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Wikipedia's article on Chelsea Manning has finally been moved to the name that Manning has stated is her name and the name that is used by most mainstream English language sources. This happened after much wrangling and resistance, which included moving the article back to Bradley, locking it there for 5 weeks, before finally moving it for the third time back to Chelsea. The process has provoked highly negative reactions in the real world. The case has demonstrated that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't have policies in place that ensure that all living subjects of articles are treated with basic dignity and respect. The predominant view among those knowledgeable on the issue is that the refusal to recognise someone's gender identity and self-concept is immensely harmful to transgender people.
I call upon the Wikimedia Foundation as site owners to issue clear rules, as the foundation has done before, to ensure that transgender people are treated with dignity, in the spirit of its policy on biographies of living persons. The sooner this happens, the better. Josh Gorand ( talk) 00:33, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
It is a mistake to read this as simply a transgender issue - the principle that should have governed this and other unrelated BLP cases exists only as a disregarded footnote (about something the WMF board once said) in WP:BLP. The policy itself once said Wikipedia articles should respect the basic human dignity of their subjects, but this was deleted in 2009 after a discussion involving four editors.
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation published its resolution on BLPs that in part says we should take human dignity into account when adding or removing information. While most of that resolution is now unambiguously embodied in en.Wikipedia's policy, this point about human dignity is not. The nearest we come to it is "the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment." In the Manning naming dispute it was clear that a lot of editors exclude insulting or offending a person from their definition of "harm."
I think the current wording of WP:BLP deals well with blatant attacks but it doesn't cover demeaning, humiliating, insulting or other treatment that disregards our subjects' basic dignity. Though many editors here read into the policy (or the "spirit" of the policy) an obligation to take into account the dignity of the person concerned, without a clear expression of that obligation in the BLP policy those editors must, as was seen in this recent case, submit to editors who argue that we don't care about the feelings of our subjects and so trivial style regulations must always trump the dignity of our subjects.
This community needs to make an unambiguous statement as to whether it agrees with or repudiates the Arbitration Committee and WMF position that the dignity of our subjects should be taken into account in our editorial decision-making. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 05:06, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
It's also a fallacy to assume that the neutral point of view is in the middle, especially when sentiments calling for trans people to be put in concentration camps are often expressed. Academic and medical consensus is completely in favour of the recognition of transgender individuals and their identity, and that should be what we follow, not a press which public inquiries have found to have flaws (on the same lines, would we believe the Daily Express on immigration, for example?) Sceptre ( talk) 14:42, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
I'll forgive you for being a bit behind the times as you're a busy man and all, but when you have a moment, peruse User:Tarc/Manning statement. I'm fully supportive of a transgender person's life choices, and of naming a Wikipedia article in-kind, but I was curious to see how arbcom would deal with a polite yet prejudicial argument against transgender recognition. They, un-surprisingly, dropped the ball. After years of keeping the lunatics at bay in the Obama articles, arguing in favor of dropping the misogynistic "wife of" from Sarah Jane Brown, or opposing (ultimately unsuccessfully) the depopulation of women authors from the novelists category, people around here shoulda caught on quicker.
Mr. Gorand though did a great, great disservice to the Chelsea-supporting side; his miserable, combative, shrill tone was one of the primary reasons that it all had to go to Arbitration at all. Tarc ( talk) 12:46, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
If the Tea Party were to embrace ObamaCare, that would not make their past behavior leading to the government shutdown any better. Count Iblis ( talk) 15:35, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
I and a couple of other editors who stood firmly against extremely discriminatory anti-trans speech a month ago (that was met with no sanctions at all) and continued to argue against wrong decisions, and who navigated Chelsea Manning's article safely back to Chelsea despite harsh resistance and attacks against ourselves, are the ones who might just have saved Wikipedia's honour. Whether editors like Tarc were serious or whether they were just perpetrating the biggest case of disruptive WP:POINT ever perpetrated on Wikipedia, as he now claims, when they made comments like these, doesn't matter. They lost, and they look bad. Immensely bad. And they are now taking it out on me, it seems. (I should also note that Tarc was one of the main culprits in creating an aggressively discriminatory atmosphere and a hostile climate in that discussion, and baiting good faith editors into getting enraged over comments comparing trans people to pigs doesn't make him look more agreeable, if his claims here are even true) Josh Gorand ( talk) 16:09, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
The #1 rule of trolls is, don't feed the trolls. I'd suggest everyone just ignore Tarc and his rather epic trollfest, he's just relishing the attention even more and it makes him even more smug.-- Obi-Wan Kenobi ( talk) 17:38, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
FWIW, "Bradley Manning" is still the most commonly name used name. [1] A Quest For Knowledge ( talk) 14:27, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
Where is Kate Middleton now: In many places, the name " Kate Middleton" is well-known, but I imagine there are few who could state the new formal name as "Catherine,..." and yet the article was renamed immediately. I think that is the major point, when a person has an attorney make a formal statement of name change. - Wikid77 18:23, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
@ Konveyor: It's important to distinguish between a Google search and a Google News search. A Google search indexes all of the Internet but Google News only indexes news sources. There used to be a time where Google News searches indexed non- reliable sources such as prisonplanet.com, but Google fixed that problem a couple years ago. So, my "stance" (as you put it - I don't really have a "stance", I try to answer these types of issues objectively without letting person opinion get in the way) is to determine the most commonly used name using reliable sources. This is policy. In any case, you didn't answer my second question: how do you recommend that we determine the most common name for an article's topic? AQFK ( talk) 12:38, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
Please stop trying to fit 10 pounds of shiat into a 2 pound box. It's obvious it's not her "common name" when every article has to introduce her with her common name so they know wtf the article is talking about. Julia Serano is a common name. No one has to publish "previously known as XXX Serano." We don't even have her birth name in the article, though it's widely available. Heck, I wouldn't even attempt to add it to Serano because of the irrational response it would receive even if it mimicked the Manning article. "Chelsea Manning" is listed there for only a few reasons: one of which is that listing it there causes less disruption and harm than any other pace. It's not her legal name in any common, statutory or administrative law sense. It's not her common name in any rationale way when articles about her have to include "Bradley" and articles not about her omit "Chelsea" completely. We respect her self-identification out of the belief that it is least harmful. It should only extend to her bio and accounts of fact after her conviction. Trying to make ludicrous claims about who she is doesn't make it easier to decide what follows. -- DHeyward ( talk) 05:40, 16 October 2013 (UTC) @AQFK, Elaqueate, and Konveyor belt- this has nothing to do with COMMONNAME... that's a red herring and your back and forth private conversation in a public place is a bit annoying. It has always, and rightfully so, been a BLP issue. If you really want to convince people of your POV from either side of the aisle, then address the BLP issue. Otherwise go to your talk pages and have your discussion truly privately by yourselves. Camelbinky ( talk) 13:33, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
Hey I just had this question in my mind and couldn't think of another person to ask. How is that all of you choose the location for Wikimania? Miss Bono [hello, hello!] 18:39, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Dear Mr. Wales,
Good day to you!
My name is Andrew Cabral and I’m writing to you from India.
I wish to bring to your notice (in case it hasn’t already, that is) the fact that Wikipedia is being systematically used by a certain very well-defined community of users to propagate misinformation (often downright lies). There is an extreme right-wing Hindu political propagandist organization in India called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) whose sole agenda is to distort history to accommodate their view of India as the cradle of civilization, Sanskrit as the mother of all languages, and to glorify India and simultaneously undermine other civilizations, nations and cultures. Needless to say, their views are not accepted by any mainstream scholarship, aside from a few crackpots, who will naturally always be there. Nonetheless, their influence in India itself is considerable. They exploit the relatively uneducated Indian by preaching to him that India was always at the forefront of civilization and that barbaric outsiders plundered her and stole all her secrets. Partially true, no doubt, but definitely not the way they tell it. They instill a sense of xenophobia in the average Indian and play upon his victim complex. They make them believe that Indians are the only truly religious, pious, peace-loving, tolerant (and what have you) people around. They instill a sense of false superiority in these people and purposefully glorify India by either making sweeping claims about it and its history or shrewdly manipulating any historical ambiguity into something which “conclusively” proves their point. When confronted by those who know better, these people use one of two escape routes, namely, talk sheer circumlocuting rubbish or directly attack the other as racist and biased.
A point in fact is the Talk page of the Wikipedia article on “Man”. I request you (actually strongly urge you) to read what is on that page itself. I had made an edit request on the 12th of February this year which was accepted almost immediately. It is only recently that I got to know what had transpired since then. I have just left a long communication on that page to the principal involved. Kindly do read it and decide for yourself the merits of my bringing this to your notice. Also please be rest assured that I can give you many other instances of the orthodox Hindu mind at work on Wikipedia, should you wish me to do so. Please understand that this is NOT an isolated incident. As one editor on the Talk page of Indian Mathematics put it, “Sadly, mathematics is far from the only topic on Wikipedia which suffers from this artificial inflation of India's role.” When you do have the time, you can read that rather lengthy page and see for yourself what regular editors have had to face. Also, please be clear that although these people represent a huge percentage of Indians, they do not represent India in general. I have personally known two Indians who were regular contributors to Wikipedia and whose integrity was beyond question. Even the editor Saddhiyama who kept his cool on the Man talk page is probably Indian.
Inasmuch as it is one thing to point out a problem area and quite another to propose a means which could even start approaching its rectification, I am at a loss as to how to suggest a method to check or even contain the progress of these people. Nonetheless, even if you were aware of this problem before, I felt that it merited my presenting it. The closed, bigoted and uneducated mind is cancerous, and, as we all know, if there is one thing that cancer does well, that thing is spreading itself.
Thank you for reading this. I trust that you will take due cognizance of the matter.
Sincerely yours,
Andrew Cabral — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.200.54 ( talk) 10:32, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Hi, Wikid77! I’m afraid you don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. This isn’t a matter of boosting a particular individual or organization; it’s a whole race of people. Need I remind you what fraction of the world’s population is Indian and even if you take that a quarter of the country’s population is influenced by Hindutva (a modest estimate, in my opinion), then you have a sizeable proportion of the globe to deal with. As Sitush and Spartaz know, these are not people with whom you can deal in a rational manner. They have monolithic mindsets and manipulative tendencies. I’ll give you an example. I recently had occasion to disprove on a Yahoo page a pet claim of theirs: that the Vedas, etc. accurately predicted the age of the universe. I quoted from the Vishnu Puran and did the arithmetic, so to speak. The response (at least I wasn’t abused, but then I was very straightforward): “Mathematics does not prove anything. You have to be truly spiritual to be able to understand the depth of our scriptures. Hinduism is based on natural principles. Our rishis and munnis developed great time-scales for the benefit of all humanity. Blah, blah, blah!” I trust you get the point. Another thing you might not be aware of is the fact that the RSS were always great admirers of the Nazis. Of course, they don’t have the balls (unlike the Nazis did) to openly state that they want a “pure” “Aryan” India free from “foreigners”, but that is their basic desire. I’m very sure that “boosterism” (a term I wasn’t aware of but immediately understood) exists in other spheres as well, but I am even more sure that it doesn’t to even half the extent to which it does here. I knew exactly what I was saying when I compared it to a cancer. It’s far more than just superlatives. I’m telling you there are both downright lies and ambiguities which are tweaked in their favour, superlatively, of course. There are also convenient omissions, either of the type which could water down their claims or which could show that others (non-Indian cultures, nations, civilizations, even individuals) had more rights to those claims. We live in an information age which is as much a misinformation age. A site like Wikipedia loses its credibility among those who know better. Even those who don’t and who have no reason to be inclined towards Hindutva start getting suspicious after a point and stop trusting what they find here. Those who are of the “Oh my Gawd, this is so coooool!” disposition get taken for a ride, literally. And those who desperately want to believe get their ideas reinforced. The proportion of people in India who actually read books is less than in most other countries. Their source of information is invariably the net. So, you don’t realize it, but Wikipedia is not only catering to their need to portray India and its history in a superlative light to the rest of the world, but it is also actually contributing towards increasing the strength of their own fold.
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.96.204.30 ( talk) 15:47, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Hi, Sitush! I fully understand what you, Spartaz and others have to go through on an almost daily basis. I first started doubting things related to the History of Indian Mathematics pages (particularly Bhaskara II), but after reading in one of those “Fact of the Matter” boxes in the Times of India newspaper that “the English word Navigation comes from Sanskrit Navigutha” and finding exactly that on Wikipedia, I started doubting everything related to India on Wikipedia. It is one of Hindutva’s cherished dreams to prove that English derives from Sanskrit (the colonial hangover). Forget the fact that navigation derives from the Latin “navigare”, to them even Latin and Greek come from Sanskrit. The early philologists like William Jones’ waxing eloquent over Sanskrit in comparison to Latin and Greek is always quoted as “proof”. I once went to great pains on the comments section of a page on YouTube to explain that English was one language that was influenced by more languages than most for it to be traced to even one “original” source, leave alone one as far away as Sanskrit. In reply, I was given a list of English words with similar phonetics and meanings in Sanskrit. Most of them were root words and all were what we know as Latin- or Greek-based. I was told that if I wanted, there were “thousands” of more words which could be posted. I didn’t bother replying. Maybe I will one of these days. Proto-Indo-European doesn’t exist for them. Forgive me for boring you, but I’m purposely writing these things down so that others can read of concrete, real incidents which have taken place and so understand the situation better.
Regarding the problematic editors, why, may I ask, is there often a reluctance to take action earlier on? It only gets worse the longer one waits and they thrive on the extra time granted them. In fact, it bolsters their confidence. It is quite possible that the particular editor of whom you were talking is the same Archetypex07 who made a scene on the Man Talk page. After giving it some thought last night, I have a suggestion which might not go down well with Jimmy Wales or even the editors of Wikipedia, but I do believe that it’s worth due consideration. Along the lines of what PayPal does to verify a new member’s credit card number, namely, charging him a token refundable fee which appears on his credit card statement along with a special code which has to be inputted by the member on the PayPal site, Wikipedia could try a similar thing with actual identification documents, with the promise that the editor’s identity won’t be revealed to the community at large, etc. One who wants to become a regular editor would have to upload scans of TWO acceptable identification documents AND pay the token fee via PayPal or any other medium (Wikipedia would have to hook up with these). Someone who is honest and has good intentions shouldn’t have a problem with this. Once the prospective editor verifies his identity via the code on the Wikipedia site, he can become a regular full-time editor. Wikipedia stores his ID info in its database. If he is banned, then he cannot become an editor again unless he falsifies his identity. This would actually lower the number of cranks out there in general, not just the “Indian” ones. The way things are, it’s too easy for them. Once it gets stricter, they’ll at least think twice. And if one is caught falsifying his ID the second time, it becomes a legal matter. Some desperate idiot might try falsifying his ID the very first time itself. In that case, he’d be very careful not to come under any suspicion whatsoever, like doing something which could get him banned. The point is that even though he might use someone else’s credit card at different times without sweating, he would have to upload his own ID each time. And anyway, how many people could one ask to use their card and then expect them to give him the code they want? One could even think about faxing signatures for verification. I don’t think it would cost Wikipedia too much in terms of investment. One could try a similar thing even at the level of those who edit protected pages (assuming that not every full-time editor can). This way, Wikipedia would even know how many editors are from India at a given time, etc. Think about it!
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.193.14 ( talk) 18:19, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Liz, I've already acknowledged that "boosterism" would definitely exist in other areas, but tell me, how experienced are you with not just what happens in India (on the ground, so to speak), but even on the India-related pages of Wikipedia? Read my comments again and try and understand what I'm saying, even if you instinctively wish to take me as some kind of crank. I don't doubt the abilities of experienced and honest editors. I'm saying that you have quite a few dishonest ones who are gaining even more experience at being so and that, furthermore, there'll be more to come if steps aren't taken to check them now. You seem to have taken my suggestion as some kind of attack on the general editor on Wikipedia. It was not. That should have been amply clear to anyone who reads my comments. I had even acknowledged that my idea would most probably not be entertained, but I think its a reasonably valid suggestion. The "validation" of accounts procedure which I had explained is supposed to be only in the beginning so as to ensure that people like Archetypex07 (the bad pennies) can't come back. The editor's anonymity is assured otherwise. This was suggested for full-time editors, the ones who edit protected pages. And what is the problem with filling in an online proforma and uploading some corroborating ID? Don't you do the same thing when you apply for a credit card, etc., fully believing in the assurance of the company concerned that your data is safe with them because it is secured with some SSL encryption or the other? Also, what is so ironic about my stance in the matter? I'm far from being anonymous over here. I'm certainly signing with my own name and I can't help it if my internet service provider keeps changing IP addresses. (I just clicked on the Talk button of my previous response and found some edit on Hindu College which I had certainly never done. Never even visited that page.) As far as my taking the time to register and create an account is concerned, I did once and for some reason (probably my connection), it failed. (That's why I compose these messages in Word first and then paste them here.) So what if I didn't try again? I'm still a member of the global community at large which accesses Wikipedia and I have the right to bring something to the site's notice if I feel it's important (I most certainly do and have given what I believe to be convincing arguments in support of it) and suggest something towards its resolution. I repeat, my suggestion is not intended to offend any honest editor or even threaten his/her anonymity, but only to bring in more accountability, which should not trouble the editors at Wikipedia unduly. Lastly, aside from my desire to see that misinformation is not disseminated in general, I have made it clear that Wikipedia's reputation is itself at stake in the long run. What long run? If I'm not mistaken, you'll have had problems with the dependability of the information on your pages for quite some time now.
