Archive for the ‘Editors’ Category
The Wikipedia Hierachy
This post was submitted to the forum by The Review’s resident Gadfly, Dan Tobias.
The Wikipedia hierarchy (at least on en-wp), from lowest to highest:
- Bogeymen / Arch-Enemies / The Antichrist
- Very Banned Users
- Normal Banned Users
- Blocked Users (supposedly distinct from Banned Users, even if nobody can actually put their finger solidly on the definition of the distinction)
- Users under some limited sanction
- Users with some real or imagined connection to an Evil Attack Site but who are inexplicably not banned or blocked or sanctioned anyway
- Anon IPs
- Recently created accounts
- Established accounts that haven’t done anything, positive or negative, attracting the attention of the inside clique
- Editors with a high edit count, featured article creation, and other achievements, if they’re not too politically incorrect
- Admins
- Bureaucrats, Checkusers, and other users with superpowers
- ArbCom
- Ruling Clique Outer Circle (hangers-on with some friendship with the top cliqueistas)
- Ruling Clique Inner Circle (leaders of the sooper sekrit lists)
- Jimbo (though his influence seems to be waning, so he might fall off the top of the pyramid ultimately)
(However, the composition of those Ruling Clique Inner and Outer Circles is greatly in flux these days.)
Wikia’s “Spanking fetish” site and the use of photographs of children
The below essay (by Review member “Dogbiscuit”) was submitted after Wikipedia Review discovered that Wikia, Inc, the for-profit company founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, were hosting a Wiki called Spanking Art. This Wiki detailed sexual fetish practices relating to corporal punishment, but also featured numerous sexualized images of children and photographs of minors uploaded in innocence by editors to Wikipedia and the Wiki-Commons.
Our discovery provoked protests against “Spanking Art” on Wikipedia itself. One editor, a representative of the Scouting movement whose uploaded photo of boy scouts had been transported onto the Spanking Sex site without permission, demanded answers on Jimbo Wales’s Wikipedia talk page. Eventually Wales personally deleted material from the Wikia site. Later, the entire Spanking Art site was removed, with an accompanying statement made by a representative of Wikia Inc. :
Thanks for the concern. There have been some outside inquiries about the content of the wiki that were very difficult to deal with in a thoughtful way on a Friday afternoon. We chose to remove the wiki from public view while we work with the both the complainants and the community to make sure that the wiki is focused on its mission of documenting adult sexuality. All parties have been polite and responsive and we hope to have the issue resolved soon.
We do reserve the right to remove access to our wikis on the very rare occasion when we decide it is necessary, but the GFDL license means that the content belongs to the community, and we comply with that license by making backups of all wikis available on a daily basis. We will be happy to provide more information as it becomes available. — Catherine
(talk) 03:15, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
Violating Copyright for the “good of the project”
In a follow up to a previous posting Give Us Money And We’ll Give You Free Culture, The Review’s resident culture-vulture, the fieryangel, submitted this post to the forum on 31st December 2007. After reading the article, please follow the thread for more discussion.
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In the latest installment of the WMF fund raising blog, there is one more “Free culture” pitch, this time from the point of view of Wikipedia commons. I’ve already commented extensively about the last “free culture” pitch here, pointing out why I think that this line of reasoning is essentially the same as going into someone’s house and telling them to move out because it’s yours now.
The current poster, who is an active image contributor on Commons, suggests that we all read Larry Lessing’s book “Free Culture” which is available for “free” as in “beer” at this link. I won’t comment on the contents of this book yet, as I’m currently reading it, but I can say at this point that Mr. Lessing does not seem to understand that US copyright law, especially as it concerns individual creators, has changed profoundly since the 1978 implementation of the Bern convention and most of his examples are simply no longer true. I will comment on this book in detail on a further post, once I have time to digest this (it’s a pretty easy read, though…I would suggest that everyone read this, just to get a handle on these issues).
WP:Give US Money and we’ll give you FREE Culture. Another fund-raising ploy…
As a new feature of Opinions and Editorials, some of the best postings to The Review forum will be showcased here. This post was submitted to The Wikipedia Review on December 12th, 2007 by our own resident culture vulture, The Fieryangel. The original post can found here.
