" and "Interface Manager".

        I hadn't been over to wikitech: for quite a while, as I have too many balls to juggle and that's one that stays dropped for long stretches of time. If only I could hire some people to make spelling corrections, I could make higher use of my time and abilities. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:31, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

        Why is the mw:Wikimedia Cloud Services team on the MediaWiki site (mw:) and not at wikitech:Wikimedia Cloud Services team on the wikitech: site, as that's the site they ostensibly support? wbm1058 (talk) 13:43, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

        Support for editing through mobile interface

        Dear sir, I got to know that you are founder . I hope i have reached the right place. Sir I am college student from India. I registered in your universally popular and treasure of informations website last year ,as I read this site since my childhood and your wikipedia is a saviour of lot of students across the world. I registered to contribute as much as I can , as you know respected sir a lot of people use mobile interface in fact I believe over 80 percentage of internet users over the world are mobile phone users, but sir as soon I registered I face lot of difficulties editing the site through phone ,even now I face it. First as am from non-programming background I struggled to learn wikimarkup. yes there are visual editor but it is not effective, as I love this project I didn't quit this and keep on spending my time by now I have patrolled 100s of pages and have 2000 plus contributions and some article creation mostly about the topics related to India, as I am more interested in India related things. Like me there are many people across the world who want to contribute but find extreme difficulties on mobile interface. And many don't know that Wikipedia could be edited , I request you to do some improvements in Wikipedia's software which can make mobile users more friendly towards the site and place pop-up of create account page so that people can know that wikipedia could be edited and thus it would bring more contributors to the site

        Love and Much respect to you sir always. Anoptimistix (talk) 10:38, 11 July 2017 (UTC) Anoptimistix (talk) 10:38, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

        Hello, Anoptimistix. I am not sure Jimbo has time to respond to all your comments, but he generally likes to hear from users about such issues. As for the mobile-phone interface, it varies depending on the type of cell phone being used, and phones are being improved (enlarged) faster than the Wikipedia MediaWiki software has been improved to simplify mobile phone use. The Android phones allow a "desktop View" which shows the full-page layout, as seen on desktop/laptop computers. However, entering text can be very tedious with a touch screen interface ("touch-scream"), and so use of a spellcheck word-completion feature to autofix the spelling of words can reduce the numerous typos; unfortunately, some mobile phones do not consider spelling of words with numeral digits, and so extra care must be taken when entering numbers on a touch-screen.
        In general, it is far easier (50x faster?) to edit pages using a desktop computer, such as at a school, library, church or community center. Please note that for decades, computer scientists have confirmed that touch-screen computers are more tedious to use for text-entry than laptop/keyboard computers, due to the vastly increased speed of 10-finger typing and the 6x-20x wider screen space which can display a dozen pages side-by-side with small-text resolution.
        In fact, when developing software, I often used 3 desktop computers, side-by-side, to compile software on one computer, while editing other software on another screen (with different copy/paste clipboards), plus running full-screen testcases on a 3rd screen while watching the intermittent status messages on all three. U.S. President Thomas Jefferson had a multi-book reader carousel which allowed him to read 4 or 5 books concurrently, by rotating around among all the open books on the spinning carousel. I would encourage you to get libraries or community centers to allow more people to have increased access to desktop computers, until mobile phones are advanced to have wider, folded-screens and then plug-in a full-key keyboard as an optional text interface with the touch-screen mode. Until then, it is much faster to open 20 narrow pages concurrently on a large desktop computer, and then switch among them to cross-check the data while copying text from various text-editor screens into those multiple pages. Otherwise, prolonged use of mobile-phone editing is like trying to enter text "through a keyhole" in a door, as confirmed by how long it takes to update 90 pages on a desktop versus phone edits. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:50, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
        (talk page gnome) @Anoptimistix: A major issue is that those devices are primarily designed to be consumer platforms (to buy services, applications, access content, not produce). If your device supports Bluetooth or USB, I highly recommend investing in a portable keyboard which will help a lot. Thank you for your comment, —PaleoNeonate - 17:16, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
        Editing Wikipedia on a touch screen device is like doing the gardening with a teaspoon instead of a spade. A Bluetooth keyboard would help, but a laptop or desktop are the best ways to edit Wikipedia.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 10:11, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

        There are some shortcomings with the media wiki interface on Wikipedia .The top suggestion in my lists of to-dos is allowing IP editors to access the talk page . I would also like to know if there is any way to revert another editor on Wikipedia.(For the last 2 weeks I have been searching for the same but I haven't found it ⮘RADICAL SODA(FORCE)⮚ 10:59, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

        Sunday July 16: New England Wiknic @ Cambridge, MA

        Sunday July 16, 1-5pm: New England Wiknic

        You are invited to join us the "picnic anyone can edit" at John F. Kennedy Park, near Harvard Square, Cambridge, as part of the Great American Wiknic celebrations being held across the USA. Remember it's a wiki-picnic, which means potluck.

        1–5pm - come by any time!
        Look for us by the Wikipedia / Wikimedia banner!

        We hope to see you there! --Phoebe (talk) 16:33, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

        (You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for Boston-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

        Block in BG Wikipedia

        Hello, in BG Wiki, my account was blocked indefinitely without having made any edits. Петър Михайлов (talk) 12:43, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

        Your account was blocked for an unacceptable username and abuse of multiple accounts. General Ization Talk 12:48, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

        But this block is incorrect. My name is appropriate. Петър Михайлов (talk) 13:01, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

        Not sure why Петър Михайлов is an unacceptable username. Maybe it could be confused with this person [77][78] but Петър Михайлов (Peter Michaelson in English) isn't offensive. Clarification needed here.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 13:03, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
        Or with Петър Михайлов и Ко ООД, which is the name of a company. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 13:04, 13 July 2017 (UTC)
        At any rate, Петър Михайлов, you'll need to contest your block on bgwiki. Jimbo has no particular authority over blocks there. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 13:06, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

        Петър Михайлов is the name of different people in Bulgaria. Петър Михайлов (talk) 13:13, 13 July 2017 (UTC)

        The Signpost: 15 July 2017

        * Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:48, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
        Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_221&oldid=1186870376"