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.146.146 ( talk) 06:12, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
One more thing, Liz, these people are not just from India. They're all over the world. Whereas, if you have ID, the Wikipedia database knows exactly who is who, even if he's a Russian in Afghanistan or a Englishman in New York. (Strange how sometimes when you're searching for an example to illustrate your point, some old tunes come to the rescue almost immediately.) And, as I've taken the pains to point out, not all Indians are like them. So, knowing the traffic from India does not help in any way.
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.146.146 ( talk) 06:41, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
Well, Andrew, let me emphasize this isn't a matter of boosting just a "whole race of people" but rather putting a spin to slant every school, sports arena, or town as " George Washington Slept Here the longest" while omitting the negative aspects of a topic. For example, while the article " French Quarter" (about the origin of New Orleans) does mention being "Spanish" architecture, it should also quickly mention the Spanish balconies and courtyards, the fires which destroyed most French buildings, emphasize there are few outdoor cafes as in France, and note the lack of shade trees so the street temperature can exceed 110 °F (43 °C), unlike many French towns with park squares and trees. Similarly, a seaside town, while noting the view along the shoreline or beaches should also note the common undertow or rip tides, sea nettles, seaweed around swimmers ( Mombasa, Kenya), sand blown into food, or the cold-water season. More than just claiming an ancient connection between English words and Sanskrit cognates, the boosterism in town pages has omitted the negative issues for most aspects of town life. That is why some other editors have been trying to explain the rampant extent of the problem which also slants the non-India topics. People should read the page " French Quarter" and come away knowing there are few French buildings, few outdoor cafes, few French shade trees, and unbearable heat/humidity most of the year (not to mention graffiti which says, " 9th ward 4EVER"). - Wikid77 ( talk) 14:00, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, Wikid77, for giving me some other examples of boosterism which I wasn't aware of. I have noticed such things on some non-India pages, but not the ones which you've mentioned. I'll read up on "slanting" schools/towns.
Andrew
Fowler&fowler, this isn't exactly the place to get into a debate which we could very well end up having some other time. Nonetheless, I'll start it. I'm very well aware of the regional sub-nationalism which exists in India (basically linguistic), two prime examples being the Marathis and the Tamilians. But if you go by sheer numbers, they are beaten hands down by the "North", which anyway has always tried (generally with success) to dominate these regional identities. Furthermore, three of the four religions which were born in India were basically from that same northern region. So, those who exhibit the regional variety often do exhibit the global one as well. The RSS hardly has a following in the south. (It might grow though.) But they are thick in the north and always have been. And they are extremely casteist. You would have lower caste POVs, but they'd be minuscule compared to the higher ones. I'm sure that you'd agree that much with me. If irredentism is counterfactual history, like what the Latin American writers love to churn out, I'm not so sure. I think something of a slightly different nature applies here. Indians love historicizing their mythology and do so all the time. (You are doubtless aware of that.) There can be no question of counterfactuals there because they don't wish to explore any alternatives to what happened the way they believe it. (Don't you know that the Mahabharat war ended on the 18th of February, 3102 BC? Such precision!) The only what-if's which they dwell upon are "What if the Arabs and, later, the Europeans hadn't invaded us?" Some of those dreams which you've written about have largely crystallized into "irrefutable facts" for them. The potential was always there, but it takes an organization like the RSS to exploit it fully and carry on the catalysis till what you're left with is a rigid, frog-in-a-deep-well mindset. Even the "riding shotgun" example you've given is quintessential RSS, where the Greeks were the Yavans (as in what became the accepted meaning, namely, barbaric/demonic foreigner, as opposed to the original, namely, the Sanskritic cognate of Ionian) while the Vedic Indians did "the stuff that dreams are made of". Literally, like flying "vimanas"! Even some of their "top scientists" are right there in the thick of things. Ever heard of a pompous ass named CK Raju? Check out his I-Me-and-Myself blog, which "proves", among other things, that infinitesimals and the idea of heliocentrism came from India. People like him are quoted as "experts". (You know how gurus are revered in India.) He does have the credentials, but he's misusing them. To summarize, I believe that most of the examples which you've cited are indeed all very much part of Hindutva, some right at its core and some more peripherally located.
At any rate, Jimmy Wales isn't interested in reading what either you or I believe on his page. His interest would be in whether what I'd written to him was legit or not. I haven't really bothered with the pages on Indian cinema or royalty. But thank you for confirming that the history-related pages are highly susceptible. I'll add the Indian mathematics and science pages to that. While we're at it, let's just treat the Indian philosophy ones as the tusker in the room!
Andrew
General statement: The idea which I'd written about (to ensure that certain editors don't get the chance to come back) is NOT the important thing to me. It was just a corollary to Sitush's reply. I have every respect for the honest editors at Wikipedia and appreciate the time and effort which they put in. I have no wish to disrupt the flow of their functioning. But I do wish that they realize that Hindutva and the RSS are in all probability more dangerous than any other religio-nationalistic tendencies from across the globe and, furthermore, that Wikipedia is especially susceptible to them, inasmuch as they are using it to further their agenda and will continue to do so.
Andrew Cabral — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.52.16 ( talk) 18:56, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
Fowler&fowler: I owe you an apology for my last reply. In retrospect, it appears to me that it could very easily be construed as my not respecting your views, which was not my intention. Aside from the fact that I think that you’re among the more senior editors who has replied to me (I might be wrong though), there is the undeniable fact that other than Sitush, you’ve been the only one who has tried to talk about the matter itself. I’m more clear-headed today than I was yesterday at this time and some things which I should have said then I’ll be stating in my reply to Vigyani below (the second half, which is liberally sprinkled with NOTs). Also thank you kindly for the offer to join the "Maratha Wars". I just might, even though Indian history of the post-Mughal period was always something which I avoided.
Andrew
Vigyani: I did check out the “Too Long, Didn’t Read” link but I’m afraid that not everything can be condensed into five or six sentences. In fact some of the best things in life, like the Russian writers, absolutely cannot. Anyway, even if it’s long, I write simpler than both Joyce and Pynchon, so there’s no question of my “prose” being too difficult to follow. I’ve been fully aware that I sound like I have a bee in my bonnet, but then every once in a while one feels strongly enough about something to act precisely in that manner. I’m also acutely aware that it’s considered bad form to continue dominating a discussion, but circumstances have dictated terms here. People haven’t exactly taken me seriously. So don’t worry, your reckoning places you among the clear majority. About the RSS/Hindutva “bashing”, you are in the extreme right (pun most intended). I’ve made no bones about the fact that I am anti both. Unlike most “bashers” though, I think that I’ve given enough cogent arguments for my “bashing”. The examples that I’ve given might bore one to death, but they all hold true. Since such matters are exceedingly sensitive, let me make it amply clear than I am anti-RSS/Hindutva, not anti-Hinduism. Hindutva is NOT synonymous with Hinduism and the RSS does NOT represent Hinduism, though it of course claims to be its guardian. There are many Hindus who outrightly reject both. I’ve read a decent bit about Hinduism and there are some things that I actually like about it. I’ve also not only read about but encountered facets of the RSS/Hindutva and there is absolutely nothing that I like about them. In fact, the very opposite holds: I loathe them. They are, after all, an organization which preaches intolerance to other faiths and cultures (unlike Hinduism itself), which supports defrauders like NS Rajaram (of reading Sanskrit in the Indus Valley script and fabricated Indus Valley horse seal fame) and nuts like David Frawley, which promotes the bogus, twentieth century Vedic Mathematics and Vymanika Shastra as “ancient”, and which in general propagates falsities as knowledge. If your name really is Vigyani, then you’re Indian and you definitely know what they teach in their school texts. The following link, which substantiates some of the things which I’ve written in my comments above, shows how they tried to introduce their textbooks into American schools some eight years ago:
http://www.panthic.org/articles/2209
If you feel that I have lied or misrepresented anything in my comments above, do feel free to point them out to me. Regarding Wikipedia, the problems which I’ve mentioned are NOT general problems with editors from India. Neither are they regional-minded editor problems. General/regional-minded editors would NOT be the ones who either wrongly or forcibly trace many English language word origins to Sanskrit. They would NOT be the ones who conveniently push dubious dates in Ancient India a few hundred years backwards. They would NOT be the ones who try to show that certain ideas developed in India before Greece. (Need I remind you that while Ancient Greek history is very well documented, the exact opposite holds for Ancient India?) They would NOT be the ones who try to place India before other nations on pages which trace the historical development of a discipline. (See the last substantial edit on the talk page of Historian, finally verified by Hillabear10 sometime last year. That was me. The edit, not Hillabear10. In fact, it has been a mistake on my part to have been harping on about India-related pages alone. The problem is there even in the general pages which have the potential to mention India.) They would NOT make the India mathematics and astronomy pages the caricature that they are, with convenient omissions (like Brahmagupta’s indebtedness to Diophantus), sensational lies (the calculus was "invented" in India; Madhava’s derivation of the Maclaurin series for the sine, cosine and inverse tangent was geometric and did NOT make use of any notion of a derivative or even a general function; Bhaskara II did NOT formulate the Mean Value Theorem; he gave a numerical approximation for the difference between the sine values of two “close” angles in terms of the cosine function and the difference between the angles) and a lot of gloss. (I can afford to talk here. My two degrees are in Mathematics.) They would NOT give either downright erroneous citations or citations which are as obscure and undependable as Suruchi Publishers, Allahabad. That makes six main NOTs which my rationale CANNOT ascribe to the general editor from India or the regional-minded one.
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.8.226 ( talk) 18:59, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
I full expect for some admin or even Jimbo to delete this because they just don't want to hear it. But I am going to say it anyway for those that actually care about the future of the project.
That said, I don't believe that there were every any "good old days"—problems with self-serving private bureaucracies, ArbCom and its inefficiency and unwillingness to take on power players, opaque governance (or lack thereof), and the covert dealings of insiders have plagued the project since time immemorial. It is time for a major revolution in Wikipedia governance, as I have suggested before; however, I do not plan on bringing Wikipedia back to the good old days, but into the future. Wer900 • talk 04:49, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
We want a wide range of views represented on the encyclopedia. Resolute, if you would like to write a blog post on Wikipediocracy, you can email it to me and I can pass it on to Jayen466 ( talk · contribs) (Andreas Kolbe), who I am sure is open to criticism of the site and has even offered Otto Placic, a doctor found advertising plastic-surgery services on Wikipedia, an opportunity to write his state of mind. If you, Jimmy Wales, or anyone else is brave enough, then write to me what you would like to put on Wikipediocracy's front page, supporting or opposing Wikipedia practices. Wer900 • talk 18:40, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
"When Wikipedians spend too much time on the noticeboards, in Arbcom cases, and on talk pages of contentious articles, they have a high probability of concluding that Wikipedia is dysfunctional, incompetent, and doomed to fail. Once a Wikipedian has reached this realization, expect that person's user page to boast an essay announcing the imminent failure of the project. The best cure for this condition is to leave those places, and instead read a few articles on genuinely encyclopedic topics, noticing just how good they actually are. Similarly, if you were to look at a table at a subatomic level, you would see that it consists mainly of empty space, with innumerable minuscule particles whizzing about angrily, each having an arbitrary and undefinable position; indeed, if you look at them too closely, they will change just to spite you: but back away, the whole becomes visibly a table again. We're a pretty good encyclopedia, and you will notice it once you back away from the conflict zones."
So just to make sure I understand here. An IP makes a comment and its assumed to be the work of another editor. One that is highly active and has a lot of experience based on the comments of several here. That editor is accused of being disgruntled and angry and then the user responds to several comments essentially confirming what I started the discussion about. Several of those comments being from admins BTW and were IMO unnecessarily negative and provocative. So basically, this discussion confirms, without a doubt and in public what I said in the beginning whether you want to admit it or not. There is a lot of community infighting just as I stated in the beginning; the editing environment is poisoning the well of editors willing to edit here; the community does have a major rift between their admins and their editors; Jimbo doesn't seem to be interested in dealing with the problem (which is strange because he has admitted in the past he agrees there is a problem) and a lot of users think there is no problem, because the system seemed to have worked well for them so far. I have to tell you none of these things makes me want to edit and I pretty well understand why others don't want to either. Also, I do not think I sound anything like Kumioko. They are very angry, I am indifferent. The community doesn't care about me and I don't care about it. I do however use Wikipedia and it would be a shame if it shut down because the community that edits it or the company that runs it cannot see the writing on the wall. The site is dying, faster now than in the past and the pace is increasing. It will probably take a few more years (about 3 I'm guessing) but the end is coming unless things are done to change that. 138.162.8.57 ( talk) 13:53, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...
... so, it goes. Alanscottwalker ( talk) 01:48, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Aaah, fuck it, smiles all round. Everyone give everyone a big wikihug. Cas Liber ( talk · contribs) 11:03, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
I am a content editor and rarely post in project space, by the standards of most Wikipedia power players. However, even with my content work I have had negative experiences with Wikipedia's failed governance model. Fringe theorists can edit articles with relative impunity because administrators are busy fighting on drama-based articles, there are not enough good writers remaining to cover for the massive pollution of poorly presented content by individuals who are completely uninformed, and those who are merely here for the drama and POV-pushing are held in higher esteem than a common vandal who modifies Barack Obama to state that "John is gay". Why is it that the very people who do the most damage to the encyclopedia, its supposed "patriots", are in positions of power? Although they may appear to have demurred from demanding Wikipedia governance reform, stating that most of the problems occur on the drama boards, in reality the impetus for a sweeping and complete revision of the Wikipedia power structure is stronger than ever. The massive investment of resources and power in the drama boards have diverted that attention from where it is needed most; namely, the 6,849,632 articles that constitute this encyclopedia.
It is about time this stopped forever, that order was reimposed to end the flow of good content editors out from the encyclopedia and ensure the expedient removal of those who cause it harm. To these ends and more, I will propose here a governance model. This, or anything like this, has been rejected by "the community"—a group that is not in reality the civil body politic of all active Wikipedia editors in good standing, but rather a self-selected subset of those users who do nothing but battle on the drama boards and robotically fix grammar and remove vandalism. This is a threat to their power, their integral status in the existing Wikipedia hierarchy. These users will cite policies stating that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, not realizing (or at least pretending not to acknowledge) that they are members of a private, self-imposed bureaucracies operating for the benefit of a few, and that Wikipedia is based on a consensus model of governance, not realizing that whatever "consensus" exists on almost any issue is a sham, obtained through poorly publicized requests for comments attended primarily by the same inbred group of users. Nor, for that matter, do these users want to publicly accept that the above two policies are anything less than scripture, when in reality the policies are created through the same sham consensus process mentioned earlier—that is to say, the small, self-selected cohort that repeatedly cites these policies is the same one that imposed them illegitimately to begin with.
Let's move forward. In order to do so, I suggest the following changes:
Wer900 • talk 01:43, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Wer900 proposal is one of the most insane things I've ever read. But hey, if the aim of the proposal is to drive away even more contributors and make WP become a failure like Citizendium, that's indeed the way to go. -- cyclopia speak! 17:03, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Resolute, I have no wishes to destroy the project; why would I have written more articles than some of our administrators and Arbitrators if I wanted to do so? Why have I not made AN/I threads on every person I have ever disagreed with, as is so often seen there? Why haven't I voted in community-ban proceedings? Why haven't I participated in POV wars on hot topics like Barack Obama, India-Pakistan relations or Israel? There are extremely efficient ways of dealing damage to the project, and I have not partaken in them, not because I am stupid but because I care about this project and its future.
Ubikwit, we already have 1,400 administrators on Wikipedia, half of whom are inactive and the other half of whom work in private bureaucracies. I believe that you have proposed a "more streamlined" system only in good faith, but such a system, with its extreme decentralization, would, with all due respect, look like Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, which controls little outside the capital and a few areas in the south of the country. Private bureaucracies, operating for their own benefit but with (unofficially) full powers of a government, would take hold, much as extortion rackets and militias have taken root in Somalia.
AndyTheGrump: "should include" does not mean "this is the end-all, be-all of everything". What I wrote are guiding principles, nothing more, and the specific implementation of the above ideas can take any of an infinite quantity of forms. Please, no.
North8000: I am of the persuasion that the sky is falling, slowly enough that we can stop it and put it back in its place with the proper reforms, but not so slowly that we can merely ignore.
For the last time: I am NOT of the "Hasten the Day" persuasion. I am trying to help this encyclopedia and save it from its True Believers. Many of these true believers think that they have the best interests of the project at heart, and they often do, but the problem is that their unwillingness to compromise leads people to leave the project, in much the same way as a right-wing conservative Baptist upbringing is an extremely efficient way to push people to atheism. Many among said contingent of conservative Baptists would reject calls for moderation from liberal believers as a sign of excessive lack of faith, even though said liberals are the biggest hope that the religion has against atheism. You are shouting me out in the same fashion, and you are already paying dearly in the tens of thousands of once-active, now-disenchanted editors who no longer contribute. Wer900 • talk 19:35, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
This is a big problem for Wikipedians. Count Iblis ( talk) 17:29, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
Pedestal desk. Tim AFS ( talk) 00:59, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
Dear Jimbo Wales
Can you have a word with this user: /info/en/?search=User:Kww
He has deleted BZ20 and Love will save the day and in the past other boyzone tour articles. He is ruining boyzones information wikipedia. I understand he has authority on wikipedia and several people have contacted him but he seems to think he is above the law. A big problem he has is getting confused with a user who used to disrupt Boyzone articles called user 'pesf' and when people he doesn't recognise edit the boyzone articles he closes their accounts claiming them to be a sock puppet of pesf which is untrue. Please stop this user from disrupting the articles and make the BZ20 and Love will save the day articles on the Boyzone pages.
Kind Regards — Preceding unsigned comment added by Musictool ( talk • contribs) 13:51, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
You have over numerous times deleted boyzone articles for no good reason, you cannot delete peoples accounts who were not doing any damage. The least i would like to be done is for the Love will save the day and BZ20 albums to be made and in future block the user but don't delete the pages which has taken a long time to create. I have also noted that you KWW have deleted referenced information from the Boyzone article history. Musictool ( talk) 15:11, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
I don't know whether you've ever tried to edit an article in the face of coordinated sockpuppetry or meatpuppetry. I don't know whether you've ever had the experience of arguing a content point with an editor/editors, only to discover after weeks or months of dispiriting discussion that the editor is a sockpuppet of a previously banned editor. These experiences are intensely frustrating. We lose good editors because we don't handle sockpuppetry effectively. All the time.
And more insidiously, the good editors who stay become reluctant to touch certain topic areas or articles, because they're infested by sockpuppets and whenever anyone tries to address the situation they're told to "AGF". There is an editor-retention issue here, but I don't think it's the one you've outlined. MastCell Talk 18:03, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
Can someone do something about this user /info/en/?search=User:Kww He has deleted /info/en/?search=BZ20:_Anniversary_Album and /info/en/?search=Love_will_save_the_day article already twice. He is abusing his privilege and deleting every boyzone article. He is very rude and he is ruining wikipedia. Every new user who makes a new page for Boyzone he deletes. So kww are you going to to delete the articles everytime they are created? How dare you abuse your power when you should be doing good you are doing bad. I would like people to look out for this user. So are you telling me these pages about the new Boyzone album and Single due for release in November 2013 don't merit space on wikipedia? You are ridiculous and you are destroying wikipedia. I and many people are annoyed that these pages have already been removed twice by you and i am sure if they are created again you will delete it, you are a horrible person. I and many people want these pages created. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.17.230.244 ( talk) 17:08, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
I write everything posted here in my name personally. It's completely silly to think that I have a 'ghost writer' on Wikipedia. I read this page every single day, and generally read everything that is linked to. I respond to threads where I think I have something to say, but often just let a perfectly good discussion run without me. Those who suggest my involvement here is minimal are almost as silly as those who suggest I must be so busy that I couldn't possibly write these things myself. :-) -- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 16:26, 20 October 2013 (UTC) |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Although there are responses on this page that are signed 'Jimbo Wales', I am doubtful that all such responses are actually authored by Jimbo Wales. That skepticism stems from my awareness that Jimbo has a busy life, and that many of these responses concern matters that could hardly interest him. It also stems from the actual tone and wording of these responses which suggest to me that at least some of these answers signed 'Jimbo Wales' are drafted by proxies, multiple authors who are probably Administrators and possibly limited to Administrators on ArbCom. In the interest of full disclosure, an ifo box at the top of this page should explain these details of authorship, and if it indeed is claimed that Jimbo himself authors all responses signed 'Jimbo Wales' that should be what is in that info box to allay skeptics like myself. Brews ohare ( talk) 15:07, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
My goodness - now the standard practice of 'ghost writing' is elevated to the level of conspiracy and cabals! All that is suggested here is that it be made clear whether Jimbo actually authors all comments over his name on this page, or not.
Brews ohare (
talk) —Preceding
undated comment added
17:43, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
How do we know that Brews ohare isn't 17 different people, who took turns writing that post above? The question has no merit if its all about "skepticism stems from my awareness that Jimbo has a busy life, and that many of these responses concern matters that could hardly interest him." Really, you find it hard to believe someone on an encyclopedia site would not have a broad range of interests or be able to simply comment on a subject here even if the actual subject doesn't interest him much. Tis really silly.-- Mark Miller ( talk) 21:14, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
"You are trying to make this thread a form of entertainment" ... "Are you making a mockery of me, Vimes?" "No Sir, but I may be assisting." -- Demiurge1000 ( talk) 03:23, 19 October 2013 (UTC) It is entirely conjectural on my part, of course, which is why I have asked for some clarification on the matter. I simply do not believe that a person as busy as Wales can possibly engage in all the trivia that appears above his name on this page.
Brews ohare (
talk)
05:34, 19 October 2013 (UTC)
|
Damn! I wish there was "like" button for this remark! Smatprt ( talk) 01:23, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
The one-month anniversary will be 23 October 2013, for the removal of wp:VisualEditor (VE) from the Wikipedia top menu. I think we should create an essay page where people could post their opinions, in retrospect one month later, about the removal of VE under guidance from Kww, use of Special:Preferences opt-in, and discuss the continued cleanup of hundreds of text glitches saved into pages by the early versions of VE. Very many people burned days, weeks or months in dealing with the problems, and perhaps some people need a process of closure to defuse the tensions which had grown during the whole situation. Also, other people think more publicity is needed to inform (or warn) newer users who might wish to opt-in and learn more about VE, so it would be a chance to discuss how the bugfixes to VE have improved the operation. - Wikid77 ( talk) 05:34, 20 October, 00:31, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
This is a reminder for people to discuss ideas for new tools or templates at wp:VPIL, the Idea Lab. With more than 30 users now authorized as wp:Template_editors, there has been renewed enthusiasm to enhance the tools, or create new templates which the authors can continue to expand without the prior lockdown which occurred when templates became popular and were fully-protected against non-admin updates. Anyway, discuss or create a new thread at wp:VPIL (or wp:Lua requests). - Wikid77 ( talk) 05:34, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
Whenever the "random file" button is pushed, it goes to a wikimedia foundation image instead of giving a commons image. Flin the flan warrior ( talk) 17:59, 22 October 2013 (UTC)
I think that the idea of database copyright is extremely dangerous to efforts like Wikipedia, because it can prohibit the dissemination of factual information. Some actual examples: in the EU, Ministry of Sound is pursuing legal action against users of Spotify because they list the songs on their playlists, and Football Dataco is pursuing action against Yahoo for listing scores, penalties, and substitutions in games. [16] If these are upheld, I don't see any particular reason why a news outlet couldn't come after a Wikipedia user residing in the EU for updating our list of school shootings to include all the incidents in theirs, or even a physics publisher coming after him for copying a list of nuclear isomers.
Additionally, I fear we may be seeing vandalism fueled by the idea - I don't know who is behind it, but an upsurge of very small vandalism edits randomly altering statistics [17] makes me think someone is systematically attacking us with an army of bots under a notion of proprietary rights that is fueled by such legislation.
Most importantly, we need to remember that an effort was made in the 1990s to impose database copyright in the U.S., and so long as there is an international industry that makes use of it, the threat is still there. We might only have weeks to find out and oppose such a bill if it is introduced, so we should be well-prepared in advance.
For all these reasons, I think that the WMF should lay out a position paper, with proper legal consultation, expressing its opposition to existing database copyright practices and explaining any risks or incidents affecting its users, which would urge the EU to contain the practice, and be suitable to be referenced and reposted widely in the event of any future US legislation that would threaten Wikipedia's operations. Wnt ( talk) 16:51, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
Not to be a wet blanket -- but I fear the concept that a database right would apply t independently created lists is a bit of a false issue ... the counties which recognize such rights do not apply them to such lists as may be created on a website, but rather to use of a privately created list then being used without consent of the person creating the list. The SCOTUS decisions based on telephone listings ( Feist v. Rural(1991) etc.) are not ancient by any means and there was a legitimate question as to whether such listings were copyrightable prior to that ruling - it was not an "open and shut" case. Nor does the EU concept of "database rights" extend to simple compilation of facts readily available without use of that database. Thus - WMF has no reason to fret this one at all, nor ought it undertake any actions opposing what appears to be widely found other than in the US. It is also useful to note that some classes of database (medical records, etc.) are indeed protected under US law. Collect ( talk) 17:57, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
There was a thread recently regarding just how busy Jimmy Wales could possibly be and if he read and responded as himself. Turns out he responds as himself and reads everything himself (kind of obvious, but apparently it had to be clarified for some). That got me thinking- where else is Jimbo active on Wikipedia, so I checked the user contributions. I was surprised that with the exception of them being mostly biographies, there isn't any specific common categories (or types) or articles you work on. My question is basically- what interests do you have in regards to Wikipedia articles? Do you often just surf around on Wikipedia reading articles of any certain interest or even do so randomly? Just a curiousity question regarding "What Jimbo reads on Wikipedia". (oh, could be a neat subpage off your user page; if people actually care what Oprah reads why wouldn't editors and casual readers alike might be interested in what Jimbo recommends for reading on Wikipedia?) Camelbinky ( talk) 18:13, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
Fascinating. Carrite ( talk) 19:41, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
In reviewing those Meta pages (such as " meta:Talk:Is Wikipedia an experiment in anarchy"), I did think it was interesting how Jimbo advised to keep the meta-discussions out of the Wikipedia space, due to distractions, especially when they used words like " recherché" (\rə-ˌsher-ˈshā, -ˈsher-ˌ\ : "unusual and not understood by most people"). In discussing the scalability of WP, the users mentioned the need for personal lists of " wp:RecentChanges" which seems to be the current wp:Watchlist feature. However, some of the discussions did seem to be worrying about problems which would occur only years later, and perhaps actually at a reduced level. I guess in general, people prefer to talk about whatever tangents interest them, and that is another reason to also focus on the major concerns of the readership, where the major topics would address some long-term issues. With WP software topics and templates, many times people have requested some complex template feature, and when written, then only a handful of people have actually used it (for a few days!). The quality guru W. Edwards Deming would respond only to consulting requests when he was asked several times, in earnest, perhaps as a way to avoid fanciful notions asking for his assistance. The wild, tangent topics can be interesting, but we have seen exotic topics and exotic software distract from the central issues which affect more users or readers. - Wikid77 12:19, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
(Note from Jimbo: I want to let this conversation run unimpeded but I wanted to set out my views in a way that I think will help clarify and focus the discussion. I have long favored the term 'paid advocacy' over 'paid editing' because there are some perfectly innocent forms of editing that involve people being paid (for example academic projects). But I have recently come to the more refined position that we should say 'paid advocacy editing' to make clear that it is the editing of articles that matters - I don't mind one bit if a PR firm is transparent, open, and honest, and comes to the talk page of an article to make suggestions or complaints, complete with sources, etc. By narrowing our focus to just 'paid advocacy editing' we can eliminate a lot of useless side noise questions that I feel the advocates of corruption (because that's what it is) throw up to confuse the issue. In terms of what policies I think English Wikipedia should implement, I think it is pretty easy. Define the narrowest possible policy to start to hit at the worst offenders, and then expand it over time if and when new problems arise. Arguments that we can't ban X because people will still do X aren't very convincing. We ban vandalism and people still do it. In society we ban shoplifting and murder, and people still do them.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 09:06, 24 October 2013 (UTC))
Paid editing, as we know, is becoming more and more of a long-term menace to Wikipedia, and indeed is becoming an existential threat to Wikipedia as a trustable neutral encyclopedia. Something must be done to eradicate it. (I am aware that it cannot be entirely eradicated, but it should be eradicated as nearly as possible.) There are two RFCs currently being considered, one to ban all paid advocacy, and the other to require paid editors to disclose. It appears that both RFCs will be closed out as No Consensus. The first proposal, the more extreme, is opposed for various reasons, including that some disclosed paid editors are effective contributors, and effective enforcement of such a rule would rely heavily on outing the offending editors. The second, the less extreme, is opposed on various grounds, including that it is not sufficient, and that it is only a restatement of the conflict of interest policy. As a result, it appears that the English Wikipedia community agrees that there is a problem, but cannot agree on what a solution is. Consensus is often elusive, and this is no exception.
(I would argue that the policy on WP:OUTING should be modified in one detail, to provide some procedure for the private outing of paid editors, not on talk pages, but to OTRS or WMF. That is my opinion.)
The ways forward are to fight the threat of paid editing with the existing inadequate tools of policies of the English Wikipedia, or to turn to a higher authority. That higher authority can be either Jimbo Wales, as a god-king, a role which he no longer uses, or the Board of Directors of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). The WMF Board does not require consensus. It votes. I ask that Jimbo Wales refer the need to fight paid editing to the WMF. WMF should, in my opinion, take a two-part approach. First, formulate a meta policy, across all Wikipedias, stating that paid editing is not permitted, and that undisclosed paid editors should be globally banned. (The so-called paid editors who are effective contributors are not editing articles on which they have a COI. They post to talk pages.) Second, WMF should consult with counsel as to whether legal action against Wiki-PR is in order. It is not permitted to make legal threats on Wikipedia, but WMF should consider whether to make legal threats via US postal mail.
Action needs to be taken against paid editing. Current policy is better than nothing, but is not sufficient against the existential threat of Wiki-PR to the integrity of Wikipedia. Since the English Wikipedia community is not coming to a "consensus", which is often elusive anyway, action has to be taken by the WMF, at least in the form of a meta policy, and possibly legal action. Robert McClenon ( talk) 01:13, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
private outing of paid editors. By private, do you mean in SPIs or similar venues, between admins only, or in ANI or Arbcom?
Basically it sounds like you would want something on the order of:
Sound sufficient, anyone? I oppose "Paypedia" and I also oppose "out anyone I disagree with" as being intrinsically wrong and deleterious to the initial concept of the project. Collect ( talk) 11:28, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Still can't wrap my thoughts around the belief that paid editing isn't going to be found to violate the core policy of NPOV. Of course the example of the benign edits by the specialist done on college company time to enhance the factual accuracy of some articles should probably be considered to be harmless. But there is a difference between that situation and someone hired specifically to edit...my belief is that in the latter case, the fiscal transaction will equate with an expected result....and that seems to lead inexorably to issues with NPOV and COI.-- MONGO 14:47, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
My little proposal:
Short, sweet, and clear enough for people to get the message. What do you guys think? Konveyor Belt 17:29, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Jimbo is saying, and I agree, that paid advocacy editing should be explicitly prohibited. However, that will have two consequences, one desirable, and one undesirable, that must be addressed. The desirable consequence is that responsible paid advocates will declare their affiliation and post to talk pages. Then NPOV editors, taking both the facts and NPOV in mind, can update the article pages and improve their quality. That is good. The undesirable consequence is that paid advocacy editors will conceal their affiliation. To be sure, that will not be new, but is already the problem that we are trying to address. The question is how to deal with undisclosed paid advocacy editing, within Wikipedia. On the one hand, undisclosed advertising violates federal (US) law, and so can, in extreme cases, by dealt with by law enforcement. On the other hand, paid advocacy editing done from outside the United States is almost certainly outside the reach of US law, and besides Wikipedia should be able to enforce its own policies without relying exclusively on US law enforcement. The problem is that there appears to be a conflict between the policy against paid advocacy editing and the policy against outing. This means that there needs to be a mechanism for persons with knowledge or reasonable non-idle suspicion that an editor is a paid advocacy editor to report their concerns other than on-Wiki. There should be a mechanism to report paid advocacy editing to OTRS or to the ArbCom. Only if a user is blocked by "highly trusted" personnel for paid advocacy editing should their affiliation be published as the reason for the block. Such blocks will lead to sockpuppetry, but sockpuppetry can be detected from the quacking. Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:00, 26 October 2013 (UTC) Comments Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:00, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
There so far has not been a consensus on the English Wikipedia as to what to do about paid advocacy editing. Anyone can propose a restated policy, but it is likely to get no consensus. (If a consensus can be reached, that is good.) I propose that the next step is for Jimbo to go to the WMF Board and ask them to adopt a policy against paid advocacy editing which could be meta to all Wikipedias. Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:12, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:13, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
Hi Jimbo and stalkers! Can anyone direct me to where the WMF and Wikipedia may be working with museums to further information? I am interested in working with two museums. The Bishop Museum in Oʻahu Hawaii and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacrmento. I want to be sure and work through whatever workgroups and organizations we already have set-up, if any and if not, how best to proceed in working directly with museums. Anyone have any suggestions?-- Mark Miller ( talk) 02:44, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
With the recent talk, in many different places, about editing for pay and all that, I would like some clarification on what I need to do and where I need to do this- I would like to work on getting Fulton, Missouri to at least GA status and to create and get to at least GA status Downtown Fulton Historic District; however I have a COI in that I will be working with the merchant's association, my business is a member of the relevant Chamber of Commerce, and I have a financial stake in a website that will benefit from increased interest in Fulton, Missouri, though not DIRECTLY from a Wikipedia article as my website will NOT EVER be used in any manner on any article. All interested parties that I have spoken to think having Wikipedia articles that are informative and can be linked to from their organizations would be a great asset; what exactly should I do first, and what can I tell those that want to join Wikipedia and edit these articles as far as where to "register" their COI and how to do so without being assaulted with "You're doing this because you have a vested financial stake" or "You're getting paid! BLOCK!". Camelbinky ( talk) 00:16, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
A couple of sections above Jimbo said "Arguments that we can't ban X because people will still do X aren't very convincing," and then he demolished that type of logic.
I'm concerned about a related fallacious argument "There's nothing that we can do about paid advocacy, so we just have to accept it." I believe that there is a lot that we can do, but that nobody has really tried to stop it. Writing new policies is fine, but ultimately admins and arbs are going to have to enforce the rules, and for whatever reasons they haven't enforced similar rules that could have gone a long way towards stopping it.
What I'd like to see is a list of possible steps the community or the Board could take that would make a real dent in paid advocacy here. I don't think any one step would be enough, but we should consider the full range of what steps are possible. So this is in the line of Brain Storming. Any ideas can be considered (and later rejected, or kept in reserve if needed). I know that some folks will cry that taking any of these steps will be the end of Wikipedia as we know it. Fine, but please put the objections in the subsection below, and leave the top of the section for ideas that might help solve the problem. Eight of my ideas follow, and other should feel free to add other ideas. Smallbones( smalltalk) 04:19, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
Note the questions about Silgan Holdings below, unanswered. An administrator created a new article about a corporation, in exchange for a $75 payment. (I believe the administrator will be donating the $75 to charity, but does that remove the notion that they "accepted" money for services? I wish Jimmy would answer the questions posed about Silgan Holdings. -- I'm not that crazy ( talk) 15:01, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
Smallbones Up thread, Jimbo made the interesting terminology comment, noting that neither 'paid editing' not 'paid advocacy' should be prohibited, while 'paid advocacy editing' is the problem. (As an aside, because Jimbo suggests that advocates can edit talk pages, and the term editing doesn't just mean articles, I'd suggest using 'paid advocacy article editing', while recognizing that it is getting bloated.) Your section heading refers to 'paid advocacy'. Does this mean you are proposing prohibitions much broader than Jimbo suggested, or is it just a terminology issue? Obviously, Jimbo's position is not privileged, and you are free to propose something other than his concept, but I'm wondering if you deliberately chose a broader term or were intending on putting teeth into Jimbo's suggestion?-- SPhilbrick (Talk) 15:15, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
To summarize the above discussion, there are two clearly stated proposals being presented, and the "consensus" of the en-wiki community to do nothing or to do very little. User:Coretheapple (with whom I have more often disagreed than agreed on articles) is proposing that the existing policies be enhanced with a new bright-line policy and enforcement. Since there is not a consensus in en-wiki, these policy changes would have to be implemented by WMF, and could span all Wikipedias. Paid advocacy editing is currently a greater threat to the English Wikipedia than to other Wikipedias, but it is a potential threat to all Wikipedias. I agree with Coretheapple that we should not either to let Wikipedia slowly rot under the corrupting influence of undisclosed paid corporate edits or strip Wikipedia of the bulk of its editors in a paradigm shift. User:Carrite, on the other hand, is proposing, as he always has, that Wikipedia as we know it cannot be fixed without a paradigm shift, to strip Wikipedia of pseudonymous editors. Carrite's changes will never meet with WMF approval. I assume that Carrite knows this, and is using that as an argument to work with the existing imperfect policies without reworking the policies, to buy more time for him to make the case for his proposal that will never be approved. My question for Carrite, then, is whether he actually thinks that it is possible to: "Identify abuses and fix them. Identify chronic abusers and they can be eliminated."? I think that Coretheapple and User:Smallbones are saying that enhanced policies, which may require WMF enactment, will help that identification of chronic abusers and abuses. That is my summary. Does anyone want to restate their views? Coretheapple and Smallbones seem to think that better policies will help. Carrite seems to be arguing two ways, first, that the existing policies can possibly be used more effectively to restrict paid advocacy editing, and, second, that the problem cannot be dealt with except by changing the editing model of Wikipedia. Robert McClenon ( talk) 15:29, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps we've had this discussion too many times before (see "old discussion" below that is taken from this page). Carrite has said repeatedly that there is nothing we can do about paid advocacy, so we have to accept it. My point above is that there are at least 8 steps we can take that that will put a serious dent into it. Carrite's response (as I predicted) was that this will be the end of Wikipedia as we know it. *His* point seems to be that Wikipedia cannot govern itself. Most of the 8 steps I give above can be implemented by the community, but if the community is indeed deadlocked by a creaky consensus system that can't handle interested parties participating in the discussion and confusing the issue beyond all recognition, then I believe the WMF can give us a push, or if necessary - if Wikipedia indeed can't be governed by the community - then the WMF will have to step in and do something on its own. Undisclosed paid advocacy on Wikipedia is unethical by the PR community's own rules, and much of it is illegal. Wikipedia can and must deal with that. Just saying, as Carrite has done repeatedly - "There's nothing we can do about it" is just wrong in so many ways.
BTW, I do agree with ASW that requiring disclosure of financial COIs is the consensus view. Smallbones( smalltalk) 20:52, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
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PR people editing WP is a fact of life. It has been for a long time and it always will be from now on. The choice we face is either playing Whack-a-Mole with one arm tied behind our back (Anonymous editing with "no outing" rules, no Sign-In-To-Edit, IP editing permitted, etc.) or whether we come up with a set of formal rules that both the PR people and Wikipedians can live with. This has been debated at very great length and, as is the case with most controversial matters given WP's supermajority-pseudoconsensus decision-making system, the result has been a draw — status quo wins. Some people continue to try to play one handed Whack-a-Mole, others try to explain the de facto rules for PR people to the more open and honest ones among them, hoping all along that they don't become Whack-a-Mole victims for trying to play fair... Oh, well... Ya make your bed, then you lay in it... We're stuck with a decision-making system that can't make controversial decisions, and it would be a controversial decision to ever get rid of it... Carrite (talk) 17:32, 4 October 2013 (UTC) You're back to the "we can't prevent it so we have to accept it" line of thinking. I strongly disagree. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:13, 4 October 2013 (UTC) What's the alternative? "We can't prevent it so we have to be in a permanent state of war fighting a battle that can't be won"??? One thing is positive: we can't prevent it. Carrite (talk) 23:11, 4 October 2013 (UTC) |
Once suggestion I'd make to whomever wishes to deal with this is that data be gathered on paid editing: Which articles have been influenced by, edited by or created by paid editors, and listing also editors who have been identified, either by themselves or others, as paid advocates. In going through the archives of this page I noticed that at one point last year [18] there was a proposal for a "paid editor notice" or user box, but I have not located any examples of that actually in use. A list of editors making such an advertisement on their user page would be a good start. Coretheapple ( talk) 17:32, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
(Note: Coretheapple asked me about this up above, in the midst of the longer discussion and I was afraid it would get lost if we discussed it up there so I'm making a separate section here.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 12:42, 25 October 2013 (UTC))
I'm very glad you've returned to the issue and hope you remain active in it. One aspect of paid editing that disturbs me is corporate representatives creating article about their companies through the Articles for Creation process. This is presently allowed but in my opinion should not be. My concern is that this elevates to attention small companies of limited notability by creating what is in effect "advertorials," sponsored content, without proper disclosure to readers. It skews the content of Wikipedia in favor of those entities that desire publicity, as opposed to competitors and others not so inclined. I've mentioned this before on your talk page, and you responded sympathetically to the concern I raised, and I wanted to do so again. I think something needs to be done about this. Since there is no consensus on dealing with this or any other paid editing issue by the community, I think that this is an issue that needs to be dealt with by the WMF as Robert pointed out above. Coretheapple (talk) 17:40, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Not entirely sure how AfC presents a problem. If autoconfirmed editors choose to by-pass the AfC process, their articles get picked up by NPP (which seems to have no shortage of volunteers). If paid editors choose to submit via AfC then at least they are taking an honest route, which will only allow their articles to main space if they are free from major sourcing/promotional problems.
Anecdotally, from working for a couple of years at AfC, articles are often written by someone with a strong COI - musician articles written by the band or record company, artist articles written by gallery owners, company articles written by the PR departments - we all know it goes on but I believe AfC reviewers are savvy enough to decline the obvious examples.
Sionk (
talk)
13:26, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
As suggested above: My problem with use of the AfC process by paid editors is this. When readers turn to Wikipedia, I think that they have an expectation that the content is created by independent editors, and has not been inspired, much less created, by the subjects of the article. The fact that the material has been vetted by independent editors is beside the point. These articles are the Wikipedia version of "advertorials," which are also often written by people employed by magazines, but without disclosure to readers.
When small companies of marginal notability and limited interest pay people to create articles about them, which seems to be the main activity in AfC of paid editors, it skews the overall content of Wikipedia in favor of subjects that have more desire to be published in Wikipedia. It says to readers that those subjects are more important than the companies in their same field that do not have articles, when in fact the companies (or people) that don't have articles are less publicity-minded. It unfairly gives Wikipedia an invidious bias in favor of such "publicity hounds" that otherwise would not be of sufficient interest for a Wikipedia article.
In my view this practice is a Wikipedia-sanctioned form of autobiography, only one step removed from people writing articles about themselves or their companies. The fact that there is an apparatus that "sanitizes" the process is immaterial. Coretheapple ( talk) 13:43, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
( edit conflict) AfC volunteer here. I can positively assert that right now the AfC process is so under-volunteered that some AfC submissions are taking 4 weeks from when they are posted for review to when they get a response to their submission (Example at Category:AfC pending submissions by age). While yes, there's been some bad apples inappropriately failing submissions, I think that this is much less harmful to the project overall than inexperienced editors accepting submissions that are not up to snuff (both in terms of volunteer time mis-appropriated to the cleanup and damage to the project's reputation). I would also note that unless we're doing a backlog drive we do not have the volunteer bandwidth to stay even with the number of submissions in to submissions out. Hasteur ( talk) 13:54, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
Has this topic has gone off Articles for Creation? I'm not even sure what the purpose of this section was in the first place! Sionk ( talk) 18:23, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
AFC reviewer here. One thing the community and, if their help is asked for, the Foundation can do is politely ask major search engines to not automatically rank all Wikipedia articles highly in search results. If they cooperate, it would reduce the incentive to create articles for PR purposes. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 22:49, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia:BLPN#Stephen_Birmingham
Article says a book was published in 1997. Editor has a copy of the book published in 1971. This is not good enough--he needs to actually cite something that says the book was published then. Apparently having a book which says it is published in 1971 is not considered good evidence for a book being published in 1971.
At least this one has a happy ending because someone found such a reference, but he really shouldn't have been required to. Ken Arromdee ( talk) 14:13, 25 October 2013 (UTC) 14:12, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
If Mr Wales wishes to be taken seriously, he needs, like any leader of an enterprise, to take the funding of it seriously. It is his foremost executive responsibility if he remains committed to the effort. His mass appeals at this site are evidence of a further deep problem of the enterprise, rather than being any substantial contribution to a long-term solution. If this is to be a charitable enterprise, so be it: he needs define the necessary endowment to support it, and to develop a plan to fund the endowment. That is, he needs use the connections his status affords (e.g., Chozick NYTM piece), and to develop a realistic business model for his charity, that works. Otherwise, from a practical perspective, he has a successful brand and presence, but an unsuccessful (non-selfsustaining) enterprise. LeProf. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.223.9.222 ( talk) 15:29, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
This seemed to be overlooked or ignored a few times, so... Jimmy, could you please comment on the article Silgan Holdings? The article was created by a Wikipedia administrator, in exchange for $75.
The Reward Board has existed for over seven and a half years. Its purpose is to compensate editors for creating new content on Wikipedia.
It would be helpful to us to understand your specific thoughts on this matter, because it would seem that as long as the Reward Board is open and acceptable, then businesses seeking to have content created or modified in exchange for money have a legitimate vehicle by which to accomplish that. -- I'm not that crazy ( talk) 20:24, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
I have not changed my opinion from 2006, but it has been misunderstood and misrepresented here. I made the comment "absolutely unacceptable, sorry" as a specific response to a specific proposal from a specific user - one which has been borne out over the years by community consensus continuing to ban the editor in question. To interpret a private comment from email as a general policy pronouncement is deeply mistaken.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 13:28, 26 October 2013 (UTC) |
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Also, user sub-pagesAbove, Jimmy advises about |
Camelbinky mistakenly believed above question concerned him, and followed with an unnecessary accusation that "scandal" was the motivation behind the simple request for clarification of Jimmy's position. |
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Hi, Jimbo.
FYI, this morning, one user started a vote to de-sysop admins SpeedyGonsales, Kubura and Zeljko. But, SpeedyGonsales came a few hours later and stopped the vote without any consultation with the community. Fortunately, another admin restarted the vote for later today. IMHO, this is serious violation of rules. We will cover this story on meta:Requests for comment/2013 issues on Croatian Wikipedia/Evidence/Conduct. -- Argo Navis ( talk) 12:56, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
A reader posed a suggestion to Wikimedia at OTRS. The suggestion isn't workable (buy a copy of EB) but the reader linked in an article I had not seen before, which is likely to be of interest to readers here:
The Decline of Wikipedia-- SPhilbrick (Talk) 20:31, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Thank you Sphilbrick. Yes I caught that. I thought their description of what has occurred on Wikipedia Editor Retention to be spot on.-- Mark Miller ( talk) 02:07, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
Saw that via The Signpost and agree with quite a bit. But was more amused by the Signpost edition headline Your worst nightmare as a child is now featured on Wikipedia. Thought it was about editor, aged 5 years old, or so, bringing an article to 'featured' status. No, just an FA on cabbage. AnonNep ( talk) 13:45, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
Don't know if this is even feasible, but its a thought I had from researching the topic second screen in marketing (btw our article on it sucks, if anyone is interested in working on it, there's a lot of good sources out there I was able to find). Basic idea on what second screen is- using a website for instance to get people who watch your commercial (or tv show) to become more engaged, because statistics show majority of people are on their tablets, laptops, smart phones while watching tv. It got me thinking about what Jimbo mentioned he looks up when I had asked him in a thread above "What do you read on Wikipedia?"... I do the same thing with tv shows and movies I watch too, something will be mentioned or an actor I cant think of the name is on the screen and I use Wikipedia. Wikipedia is unofficially a second screen source. Why not promote it more as such? Encourage this just like Shazam does on commercials for products (such as yogurt) and tv shows ( Modern Family). Just putting the idea out there if someone with some influence around the WMF wants to look into that idea and run with a polished idea. Camelbinky ( talk) 21:56, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 140 | ← | Archive 144 | Archive 145 | Archive 146 | Archive 147 | Archive 148 | → | Archive 150 |
Wikipedia's article on Chelsea Manning has finally been moved to the name that Manning has stated is her name and the name that is used by most mainstream English language sources. This happened after much wrangling and resistance, which included moving the article back to Bradley, locking it there for 5 weeks, before finally moving it for the third time back to Chelsea. The process has provoked highly negative reactions in the real world. The case has demonstrated that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't have policies in place that ensure that all living subjects of articles are treated with basic dignity and respect. The predominant view among those knowledgeable on the issue is that the refusal to recognise someone's gender identity and self-concept is immensely harmful to transgender people.
I call upon the Wikimedia Foundation as site owners to issue clear rules, as the foundation has done before, to ensure that transgender people are treated with dignity, in the spirit of its policy on biographies of living persons. The sooner this happens, the better. Josh Gorand ( talk) 00:33, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
It is a mistake to read this as simply a transgender issue - the principle that should have governed this and other unrelated BLP cases exists only as a disregarded footnote (about something the WMF board once said) in WP:BLP. The policy itself once said Wikipedia articles should respect the basic human dignity of their subjects, but this was deleted in 2009 after a discussion involving four editors.
In April 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation published its resolution on BLPs that in part says we should take human dignity into account when adding or removing information. While most of that resolution is now unambiguously embodied in en.Wikipedia's policy, this point about human dignity is not. The nearest we come to it is "the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment." In the Manning naming dispute it was clear that a lot of editors exclude insulting or offending a person from their definition of "harm."
I think the current wording of WP:BLP deals well with blatant attacks but it doesn't cover demeaning, humiliating, insulting or other treatment that disregards our subjects' basic dignity. Though many editors here read into the policy (or the "spirit" of the policy) an obligation to take into account the dignity of the person concerned, without a clear expression of that obligation in the BLP policy those editors must, as was seen in this recent case, submit to editors who argue that we don't care about the feelings of our subjects and so trivial style regulations must always trump the dignity of our subjects.
This community needs to make an unambiguous statement as to whether it agrees with or repudiates the Arbitration Committee and WMF position that the dignity of our subjects should be taken into account in our editorial decision-making. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 05:06, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
It's also a fallacy to assume that the neutral point of view is in the middle, especially when sentiments calling for trans people to be put in concentration camps are often expressed. Academic and medical consensus is completely in favour of the recognition of transgender individuals and their identity, and that should be what we follow, not a press which public inquiries have found to have flaws (on the same lines, would we believe the Daily Express on immigration, for example?) Sceptre ( talk) 14:42, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
I'll forgive you for being a bit behind the times as you're a busy man and all, but when you have a moment, peruse User:Tarc/Manning statement. I'm fully supportive of a transgender person's life choices, and of naming a Wikipedia article in-kind, but I was curious to see how arbcom would deal with a polite yet prejudicial argument against transgender recognition. They, un-surprisingly, dropped the ball. After years of keeping the lunatics at bay in the Obama articles, arguing in favor of dropping the misogynistic "wife of" from Sarah Jane Brown, or opposing (ultimately unsuccessfully) the depopulation of women authors from the novelists category, people around here shoulda caught on quicker.
Mr. Gorand though did a great, great disservice to the Chelsea-supporting side; his miserable, combative, shrill tone was one of the primary reasons that it all had to go to Arbitration at all. Tarc ( talk) 12:46, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
If the Tea Party were to embrace ObamaCare, that would not make their past behavior leading to the government shutdown any better. Count Iblis ( talk) 15:35, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
I and a couple of other editors who stood firmly against extremely discriminatory anti-trans speech a month ago (that was met with no sanctions at all) and continued to argue against wrong decisions, and who navigated Chelsea Manning's article safely back to Chelsea despite harsh resistance and attacks against ourselves, are the ones who might just have saved Wikipedia's honour. Whether editors like Tarc were serious or whether they were just perpetrating the biggest case of disruptive WP:POINT ever perpetrated on Wikipedia, as he now claims, when they made comments like these, doesn't matter. They lost, and they look bad. Immensely bad. And they are now taking it out on me, it seems. (I should also note that Tarc was one of the main culprits in creating an aggressively discriminatory atmosphere and a hostile climate in that discussion, and baiting good faith editors into getting enraged over comments comparing trans people to pigs doesn't make him look more agreeable, if his claims here are even true) Josh Gorand ( talk) 16:09, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
The #1 rule of trolls is, don't feed the trolls. I'd suggest everyone just ignore Tarc and his rather epic trollfest, he's just relishing the attention even more and it makes him even more smug.-- Obi-Wan Kenobi ( talk) 17:38, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
FWIW, "Bradley Manning" is still the most commonly name used name. [1] A Quest For Knowledge ( talk) 14:27, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
Where is Kate Middleton now: In many places, the name " Kate Middleton" is well-known, but I imagine there are few who could state the new formal name as "Catherine,..." and yet the article was renamed immediately. I think that is the major point, when a person has an attorney make a formal statement of name change. - Wikid77 18:23, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
@ Konveyor: It's important to distinguish between a Google search and a Google News search. A Google search indexes all of the Internet but Google News only indexes news sources. There used to be a time where Google News searches indexed non- reliable sources such as prisonplanet.com, but Google fixed that problem a couple years ago. So, my "stance" (as you put it - I don't really have a "stance", I try to answer these types of issues objectively without letting person opinion get in the way) is to determine the most commonly used name using reliable sources. This is policy. In any case, you didn't answer my second question: how do you recommend that we determine the most common name for an article's topic? AQFK ( talk) 12:38, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
Please stop trying to fit 10 pounds of shiat into a 2 pound box. It's obvious it's not her "common name" when every article has to introduce her with her common name so they know wtf the article is talking about. Julia Serano is a common name. No one has to publish "previously known as XXX Serano." We don't even have her birth name in the article, though it's widely available. Heck, I wouldn't even attempt to add it to Serano because of the irrational response it would receive even if it mimicked the Manning article. "Chelsea Manning" is listed there for only a few reasons: one of which is that listing it there causes less disruption and harm than any other pace. It's not her legal name in any common, statutory or administrative law sense. It's not her common name in any rationale way when articles about her have to include "Bradley" and articles not about her omit "Chelsea" completely. We respect her self-identification out of the belief that it is least harmful. It should only extend to her bio and accounts of fact after her conviction. Trying to make ludicrous claims about who she is doesn't make it easier to decide what follows. -- DHeyward ( talk) 05:40, 16 October 2013 (UTC) @AQFK, Elaqueate, and Konveyor belt- this has nothing to do with COMMONNAME... that's a red herring and your back and forth private conversation in a public place is a bit annoying. It has always, and rightfully so, been a BLP issue. If you really want to convince people of your POV from either side of the aisle, then address the BLP issue. Otherwise go to your talk pages and have your discussion truly privately by yourselves. Camelbinky ( talk) 13:33, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
Hey I just had this question in my mind and couldn't think of another person to ask. How is that all of you choose the location for Wikimania? Miss Bono [hello, hello!] 18:39, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Dear Mr. Wales,
Good day to you!
My name is Andrew Cabral and I’m writing to you from India.
I wish to bring to your notice (in case it hasn’t already, that is) the fact that Wikipedia is being systematically used by a certain very well-defined community of users to propagate misinformation (often downright lies). There is an extreme right-wing Hindu political propagandist organization in India called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) whose sole agenda is to distort history to accommodate their view of India as the cradle of civilization, Sanskrit as the mother of all languages, and to glorify India and simultaneously undermine other civilizations, nations and cultures. Needless to say, their views are not accepted by any mainstream scholarship, aside from a few crackpots, who will naturally always be there. Nonetheless, their influence in India itself is considerable. They exploit the relatively uneducated Indian by preaching to him that India was always at the forefront of civilization and that barbaric outsiders plundered her and stole all her secrets. Partially true, no doubt, but definitely not the way they tell it. They instill a sense of xenophobia in the average Indian and play upon his victim complex. They make them believe that Indians are the only truly religious, pious, peace-loving, tolerant (and what have you) people around. They instill a sense of false superiority in these people and purposefully glorify India by either making sweeping claims about it and its history or shrewdly manipulating any historical ambiguity into something which “conclusively” proves their point. When confronted by those who know better, these people use one of two escape routes, namely, talk sheer circumlocuting rubbish or directly attack the other as racist and biased.
A point in fact is the Talk page of the Wikipedia article on “Man”. I request you (actually strongly urge you) to read what is on that page itself. I had made an edit request on the 12th of February this year which was accepted almost immediately. It is only recently that I got to know what had transpired since then. I have just left a long communication on that page to the principal involved. Kindly do read it and decide for yourself the merits of my bringing this to your notice. Also please be rest assured that I can give you many other instances of the orthodox Hindu mind at work on Wikipedia, should you wish me to do so. Please understand that this is NOT an isolated incident. As one editor on the Talk page of Indian Mathematics put it, “Sadly, mathematics is far from the only topic on Wikipedia which suffers from this artificial inflation of India's role.” When you do have the time, you can read that rather lengthy page and see for yourself what regular editors have had to face. Also, please be clear that although these people represent a huge percentage of Indians, they do not represent India in general. I have personally known two Indians who were regular contributors to Wikipedia and whose integrity was beyond question. Even the editor Saddhiyama who kept his cool on the Man talk page is probably Indian.
Inasmuch as it is one thing to point out a problem area and quite another to propose a means which could even start approaching its rectification, I am at a loss as to how to suggest a method to check or even contain the progress of these people. Nonetheless, even if you were aware of this problem before, I felt that it merited my presenting it. The closed, bigoted and uneducated mind is cancerous, and, as we all know, if there is one thing that cancer does well, that thing is spreading itself.
Thank you for reading this. I trust that you will take due cognizance of the matter.
Sincerely yours,
Andrew Cabral — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.200.54 ( talk) 10:32, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Hi, Wikid77! I’m afraid you don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. This isn’t a matter of boosting a particular individual or organization; it’s a whole race of people. Need I remind you what fraction of the world’s population is Indian and even if you take that a quarter of the country’s population is influenced by Hindutva (a modest estimate, in my opinion), then you have a sizeable proportion of the globe to deal with. As Sitush and Spartaz know, these are not people with whom you can deal in a rational manner. They have monolithic mindsets and manipulative tendencies. I’ll give you an example. I recently had occasion to disprove on a Yahoo page a pet claim of theirs: that the Vedas, etc. accurately predicted the age of the universe. I quoted from the Vishnu Puran and did the arithmetic, so to speak. The response (at least I wasn’t abused, but then I was very straightforward): “Mathematics does not prove anything. You have to be truly spiritual to be able to understand the depth of our scriptures. Hinduism is based on natural principles. Our rishis and munnis developed great time-scales for the benefit of all humanity. Blah, blah, blah!” I trust you get the point. Another thing you might not be aware of is the fact that the RSS were always great admirers of the Nazis. Of course, they don’t have the balls (unlike the Nazis did) to openly state that they want a “pure” “Aryan” India free from “foreigners”, but that is their basic desire. I’m very sure that “boosterism” (a term I wasn’t aware of but immediately understood) exists in other spheres as well, but I am even more sure that it doesn’t to even half the extent to which it does here. I knew exactly what I was saying when I compared it to a cancer. It’s far more than just superlatives. I’m telling you there are both downright lies and ambiguities which are tweaked in their favour, superlatively, of course. There are also convenient omissions, either of the type which could water down their claims or which could show that others (non-Indian cultures, nations, civilizations, even individuals) had more rights to those claims. We live in an information age which is as much a misinformation age. A site like Wikipedia loses its credibility among those who know better. Even those who don’t and who have no reason to be inclined towards Hindutva start getting suspicious after a point and stop trusting what they find here. Those who are of the “Oh my Gawd, this is so coooool!” disposition get taken for a ride, literally. And those who desperately want to believe get their ideas reinforced. The proportion of people in India who actually read books is less than in most other countries. Their source of information is invariably the net. So, you don’t realize it, but Wikipedia is not only catering to their need to portray India and its history in a superlative light to the rest of the world, but it is also actually contributing towards increasing the strength of their own fold.
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.96.204.30 ( talk) 15:47, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Hi, Sitush! I fully understand what you, Spartaz and others have to go through on an almost daily basis. I first started doubting things related to the History of Indian Mathematics pages (particularly Bhaskara II), but after reading in one of those “Fact of the Matter” boxes in the Times of India newspaper that “the English word Navigation comes from Sanskrit Navigutha” and finding exactly that on Wikipedia, I started doubting everything related to India on Wikipedia. It is one of Hindutva’s cherished dreams to prove that English derives from Sanskrit (the colonial hangover). Forget the fact that navigation derives from the Latin “navigare”, to them even Latin and Greek come from Sanskrit. The early philologists like William Jones’ waxing eloquent over Sanskrit in comparison to Latin and Greek is always quoted as “proof”. I once went to great pains on the comments section of a page on YouTube to explain that English was one language that was influenced by more languages than most for it to be traced to even one “original” source, leave alone one as far away as Sanskrit. In reply, I was given a list of English words with similar phonetics and meanings in Sanskrit. Most of them were root words and all were what we know as Latin- or Greek-based. I was told that if I wanted, there were “thousands” of more words which could be posted. I didn’t bother replying. Maybe I will one of these days. Proto-Indo-European doesn’t exist for them. Forgive me for boring you, but I’m purposely writing these things down so that others can read of concrete, real incidents which have taken place and so understand the situation better.
Regarding the problematic editors, why, may I ask, is there often a reluctance to take action earlier on? It only gets worse the longer one waits and they thrive on the extra time granted them. In fact, it bolsters their confidence. It is quite possible that the particular editor of whom you were talking is the same Archetypex07 who made a scene on the Man Talk page. After giving it some thought last night, I have a suggestion which might not go down well with Jimmy Wales or even the editors of Wikipedia, but I do believe that it’s worth due consideration. Along the lines of what PayPal does to verify a new member’s credit card number, namely, charging him a token refundable fee which appears on his credit card statement along with a special code which has to be inputted by the member on the PayPal site, Wikipedia could try a similar thing with actual identification documents, with the promise that the editor’s identity won’t be revealed to the community at large, etc. One who wants to become a regular editor would have to upload scans of TWO acceptable identification documents AND pay the token fee via PayPal or any other medium (Wikipedia would have to hook up with these). Someone who is honest and has good intentions shouldn’t have a problem with this. Once the prospective editor verifies his identity via the code on the Wikipedia site, he can become a regular full-time editor. Wikipedia stores his ID info in its database. If he is banned, then he cannot become an editor again unless he falsifies his identity. This would actually lower the number of cranks out there in general, not just the “Indian” ones. The way things are, it’s too easy for them. Once it gets stricter, they’ll at least think twice. And if one is caught falsifying his ID the second time, it becomes a legal matter. Some desperate idiot might try falsifying his ID the very first time itself. In that case, he’d be very careful not to come under any suspicion whatsoever, like doing something which could get him banned. The point is that even though he might use someone else’s credit card at different times without sweating, he would have to upload his own ID each time. And anyway, how many people could one ask to use their card and then expect them to give him the code they want? One could even think about faxing signatures for verification. I don’t think it would cost Wikipedia too much in terms of investment. One could try a similar thing even at the level of those who edit protected pages (assuming that not every full-time editor can). This way, Wikipedia would even know how many editors are from India at a given time, etc. Think about it!
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.193.14 ( talk) 18:19, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Liz, I've already acknowledged that "boosterism" would definitely exist in other areas, but tell me, how experienced are you with not just what happens in India (on the ground, so to speak), but even on the India-related pages of Wikipedia? Read my comments again and try and understand what I'm saying, even if you instinctively wish to take me as some kind of crank. I don't doubt the abilities of experienced and honest editors. I'm saying that you have quite a few dishonest ones who are gaining even more experience at being so and that, furthermore, there'll be more to come if steps aren't taken to check them now. You seem to have taken my suggestion as some kind of attack on the general editor on Wikipedia. It was not. That should have been amply clear to anyone who reads my comments. I had even acknowledged that my idea would most probably not be entertained, but I think its a reasonably valid suggestion. The "validation" of accounts procedure which I had explained is supposed to be only in the beginning so as to ensure that people like Archetypex07 (the bad pennies) can't come back. The editor's anonymity is assured otherwise. This was suggested for full-time editors, the ones who edit protected pages. And what is the problem with filling in an online proforma and uploading some corroborating ID? Don't you do the same thing when you apply for a credit card, etc., fully believing in the assurance of the company concerned that your data is safe with them because it is secured with some SSL encryption or the other? Also, what is so ironic about my stance in the matter? I'm far from being anonymous over here. I'm certainly signing with my own name and I can't help it if my internet service provider keeps changing IP addresses. (I just clicked on the Talk button of my previous response and found some edit on Hindu College which I had certainly never done. Never even visited that page.) As far as my taking the time to register and create an account is concerned, I did once and for some reason (probably my connection), it failed. (That's why I compose these messages in Word first and then paste them here.) So what if I didn't try again? I'm still a member of the global community at large which accesses Wikipedia and I have the right to bring something to the site's notice if I feel it's important (I most certainly do and have given what I believe to be convincing arguments in support of it) and suggest something towards its resolution. I repeat, my suggestion is not intended to offend any honest editor or even threaten his/her anonymity, but only to bring in more accountability, which should not trouble the editors at Wikipedia unduly. Lastly, aside from my desire to see that misinformation is not disseminated in general, I have made it clear that Wikipedia's reputation is itself at stake in the long run. What long run? If I'm not mistaken, you'll have had problems with the dependability of the information on your pages for quite some time now.
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.146.146 ( talk) 06:12, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
One more thing, Liz, these people are not just from India. They're all over the world. Whereas, if you have ID, the Wikipedia database knows exactly who is who, even if he's a Russian in Afghanistan or a Englishman in New York. (Strange how sometimes when you're searching for an example to illustrate your point, some old tunes come to the rescue almost immediately.) And, as I've taken the pains to point out, not all Indians are like them. So, knowing the traffic from India does not help in any way.
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.146.146 ( talk) 06:41, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
Well, Andrew, let me emphasize this isn't a matter of boosting just a "whole race of people" but rather putting a spin to slant every school, sports arena, or town as " George Washington Slept Here the longest" while omitting the negative aspects of a topic. For example, while the article " French Quarter" (about the origin of New Orleans) does mention being "Spanish" architecture, it should also quickly mention the Spanish balconies and courtyards, the fires which destroyed most French buildings, emphasize there are few outdoor cafes as in France, and note the lack of shade trees so the street temperature can exceed 110 °F (43 °C), unlike many French towns with park squares and trees. Similarly, a seaside town, while noting the view along the shoreline or beaches should also note the common undertow or rip tides, sea nettles, seaweed around swimmers ( Mombasa, Kenya), sand blown into food, or the cold-water season. More than just claiming an ancient connection between English words and Sanskrit cognates, the boosterism in town pages has omitted the negative issues for most aspects of town life. That is why some other editors have been trying to explain the rampant extent of the problem which also slants the non-India topics. People should read the page " French Quarter" and come away knowing there are few French buildings, few outdoor cafes, few French shade trees, and unbearable heat/humidity most of the year (not to mention graffiti which says, " 9th ward 4EVER"). - Wikid77 ( talk) 14:00, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, Wikid77, for giving me some other examples of boosterism which I wasn't aware of. I have noticed such things on some non-India pages, but not the ones which you've mentioned. I'll read up on "slanting" schools/towns.
Andrew
Fowler&fowler, this isn't exactly the place to get into a debate which we could very well end up having some other time. Nonetheless, I'll start it. I'm very well aware of the regional sub-nationalism which exists in India (basically linguistic), two prime examples being the Marathis and the Tamilians. But if you go by sheer numbers, they are beaten hands down by the "North", which anyway has always tried (generally with success) to dominate these regional identities. Furthermore, three of the four religions which were born in India were basically from that same northern region. So, those who exhibit the regional variety often do exhibit the global one as well. The RSS hardly has a following in the south. (It might grow though.) But they are thick in the north and always have been. And they are extremely casteist. You would have lower caste POVs, but they'd be minuscule compared to the higher ones. I'm sure that you'd agree that much with me. If irredentism is counterfactual history, like what the Latin American writers love to churn out, I'm not so sure. I think something of a slightly different nature applies here. Indians love historicizing their mythology and do so all the time. (You are doubtless aware of that.) There can be no question of counterfactuals there because they don't wish to explore any alternatives to what happened the way they believe it. (Don't you know that the Mahabharat war ended on the 18th of February, 3102 BC? Such precision!) The only what-if's which they dwell upon are "What if the Arabs and, later, the Europeans hadn't invaded us?" Some of those dreams which you've written about have largely crystallized into "irrefutable facts" for them. The potential was always there, but it takes an organization like the RSS to exploit it fully and carry on the catalysis till what you're left with is a rigid, frog-in-a-deep-well mindset. Even the "riding shotgun" example you've given is quintessential RSS, where the Greeks were the Yavans (as in what became the accepted meaning, namely, barbaric/demonic foreigner, as opposed to the original, namely, the Sanskritic cognate of Ionian) while the Vedic Indians did "the stuff that dreams are made of". Literally, like flying "vimanas"! Even some of their "top scientists" are right there in the thick of things. Ever heard of a pompous ass named CK Raju? Check out his I-Me-and-Myself blog, which "proves", among other things, that infinitesimals and the idea of heliocentrism came from India. People like him are quoted as "experts". (You know how gurus are revered in India.) He does have the credentials, but he's misusing them. To summarize, I believe that most of the examples which you've cited are indeed all very much part of Hindutva, some right at its core and some more peripherally located.
At any rate, Jimmy Wales isn't interested in reading what either you or I believe on his page. His interest would be in whether what I'd written to him was legit or not. I haven't really bothered with the pages on Indian cinema or royalty. But thank you for confirming that the history-related pages are highly susceptible. I'll add the Indian mathematics and science pages to that. While we're at it, let's just treat the Indian philosophy ones as the tusker in the room!
Andrew
General statement: The idea which I'd written about (to ensure that certain editors don't get the chance to come back) is NOT the important thing to me. It was just a corollary to Sitush's reply. I have every respect for the honest editors at Wikipedia and appreciate the time and effort which they put in. I have no wish to disrupt the flow of their functioning. But I do wish that they realize that Hindutva and the RSS are in all probability more dangerous than any other religio-nationalistic tendencies from across the globe and, furthermore, that Wikipedia is especially susceptible to them, inasmuch as they are using it to further their agenda and will continue to do so.
Andrew Cabral — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.52.16 ( talk) 18:56, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
Fowler&fowler: I owe you an apology for my last reply. In retrospect, it appears to me that it could very easily be construed as my not respecting your views, which was not my intention. Aside from the fact that I think that you’re among the more senior editors who has replied to me (I might be wrong though), there is the undeniable fact that other than Sitush, you’ve been the only one who has tried to talk about the matter itself. I’m more clear-headed today than I was yesterday at this time and some things which I should have said then I’ll be stating in my reply to Vigyani below (the second half, which is liberally sprinkled with NOTs). Also thank you kindly for the offer to join the "Maratha Wars". I just might, even though Indian history of the post-Mughal period was always something which I avoided.
Andrew
Vigyani: I did check out the “Too Long, Didn’t Read” link but I’m afraid that not everything can be condensed into five or six sentences. In fact some of the best things in life, like the Russian writers, absolutely cannot. Anyway, even if it’s long, I write simpler than both Joyce and Pynchon, so there’s no question of my “prose” being too difficult to follow. I’ve been fully aware that I sound like I have a bee in my bonnet, but then every once in a while one feels strongly enough about something to act precisely in that manner. I’m also acutely aware that it’s considered bad form to continue dominating a discussion, but circumstances have dictated terms here. People haven’t exactly taken me seriously. So don’t worry, your reckoning places you among the clear majority. About the RSS/Hindutva “bashing”, you are in the extreme right (pun most intended). I’ve made no bones about the fact that I am anti both. Unlike most “bashers” though, I think that I’ve given enough cogent arguments for my “bashing”. The examples that I’ve given might bore one to death, but they all hold true. Since such matters are exceedingly sensitive, let me make it amply clear than I am anti-RSS/Hindutva, not anti-Hinduism. Hindutva is NOT synonymous with Hinduism and the RSS does NOT represent Hinduism, though it of course claims to be its guardian. There are many Hindus who outrightly reject both. I’ve read a decent bit about Hinduism and there are some things that I actually like about it. I’ve also not only read about but encountered facets of the RSS/Hindutva and there is absolutely nothing that I like about them. In fact, the very opposite holds: I loathe them. They are, after all, an organization which preaches intolerance to other faiths and cultures (unlike Hinduism itself), which supports defrauders like NS Rajaram (of reading Sanskrit in the Indus Valley script and fabricated Indus Valley horse seal fame) and nuts like David Frawley, which promotes the bogus, twentieth century Vedic Mathematics and Vymanika Shastra as “ancient”, and which in general propagates falsities as knowledge. If your name really is Vigyani, then you’re Indian and you definitely know what they teach in their school texts. The following link, which substantiates some of the things which I’ve written in my comments above, shows how they tried to introduce their textbooks into American schools some eight years ago:
http://www.panthic.org/articles/2209
If you feel that I have lied or misrepresented anything in my comments above, do feel free to point them out to me. Regarding Wikipedia, the problems which I’ve mentioned are NOT general problems with editors from India. Neither are they regional-minded editor problems. General/regional-minded editors would NOT be the ones who either wrongly or forcibly trace many English language word origins to Sanskrit. They would NOT be the ones who conveniently push dubious dates in Ancient India a few hundred years backwards. They would NOT be the ones who try to show that certain ideas developed in India before Greece. (Need I remind you that while Ancient Greek history is very well documented, the exact opposite holds for Ancient India?) They would NOT be the ones who try to place India before other nations on pages which trace the historical development of a discipline. (See the last substantial edit on the talk page of Historian, finally verified by Hillabear10 sometime last year. That was me. The edit, not Hillabear10. In fact, it has been a mistake on my part to have been harping on about India-related pages alone. The problem is there even in the general pages which have the potential to mention India.) They would NOT make the India mathematics and astronomy pages the caricature that they are, with convenient omissions (like Brahmagupta’s indebtedness to Diophantus), sensational lies (the calculus was "invented" in India; Madhava’s derivation of the Maclaurin series for the sine, cosine and inverse tangent was geometric and did NOT make use of any notion of a derivative or even a general function; Bhaskara II did NOT formulate the Mean Value Theorem; he gave a numerical approximation for the difference between the sine values of two “close” angles in terms of the cosine function and the difference between the angles) and a lot of gloss. (I can afford to talk here. My two degrees are in Mathematics.) They would NOT give either downright erroneous citations or citations which are as obscure and undependable as Suruchi Publishers, Allahabad. That makes six main NOTs which my rationale CANNOT ascribe to the general editor from India or the regional-minded one.
Andrew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.98.8.226 ( talk) 18:59, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
I full expect for some admin or even Jimbo to delete this because they just don't want to hear it. But I am going to say it anyway for those that actually care about the future of the project.
That said, I don't believe that there were every any "good old days"—problems with self-serving private bureaucracies, ArbCom and its inefficiency and unwillingness to take on power players, opaque governance (or lack thereof), and the covert dealings of insiders have plagued the project since time immemorial. It is time for a major revolution in Wikipedia governance, as I have suggested before; however, I do not plan on bringing Wikipedia back to the good old days, but into the future. Wer900 • talk 04:49, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
We want a wide range of views represented on the encyclopedia. Resolute, if you would like to write a blog post on Wikipediocracy, you can email it to me and I can pass it on to Jayen466 ( talk · contribs) (Andreas Kolbe), who I am sure is open to criticism of the site and has even offered Otto Placic, a doctor found advertising plastic-surgery services on Wikipedia, an opportunity to write his state of mind. If you, Jimmy Wales, or anyone else is brave enough, then write to me what you would like to put on Wikipediocracy's front page, supporting or opposing Wikipedia practices. Wer900 • talk 18:40, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
"When Wikipedians spend too much time on the noticeboards, in Arbcom cases, and on talk pages of contentious articles, they have a high probability of concluding that Wikipedia is dysfunctional, incompetent, and doomed to fail. Once a Wikipedian has reached this realization, expect that person's user page to boast an essay announcing the imminent failure of the project. The best cure for this condition is to leave those places, and instead read a few articles on genuinely encyclopedic topics, noticing just how good they actually are. Similarly, if you were to look at a table at a subatomic level, you would see that it consists mainly of empty space, with innumerable minuscule particles whizzing about angrily, each having an arbitrary and undefinable position; indeed, if you look at them too closely, they will change just to spite you: but back away, the whole becomes visibly a table again. We're a pretty good encyclopedia, and you will notice it once you back away from the conflict zones."
So just to make sure I understand here. An IP makes a comment and its assumed to be the work of another editor. One that is highly active and has a lot of experience based on the comments of several here. That editor is accused of being disgruntled and angry and then the user responds to several comments essentially confirming what I started the discussion about. Several of those comments being from admins BTW and were IMO unnecessarily negative and provocative. So basically, this discussion confirms, without a doubt and in public what I said in the beginning whether you want to admit it or not. There is a lot of community infighting just as I stated in the beginning; the editing environment is poisoning the well of editors willing to edit here; the community does have a major rift between their admins and their editors; Jimbo doesn't seem to be interested in dealing with the problem (which is strange because he has admitted in the past he agrees there is a problem) and a lot of users think there is no problem, because the system seemed to have worked well for them so far. I have to tell you none of these things makes me want to edit and I pretty well understand why others don't want to either. Also, I do not think I sound anything like Kumioko. They are very angry, I am indifferent. The community doesn't care about me and I don't care about it. I do however use Wikipedia and it would be a shame if it shut down because the community that edits it or the company that runs it cannot see the writing on the wall. The site is dying, faster now than in the past and the pace is increasing. It will probably take a few more years (about 3 I'm guessing) but the end is coming unless things are done to change that. 138.162.8.57 ( talk) 13:53, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...
... so, it goes. Alanscottwalker ( talk) 01:48, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Aaah, fuck it, smiles all round. Everyone give everyone a big wikihug. Cas Liber ( talk · contribs) 11:03, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
I am a content editor and rarely post in project space, by the standards of most Wikipedia power players. However, even with my content work I have had negative experiences with Wikipedia's failed governance model. Fringe theorists can edit articles with relative impunity because administrators are busy fighting on drama-based articles, there are not enough good writers remaining to cover for the massive pollution of poorly presented content by individuals who are completely uninformed, and those who are merely here for the drama and POV-pushing are held in higher esteem than a common vandal who modifies Barack Obama to state that "John is gay". Why is it that the very people who do the most damage to the encyclopedia, its supposed "patriots", are in positions of power? Although they may appear to have demurred from demanding Wikipedia governance reform, stating that most of the problems occur on the drama boards, in reality the impetus for a sweeping and complete revision of the Wikipedia power structure is stronger than ever. The massive investment of resources and power in the drama boards have diverted that attention from where it is needed most; namely, the 6,849,632 articles that constitute this encyclopedia.
It is about time this stopped forever, that order was reimposed to end the flow of good content editors out from the encyclopedia and ensure the expedient removal of those who cause it harm. To these ends and more, I will propose here a governance model. This, or anything like this, has been rejected by "the community"—a group that is not in reality the civil body politic of all active Wikipedia editors in good standing, but rather a self-selected subset of those users who do nothing but battle on the drama boards and robotically fix grammar and remove vandalism. This is a threat to their power, their integral status in the existing Wikipedia hierarchy. These users will cite policies stating that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, not realizing (or at least pretending not to acknowledge) that they are members of a private, self-imposed bureaucracies operating for the benefit of a few, and that Wikipedia is based on a consensus model of governance, not realizing that whatever "consensus" exists on almost any issue is a sham, obtained through poorly publicized requests for comments attended primarily by the same inbred group of users. Nor, for that matter, do these users want to publicly accept that the above two policies are anything less than scripture, when in reality the policies are created through the same sham consensus process mentioned earlier—that is to say, the small, self-selected cohort that repeatedly cites these policies is the same one that imposed them illegitimately to begin with.
Let's move forward. In order to do so, I suggest the following changes:
Wer900 • talk 01:43, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Wer900 proposal is one of the most insane things I've ever read. But hey, if the aim of the proposal is to drive away even more contributors and make WP become a failure like Citizendium, that's indeed the way to go. -- cyclopia speak! 17:03, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Resolute, I have no wishes to destroy the project; why would I have written more articles than some of our administrators and Arbitrators if I wanted to do so? Why have I not made AN/I threads on every person I have ever disagreed with, as is so often seen there? Why haven't I voted in community-ban proceedings? Why haven't I participated in POV wars on hot topics like Barack Obama, India-Pakistan relations or Israel? There are extremely efficient ways of dealing damage to the project, and I have not partaken in them, not because I am stupid but because I care about this project and its future.
Ubikwit, we already have 1,400 administrators on Wikipedia, half of whom are inactive and the other half of whom work in private bureaucracies. I believe that you have proposed a "more streamlined" system only in good faith, but such a system, with its extreme decentralization, would, with all due respect, look like Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, which controls little outside the capital and a few areas in the south of the country. Private bureaucracies, operating for their own benefit but with (unofficially) full powers of a government, would take hold, much as extortion rackets and militias have taken root in Somalia.
AndyTheGrump: "should include" does not mean "this is the end-all, be-all of everything". What I wrote are guiding principles, nothing more, and the specific implementation of the above ideas can take any of an infinite quantity of forms. Please, no.
North8000: I am of the persuasion that the sky is falling, slowly enough that we can stop it and put it back in its place with the proper reforms, but not so slowly that we can merely ignore.
For the last time: I am NOT of the "Hasten the Day" persuasion. I am trying to help this encyclopedia and save it from its True Believers. Many of these true believers think that they have the best interests of the project at heart, and they often do, but the problem is that their unwillingness to compromise leads people to leave the project, in much the same way as a right-wing conservative Baptist upbringing is an extremely efficient way to push people to atheism. Many among said contingent of conservative Baptists would reject calls for moderation from liberal believers as a sign of excessive lack of faith, even though said liberals are the biggest hope that the religion has against atheism. You are shouting me out in the same fashion, and you are already paying dearly in the tens of thousands of once-active, now-disenchanted editors who no longer contribute. Wer900 • talk 19:35, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
This is a big problem for Wikipedians. Count Iblis ( talk) 17:29, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
Pedestal desk. Tim AFS ( talk) 00:59, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
Dear Jimbo Wales
Can you have a word with this user: /info/en/?search=User:Kww
He has deleted BZ20 and Love will save the day and in the past other boyzone tour articles. He is ruining boyzones information wikipedia. I understand he has authority on wikipedia and several people have contacted him but he seems to think he is above the law. A big problem he has is getting confused with a user who used to disrupt Boyzone articles called user 'pesf' and when people he doesn't recognise edit the boyzone articles he closes their accounts claiming them to be a sock puppet of pesf which is untrue. Please stop this user from disrupting the articles and make the BZ20 and Love will save the day articles on the Boyzone pages.
Kind Regards — Preceding unsigned comment added by Musictool ( talk • contribs) 13:51, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
You have over numerous times deleted boyzone articles for no good reason, you cannot delete peoples accounts who were not doing any damage. The least i would like to be done is for the Love will save the day and BZ20 albums to be made and in future block the user but don't delete the pages which has taken a long time to create. I have also noted that you KWW have deleted referenced information from the Boyzone article history. Musictool ( talk) 15:11, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
I don't know whether you've ever tried to edit an article in the face of coordinated sockpuppetry or meatpuppetry. I don't know whether you've ever had the experience of arguing a content point with an editor/editors, only to discover after weeks or months of dispiriting discussion that the editor is a sockpuppet of a previously banned editor. These experiences are intensely frustrating. We lose good editors because we don't handle sockpuppetry effectively. All the time.
And more insidiously, the good editors who stay become reluctant to touch certain topic areas or articles, because they're infested by sockpuppets and whenever anyone tries to address the situation they're told to "AGF". There is an editor-retention issue here, but I don't think it's the one you've outlined. MastCell Talk 18:03, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
Can someone do something about this user /info/en/?search=User:Kww He has deleted /info/en/?search=BZ20:_Anniversary_Album and /info/en/?search=Love_will_save_the_day article already twice. He is abusing his privilege and deleting every boyzone article. He is very rude and he is ruining wikipedia. Every new user who makes a new page for Boyzone he deletes. So kww are you going to to delete the articles everytime they are created? How dare you abuse your power when you should be doing good you are doing bad. I would like people to look out for this user. So are you telling me these pages about the new Boyzone album and Single due for release in November 2013 don't merit space on wikipedia? You are ridiculous and you are destroying wikipedia. I and many people are annoyed that these pages have already been removed twice by you and i am sure if they are created again you will delete it, you are a horrible person. I and many people want these pages created. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.17.230.244 ( talk) 17:08, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
I write everything posted here in my name personally. It's completely silly to think that I have a 'ghost writer' on Wikipedia. I read this page every single day, and generally read everything that is linked to. I respond to threads where I think I have something to say, but often just let a perfectly good discussion run without me. Those who suggest my involvement here is minimal are almost as silly as those who suggest I must be so busy that I couldn't possibly write these things myself. :-) -- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 16:26, 20 October 2013 (UTC) |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Although there are responses on this page that are signed 'Jimbo Wales', I am doubtful that all such responses are actually authored by Jimbo Wales. That skepticism stems from my awareness that Jimbo has a busy life, and that many of these responses concern matters that could hardly interest him. It also stems from the actual tone and wording of these responses which suggest to me that at least some of these answers signed 'Jimbo Wales' are drafted by proxies, multiple authors who are probably Administrators and possibly limited to Administrators on ArbCom. In the interest of full disclosure, an ifo box at the top of this page should explain these details of authorship, and if it indeed is claimed that Jimbo himself authors all responses signed 'Jimbo Wales' that should be what is in that info box to allay skeptics like myself. Brews ohare ( talk) 15:07, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
My goodness - now the standard practice of 'ghost writing' is elevated to the level of conspiracy and cabals! All that is suggested here is that it be made clear whether Jimbo actually authors all comments over his name on this page, or not.
Brews ohare (
talk) —Preceding
undated comment added
17:43, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
How do we know that Brews ohare isn't 17 different people, who took turns writing that post above? The question has no merit if its all about "skepticism stems from my awareness that Jimbo has a busy life, and that many of these responses concern matters that could hardly interest him." Really, you find it hard to believe someone on an encyclopedia site would not have a broad range of interests or be able to simply comment on a subject here even if the actual subject doesn't interest him much. Tis really silly.-- Mark Miller ( talk) 21:14, 18 October 2013 (UTC)
"You are trying to make this thread a form of entertainment" ... "Are you making a mockery of me, Vimes?" "No Sir, but I may be assisting." -- Demiurge1000 ( talk) 03:23, 19 October 2013 (UTC) It is entirely conjectural on my part, of course, which is why I have asked for some clarification on the matter. I simply do not believe that a person as busy as Wales can possibly engage in all the trivia that appears above his name on this page.
Brews ohare (
talk)
05:34, 19 October 2013 (UTC)
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Damn! I wish there was "like" button for this remark! Smatprt ( talk) 01:23, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
The one-month anniversary will be 23 October 2013, for the removal of wp:VisualEditor (VE) from the Wikipedia top menu. I think we should create an essay page where people could post their opinions, in retrospect one month later, about the removal of VE under guidance from Kww, use of Special:Preferences opt-in, and discuss the continued cleanup of hundreds of text glitches saved into pages by the early versions of VE. Very many people burned days, weeks or months in dealing with the problems, and perhaps some people need a process of closure to defuse the tensions which had grown during the whole situation. Also, other people think more publicity is needed to inform (or warn) newer users who might wish to opt-in and learn more about VE, so it would be a chance to discuss how the bugfixes to VE have improved the operation. - Wikid77 ( talk) 05:34, 20 October, 00:31, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
This is a reminder for people to discuss ideas for new tools or templates at wp:VPIL, the Idea Lab. With more than 30 users now authorized as wp:Template_editors, there has been renewed enthusiasm to enhance the tools, or create new templates which the authors can continue to expand without the prior lockdown which occurred when templates became popular and were fully-protected against non-admin updates. Anyway, discuss or create a new thread at wp:VPIL (or wp:Lua requests). - Wikid77 ( talk) 05:34, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
Whenever the "random file" button is pushed, it goes to a wikimedia foundation image instead of giving a commons image. Flin the flan warrior ( talk) 17:59, 22 October 2013 (UTC)
I think that the idea of database copyright is extremely dangerous to efforts like Wikipedia, because it can prohibit the dissemination of factual information. Some actual examples: in the EU, Ministry of Sound is pursuing legal action against users of Spotify because they list the songs on their playlists, and Football Dataco is pursuing action against Yahoo for listing scores, penalties, and substitutions in games. [16] If these are upheld, I don't see any particular reason why a news outlet couldn't come after a Wikipedia user residing in the EU for updating our list of school shootings to include all the incidents in theirs, or even a physics publisher coming after him for copying a list of nuclear isomers.
Additionally, I fear we may be seeing vandalism fueled by the idea - I don't know who is behind it, but an upsurge of very small vandalism edits randomly altering statistics [17] makes me think someone is systematically attacking us with an army of bots under a notion of proprietary rights that is fueled by such legislation.
Most importantly, we need to remember that an effort was made in the 1990s to impose database copyright in the U.S., and so long as there is an international industry that makes use of it, the threat is still there. We might only have weeks to find out and oppose such a bill if it is introduced, so we should be well-prepared in advance.
For all these reasons, I think that the WMF should lay out a position paper, with proper legal consultation, expressing its opposition to existing database copyright practices and explaining any risks or incidents affecting its users, which would urge the EU to contain the practice, and be suitable to be referenced and reposted widely in the event of any future US legislation that would threaten Wikipedia's operations. Wnt ( talk) 16:51, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
Not to be a wet blanket -- but I fear the concept that a database right would apply t independently created lists is a bit of a false issue ... the counties which recognize such rights do not apply them to such lists as may be created on a website, but rather to use of a privately created list then being used without consent of the person creating the list. The SCOTUS decisions based on telephone listings ( Feist v. Rural(1991) etc.) are not ancient by any means and there was a legitimate question as to whether such listings were copyrightable prior to that ruling - it was not an "open and shut" case. Nor does the EU concept of "database rights" extend to simple compilation of facts readily available without use of that database. Thus - WMF has no reason to fret this one at all, nor ought it undertake any actions opposing what appears to be widely found other than in the US. It is also useful to note that some classes of database (medical records, etc.) are indeed protected under US law. Collect ( talk) 17:57, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
There was a thread recently regarding just how busy Jimmy Wales could possibly be and if he read and responded as himself. Turns out he responds as himself and reads everything himself (kind of obvious, but apparently it had to be clarified for some). That got me thinking- where else is Jimbo active on Wikipedia, so I checked the user contributions. I was surprised that with the exception of them being mostly biographies, there isn't any specific common categories (or types) or articles you work on. My question is basically- what interests do you have in regards to Wikipedia articles? Do you often just surf around on Wikipedia reading articles of any certain interest or even do so randomly? Just a curiousity question regarding "What Jimbo reads on Wikipedia". (oh, could be a neat subpage off your user page; if people actually care what Oprah reads why wouldn't editors and casual readers alike might be interested in what Jimbo recommends for reading on Wikipedia?) Camelbinky ( talk) 18:13, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
Fascinating. Carrite ( talk) 19:41, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
In reviewing those Meta pages (such as " meta:Talk:Is Wikipedia an experiment in anarchy"), I did think it was interesting how Jimbo advised to keep the meta-discussions out of the Wikipedia space, due to distractions, especially when they used words like " recherché" (\rə-ˌsher-ˈshā, -ˈsher-ˌ\ : "unusual and not understood by most people"). In discussing the scalability of WP, the users mentioned the need for personal lists of " wp:RecentChanges" which seems to be the current wp:Watchlist feature. However, some of the discussions did seem to be worrying about problems which would occur only years later, and perhaps actually at a reduced level. I guess in general, people prefer to talk about whatever tangents interest them, and that is another reason to also focus on the major concerns of the readership, where the major topics would address some long-term issues. With WP software topics and templates, many times people have requested some complex template feature, and when written, then only a handful of people have actually used it (for a few days!). The quality guru W. Edwards Deming would respond only to consulting requests when he was asked several times, in earnest, perhaps as a way to avoid fanciful notions asking for his assistance. The wild, tangent topics can be interesting, but we have seen exotic topics and exotic software distract from the central issues which affect more users or readers. - Wikid77 12:19, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
(Note from Jimbo: I want to let this conversation run unimpeded but I wanted to set out my views in a way that I think will help clarify and focus the discussion. I have long favored the term 'paid advocacy' over 'paid editing' because there are some perfectly innocent forms of editing that involve people being paid (for example academic projects). But I have recently come to the more refined position that we should say 'paid advocacy editing' to make clear that it is the editing of articles that matters - I don't mind one bit if a PR firm is transparent, open, and honest, and comes to the talk page of an article to make suggestions or complaints, complete with sources, etc. By narrowing our focus to just 'paid advocacy editing' we can eliminate a lot of useless side noise questions that I feel the advocates of corruption (because that's what it is) throw up to confuse the issue. In terms of what policies I think English Wikipedia should implement, I think it is pretty easy. Define the narrowest possible policy to start to hit at the worst offenders, and then expand it over time if and when new problems arise. Arguments that we can't ban X because people will still do X aren't very convincing. We ban vandalism and people still do it. In society we ban shoplifting and murder, and people still do them.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 09:06, 24 October 2013 (UTC))
Paid editing, as we know, is becoming more and more of a long-term menace to Wikipedia, and indeed is becoming an existential threat to Wikipedia as a trustable neutral encyclopedia. Something must be done to eradicate it. (I am aware that it cannot be entirely eradicated, but it should be eradicated as nearly as possible.) There are two RFCs currently being considered, one to ban all paid advocacy, and the other to require paid editors to disclose. It appears that both RFCs will be closed out as No Consensus. The first proposal, the more extreme, is opposed for various reasons, including that some disclosed paid editors are effective contributors, and effective enforcement of such a rule would rely heavily on outing the offending editors. The second, the less extreme, is opposed on various grounds, including that it is not sufficient, and that it is only a restatement of the conflict of interest policy. As a result, it appears that the English Wikipedia community agrees that there is a problem, but cannot agree on what a solution is. Consensus is often elusive, and this is no exception.
(I would argue that the policy on WP:OUTING should be modified in one detail, to provide some procedure for the private outing of paid editors, not on talk pages, but to OTRS or WMF. That is my opinion.)
The ways forward are to fight the threat of paid editing with the existing inadequate tools of policies of the English Wikipedia, or to turn to a higher authority. That higher authority can be either Jimbo Wales, as a god-king, a role which he no longer uses, or the Board of Directors of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). The WMF Board does not require consensus. It votes. I ask that Jimbo Wales refer the need to fight paid editing to the WMF. WMF should, in my opinion, take a two-part approach. First, formulate a meta policy, across all Wikipedias, stating that paid editing is not permitted, and that undisclosed paid editors should be globally banned. (The so-called paid editors who are effective contributors are not editing articles on which they have a COI. They post to talk pages.) Second, WMF should consult with counsel as to whether legal action against Wiki-PR is in order. It is not permitted to make legal threats on Wikipedia, but WMF should consider whether to make legal threats via US postal mail.
Action needs to be taken against paid editing. Current policy is better than nothing, but is not sufficient against the existential threat of Wiki-PR to the integrity of Wikipedia. Since the English Wikipedia community is not coming to a "consensus", which is often elusive anyway, action has to be taken by the WMF, at least in the form of a meta policy, and possibly legal action. Robert McClenon ( talk) 01:13, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
private outing of paid editors. By private, do you mean in SPIs or similar venues, between admins only, or in ANI or Arbcom?
Basically it sounds like you would want something on the order of:
Sound sufficient, anyone? I oppose "Paypedia" and I also oppose "out anyone I disagree with" as being intrinsically wrong and deleterious to the initial concept of the project. Collect ( talk) 11:28, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Still can't wrap my thoughts around the belief that paid editing isn't going to be found to violate the core policy of NPOV. Of course the example of the benign edits by the specialist done on college company time to enhance the factual accuracy of some articles should probably be considered to be harmless. But there is a difference between that situation and someone hired specifically to edit...my belief is that in the latter case, the fiscal transaction will equate with an expected result....and that seems to lead inexorably to issues with NPOV and COI.-- MONGO 14:47, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
My little proposal:
Short, sweet, and clear enough for people to get the message. What do you guys think? Konveyor Belt 17:29, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Jimbo is saying, and I agree, that paid advocacy editing should be explicitly prohibited. However, that will have two consequences, one desirable, and one undesirable, that must be addressed. The desirable consequence is that responsible paid advocates will declare their affiliation and post to talk pages. Then NPOV editors, taking both the facts and NPOV in mind, can update the article pages and improve their quality. That is good. The undesirable consequence is that paid advocacy editors will conceal their affiliation. To be sure, that will not be new, but is already the problem that we are trying to address. The question is how to deal with undisclosed paid advocacy editing, within Wikipedia. On the one hand, undisclosed advertising violates federal (US) law, and so can, in extreme cases, by dealt with by law enforcement. On the other hand, paid advocacy editing done from outside the United States is almost certainly outside the reach of US law, and besides Wikipedia should be able to enforce its own policies without relying exclusively on US law enforcement. The problem is that there appears to be a conflict between the policy against paid advocacy editing and the policy against outing. This means that there needs to be a mechanism for persons with knowledge or reasonable non-idle suspicion that an editor is a paid advocacy editor to report their concerns other than on-Wiki. There should be a mechanism to report paid advocacy editing to OTRS or to the ArbCom. Only if a user is blocked by "highly trusted" personnel for paid advocacy editing should their affiliation be published as the reason for the block. Such blocks will lead to sockpuppetry, but sockpuppetry can be detected from the quacking. Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:00, 26 October 2013 (UTC) Comments Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:00, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
There so far has not been a consensus on the English Wikipedia as to what to do about paid advocacy editing. Anyone can propose a restated policy, but it is likely to get no consensus. (If a consensus can be reached, that is good.) I propose that the next step is for Jimbo to go to the WMF Board and ask them to adopt a policy against paid advocacy editing which could be meta to all Wikipedias. Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:12, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:13, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
Hi Jimbo and stalkers! Can anyone direct me to where the WMF and Wikipedia may be working with museums to further information? I am interested in working with two museums. The Bishop Museum in Oʻahu Hawaii and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacrmento. I want to be sure and work through whatever workgroups and organizations we already have set-up, if any and if not, how best to proceed in working directly with museums. Anyone have any suggestions?-- Mark Miller ( talk) 02:44, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
With the recent talk, in many different places, about editing for pay and all that, I would like some clarification on what I need to do and where I need to do this- I would like to work on getting Fulton, Missouri to at least GA status and to create and get to at least GA status Downtown Fulton Historic District; however I have a COI in that I will be working with the merchant's association, my business is a member of the relevant Chamber of Commerce, and I have a financial stake in a website that will benefit from increased interest in Fulton, Missouri, though not DIRECTLY from a Wikipedia article as my website will NOT EVER be used in any manner on any article. All interested parties that I have spoken to think having Wikipedia articles that are informative and can be linked to from their organizations would be a great asset; what exactly should I do first, and what can I tell those that want to join Wikipedia and edit these articles as far as where to "register" their COI and how to do so without being assaulted with "You're doing this because you have a vested financial stake" or "You're getting paid! BLOCK!". Camelbinky ( talk) 00:16, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
A couple of sections above Jimbo said "Arguments that we can't ban X because people will still do X aren't very convincing," and then he demolished that type of logic.
I'm concerned about a related fallacious argument "There's nothing that we can do about paid advocacy, so we just have to accept it." I believe that there is a lot that we can do, but that nobody has really tried to stop it. Writing new policies is fine, but ultimately admins and arbs are going to have to enforce the rules, and for whatever reasons they haven't enforced similar rules that could have gone a long way towards stopping it.
What I'd like to see is a list of possible steps the community or the Board could take that would make a real dent in paid advocacy here. I don't think any one step would be enough, but we should consider the full range of what steps are possible. So this is in the line of Brain Storming. Any ideas can be considered (and later rejected, or kept in reserve if needed). I know that some folks will cry that taking any of these steps will be the end of Wikipedia as we know it. Fine, but please put the objections in the subsection below, and leave the top of the section for ideas that might help solve the problem. Eight of my ideas follow, and other should feel free to add other ideas. Smallbones( smalltalk) 04:19, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
Note the questions about Silgan Holdings below, unanswered. An administrator created a new article about a corporation, in exchange for a $75 payment. (I believe the administrator will be donating the $75 to charity, but does that remove the notion that they "accepted" money for services? I wish Jimmy would answer the questions posed about Silgan Holdings. -- I'm not that crazy ( talk) 15:01, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
Smallbones Up thread, Jimbo made the interesting terminology comment, noting that neither 'paid editing' not 'paid advocacy' should be prohibited, while 'paid advocacy editing' is the problem. (As an aside, because Jimbo suggests that advocates can edit talk pages, and the term editing doesn't just mean articles, I'd suggest using 'paid advocacy article editing', while recognizing that it is getting bloated.) Your section heading refers to 'paid advocacy'. Does this mean you are proposing prohibitions much broader than Jimbo suggested, or is it just a terminology issue? Obviously, Jimbo's position is not privileged, and you are free to propose something other than his concept, but I'm wondering if you deliberately chose a broader term or were intending on putting teeth into Jimbo's suggestion?-- SPhilbrick (Talk) 15:15, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
To summarize the above discussion, there are two clearly stated proposals being presented, and the "consensus" of the en-wiki community to do nothing or to do very little. User:Coretheapple (with whom I have more often disagreed than agreed on articles) is proposing that the existing policies be enhanced with a new bright-line policy and enforcement. Since there is not a consensus in en-wiki, these policy changes would have to be implemented by WMF, and could span all Wikipedias. Paid advocacy editing is currently a greater threat to the English Wikipedia than to other Wikipedias, but it is a potential threat to all Wikipedias. I agree with Coretheapple that we should not either to let Wikipedia slowly rot under the corrupting influence of undisclosed paid corporate edits or strip Wikipedia of the bulk of its editors in a paradigm shift. User:Carrite, on the other hand, is proposing, as he always has, that Wikipedia as we know it cannot be fixed without a paradigm shift, to strip Wikipedia of pseudonymous editors. Carrite's changes will never meet with WMF approval. I assume that Carrite knows this, and is using that as an argument to work with the existing imperfect policies without reworking the policies, to buy more time for him to make the case for his proposal that will never be approved. My question for Carrite, then, is whether he actually thinks that it is possible to: "Identify abuses and fix them. Identify chronic abusers and they can be eliminated."? I think that Coretheapple and User:Smallbones are saying that enhanced policies, which may require WMF enactment, will help that identification of chronic abusers and abuses. That is my summary. Does anyone want to restate their views? Coretheapple and Smallbones seem to think that better policies will help. Carrite seems to be arguing two ways, first, that the existing policies can possibly be used more effectively to restrict paid advocacy editing, and, second, that the problem cannot be dealt with except by changing the editing model of Wikipedia. Robert McClenon ( talk) 15:29, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps we've had this discussion too many times before (see "old discussion" below that is taken from this page). Carrite has said repeatedly that there is nothing we can do about paid advocacy, so we have to accept it. My point above is that there are at least 8 steps we can take that that will put a serious dent into it. Carrite's response (as I predicted) was that this will be the end of Wikipedia as we know it. *His* point seems to be that Wikipedia cannot govern itself. Most of the 8 steps I give above can be implemented by the community, but if the community is indeed deadlocked by a creaky consensus system that can't handle interested parties participating in the discussion and confusing the issue beyond all recognition, then I believe the WMF can give us a push, or if necessary - if Wikipedia indeed can't be governed by the community - then the WMF will have to step in and do something on its own. Undisclosed paid advocacy on Wikipedia is unethical by the PR community's own rules, and much of it is illegal. Wikipedia can and must deal with that. Just saying, as Carrite has done repeatedly - "There's nothing we can do about it" is just wrong in so many ways.
BTW, I do agree with ASW that requiring disclosure of financial COIs is the consensus view. Smallbones( smalltalk) 20:52, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
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PR people editing WP is a fact of life. It has been for a long time and it always will be from now on. The choice we face is either playing Whack-a-Mole with one arm tied behind our back (Anonymous editing with "no outing" rules, no Sign-In-To-Edit, IP editing permitted, etc.) or whether we come up with a set of formal rules that both the PR people and Wikipedians can live with. This has been debated at very great length and, as is the case with most controversial matters given WP's supermajority-pseudoconsensus decision-making system, the result has been a draw — status quo wins. Some people continue to try to play one handed Whack-a-Mole, others try to explain the de facto rules for PR people to the more open and honest ones among them, hoping all along that they don't become Whack-a-Mole victims for trying to play fair... Oh, well... Ya make your bed, then you lay in it... We're stuck with a decision-making system that can't make controversial decisions, and it would be a controversial decision to ever get rid of it... Carrite (talk) 17:32, 4 October 2013 (UTC) You're back to the "we can't prevent it so we have to accept it" line of thinking. I strongly disagree. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:13, 4 October 2013 (UTC) What's the alternative? "We can't prevent it so we have to be in a permanent state of war fighting a battle that can't be won"??? One thing is positive: we can't prevent it. Carrite (talk) 23:11, 4 October 2013 (UTC) |
Once suggestion I'd make to whomever wishes to deal with this is that data be gathered on paid editing: Which articles have been influenced by, edited by or created by paid editors, and listing also editors who have been identified, either by themselves or others, as paid advocates. In going through the archives of this page I noticed that at one point last year [18] there was a proposal for a "paid editor notice" or user box, but I have not located any examples of that actually in use. A list of editors making such an advertisement on their user page would be a good start. Coretheapple ( talk) 17:32, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
(Note: Coretheapple asked me about this up above, in the midst of the longer discussion and I was afraid it would get lost if we discussed it up there so I'm making a separate section here.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 12:42, 25 October 2013 (UTC))
I'm very glad you've returned to the issue and hope you remain active in it. One aspect of paid editing that disturbs me is corporate representatives creating article about their companies through the Articles for Creation process. This is presently allowed but in my opinion should not be. My concern is that this elevates to attention small companies of limited notability by creating what is in effect "advertorials," sponsored content, without proper disclosure to readers. It skews the content of Wikipedia in favor of those entities that desire publicity, as opposed to competitors and others not so inclined. I've mentioned this before on your talk page, and you responded sympathetically to the concern I raised, and I wanted to do so again. I think something needs to be done about this. Since there is no consensus on dealing with this or any other paid editing issue by the community, I think that this is an issue that needs to be dealt with by the WMF as Robert pointed out above. Coretheapple (talk) 17:40, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
Not entirely sure how AfC presents a problem. If autoconfirmed editors choose to by-pass the AfC process, their articles get picked up by NPP (which seems to have no shortage of volunteers). If paid editors choose to submit via AfC then at least they are taking an honest route, which will only allow their articles to main space if they are free from major sourcing/promotional problems.
Anecdotally, from working for a couple of years at AfC, articles are often written by someone with a strong COI - musician articles written by the band or record company, artist articles written by gallery owners, company articles written by the PR departments - we all know it goes on but I believe AfC reviewers are savvy enough to decline the obvious examples.
Sionk (
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13:26, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
As suggested above: My problem with use of the AfC process by paid editors is this. When readers turn to Wikipedia, I think that they have an expectation that the content is created by independent editors, and has not been inspired, much less created, by the subjects of the article. The fact that the material has been vetted by independent editors is beside the point. These articles are the Wikipedia version of "advertorials," which are also often written by people employed by magazines, but without disclosure to readers.
When small companies of marginal notability and limited interest pay people to create articles about them, which seems to be the main activity in AfC of paid editors, it skews the overall content of Wikipedia in favor of subjects that have more desire to be published in Wikipedia. It says to readers that those subjects are more important than the companies in their same field that do not have articles, when in fact the companies (or people) that don't have articles are less publicity-minded. It unfairly gives Wikipedia an invidious bias in favor of such "publicity hounds" that otherwise would not be of sufficient interest for a Wikipedia article.
In my view this practice is a Wikipedia-sanctioned form of autobiography, only one step removed from people writing articles about themselves or their companies. The fact that there is an apparatus that "sanitizes" the process is immaterial. Coretheapple ( talk) 13:43, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
( edit conflict) AfC volunteer here. I can positively assert that right now the AfC process is so under-volunteered that some AfC submissions are taking 4 weeks from when they are posted for review to when they get a response to their submission (Example at Category:AfC pending submissions by age). While yes, there's been some bad apples inappropriately failing submissions, I think that this is much less harmful to the project overall than inexperienced editors accepting submissions that are not up to snuff (both in terms of volunteer time mis-appropriated to the cleanup and damage to the project's reputation). I would also note that unless we're doing a backlog drive we do not have the volunteer bandwidth to stay even with the number of submissions in to submissions out. Hasteur ( talk) 13:54, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
Has this topic has gone off Articles for Creation? I'm not even sure what the purpose of this section was in the first place! Sionk ( talk) 18:23, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
AFC reviewer here. One thing the community and, if their help is asked for, the Foundation can do is politely ask major search engines to not automatically rank all Wikipedia articles highly in search results. If they cooperate, it would reduce the incentive to create articles for PR purposes. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 22:49, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia:BLPN#Stephen_Birmingham
Article says a book was published in 1997. Editor has a copy of the book published in 1971. This is not good enough--he needs to actually cite something that says the book was published then. Apparently having a book which says it is published in 1971 is not considered good evidence for a book being published in 1971.
At least this one has a happy ending because someone found such a reference, but he really shouldn't have been required to. Ken Arromdee ( talk) 14:13, 25 October 2013 (UTC) 14:12, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
If Mr Wales wishes to be taken seriously, he needs, like any leader of an enterprise, to take the funding of it seriously. It is his foremost executive responsibility if he remains committed to the effort. His mass appeals at this site are evidence of a further deep problem of the enterprise, rather than being any substantial contribution to a long-term solution. If this is to be a charitable enterprise, so be it: he needs define the necessary endowment to support it, and to develop a plan to fund the endowment. That is, he needs use the connections his status affords (e.g., Chozick NYTM piece), and to develop a realistic business model for his charity, that works. Otherwise, from a practical perspective, he has a successful brand and presence, but an unsuccessful (non-selfsustaining) enterprise. LeProf. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.223.9.222 ( talk) 15:29, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
This seemed to be overlooked or ignored a few times, so... Jimmy, could you please comment on the article Silgan Holdings? The article was created by a Wikipedia administrator, in exchange for $75.
The Reward Board has existed for over seven and a half years. Its purpose is to compensate editors for creating new content on Wikipedia.
It would be helpful to us to understand your specific thoughts on this matter, because it would seem that as long as the Reward Board is open and acceptable, then businesses seeking to have content created or modified in exchange for money have a legitimate vehicle by which to accomplish that. -- I'm not that crazy ( talk) 20:24, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
I have not changed my opinion from 2006, but it has been misunderstood and misrepresented here. I made the comment "absolutely unacceptable, sorry" as a specific response to a specific proposal from a specific user - one which has been borne out over the years by community consensus continuing to ban the editor in question. To interpret a private comment from email as a general policy pronouncement is deeply mistaken.-- Jimbo Wales ( talk) 13:28, 26 October 2013 (UTC) |
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Also, user sub-pagesAbove, Jimmy advises about |
Camelbinky mistakenly believed above question concerned him, and followed with an unnecessary accusation that "scandal" was the motivation behind the simple request for clarification of Jimmy's position. |
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Hi, Jimbo.
FYI, this morning, one user started a vote to de-sysop admins SpeedyGonsales, Kubura and Zeljko. But, SpeedyGonsales came a few hours later and stopped the vote without any consultation with the community. Fortunately, another admin restarted the vote for later today. IMHO, this is serious violation of rules. We will cover this story on meta:Requests for comment/2013 issues on Croatian Wikipedia/Evidence/Conduct. -- Argo Navis ( talk) 12:56, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
A reader posed a suggestion to Wikimedia at OTRS. The suggestion isn't workable (buy a copy of EB) but the reader linked in an article I had not seen before, which is likely to be of interest to readers here:
The Decline of Wikipedia-- SPhilbrick (Talk) 20:31, 26 October 2013 (UTC)
Thank you Sphilbrick. Yes I caught that. I thought their description of what has occurred on Wikipedia Editor Retention to be spot on.-- Mark Miller ( talk) 02:07, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
Saw that via The Signpost and agree with quite a bit. But was more amused by the Signpost edition headline Your worst nightmare as a child is now featured on Wikipedia. Thought it was about editor, aged 5 years old, or so, bringing an article to 'featured' status. No, just an FA on cabbage. AnonNep ( talk) 13:45, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
Don't know if this is even feasible, but its a thought I had from researching the topic second screen in marketing (btw our article on it sucks, if anyone is interested in working on it, there's a lot of good sources out there I was able to find). Basic idea on what second screen is- using a website for instance to get people who watch your commercial (or tv show) to become more engaged, because statistics show majority of people are on their tablets, laptops, smart phones while watching tv. It got me thinking about what Jimbo mentioned he looks up when I had asked him in a thread above "What do you read on Wikipedia?"... I do the same thing with tv shows and movies I watch too, something will be mentioned or an actor I cant think of the name is on the screen and I use Wikipedia. Wikipedia is unofficially a second screen source. Why not promote it more as such? Encourage this just like Shazam does on commercials for products (such as yogurt) and tv shows ( Modern Family). Just putting the idea out there if someone with some influence around the WMF wants to look into that idea and run with a polished idea. Camelbinky ( talk) 21:56, 26 October 2013 (UTC)