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This is one of the things that really gets my goat. As somebody who studies music professionally, I know a lot about the creative process. While the public has this idea that composers and other creators basically live in some sort of world where there are no such things as bills to pay, food to buy, clothes to wash and other such mundane things that make up ordinary existence, these things are often important parts of why certain choices are made in a professional life and why some people either succeed or fail. “Information just wants to be free” should never be understood as “free as in beer”, since composers, writers, artists and others have to make their lives.
Happily for people living today, other creators in the past have fought to create some sort of payment for use of intellectual property to those who create. Beaumarchais was the first important figure in this process, insisting on a percentage of the book at performances of his plays. Beethoven created a new statute for composers by refusing to submit to the old system of royal patronage. Finally, in 1847, the composer Ernest Bourget sued the Café-Concert (think “cabaret”) the Ambassadeurs in Paris for payment for use of his songs and won his court case. This lead to the create of unions of composers such as the SACEM, ASCAP, PRS and others which allowed for payment for use of music. Although there are excesses, I can personally point to situations in which this money becomes the difference between living comfortably (but not lavishly) and being in a poorhouse…
Information just wants to be free, but creators need to be paid. It’s a right to be paid for your work. Why should creators be any different?
Unfortunately, Wikipedia is taking this even further in their latest fund-raising ploy : Give us money and we’ll give you “free” information.
Good sock hunting
In today’s issue, Wikipedia Review determines whether there is such a thing as a “good sock puppet”. According to Wikipedia, its perfectly acceptable to have multiple accounts, so long as you don’t abuse it. But what counts as abuse? Apparently if you were banned for some obscure reason, and come back with a new account to edit productively, then that’s an abuse, while if you are an “editor in good standing” and/or an administrator, and have multiple accounts to either secretly push an agenda or to secretly create a new account, then that’s not abusive at all. It is, however, apparently a severe abuse for Wikipedia Review critics to say to the world what these sock puppet accounts are.
Don Murphy - another Living Person who doesn’t want a Wikipedia biography
On 31st August 2007, Wikipedia Review discussion forums welcomed a new member, ColScott, who began by writing a post about his own personal experiences on Wikipedia, titled “ColScott says Hola“. As at the time of my writing this blog post, the thread was on its 14th page, with 262 replies and 4,395 views, and whilst it did go slightly off topic a few times, it is generally speaking pretty much on track.
As we discovered, ColScott is Don Murphy, who is a film producer with his own studio house called Angry Films, with a modest entry in the Internet Movie Database, and his own Wikipedia article. This issue is a similar one to Daniel Brandt’s, that inspired Wikipedia Watch, and is also similar to many other Biographies of Living Persons issues. But what does it all mean? Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Moore on Wikipedia
Michael Moore, creator of the documentary “Sicko” that criticises the US health system, has now targetted Ted Frank, who is a lawyer who has defended Merck in cases involving Vioxx, who were adversely affected by the movie and is hyper-critical of Michael Moore. Wikipedia’s response has been to label Michael Moore’s web site as an attack site, to delete all references to it, and to go out of their way to protect and support Ted Frank (Wikipedia user THF), including suggestions that he was “outed”, even though he originally called himself TedFrank on Wikipedia, only recently changed it to THF, and is a public figure with a Wikipedia article written about him.
Wikipedia Scanner
On 13 August 2007, Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith released what he calls the “Wikipedia Scanner”, which is available over the web for all to see here.
Should we feel sorry for the Jay-man?
No, of course not!
That’s the simple answer, at least. After all, Wikipedia’s User:Jayjg is Bad News Personified: He’s a POV-pushin’, article-ownin’, checkuser-abusin’, personal-attackin’ son-of-a-whatever. And what’s more, he does it all completely anonymously. In effect, he’s the epitome of Wikipedia’s most questionable aspects, and yet he can hardly be said to be “getting away with it” - he’s at the center of a disproportionate number of nasty incidents that occur on Wikipedia, embattled, criticized, bashed, and targeted by pro-Wikipedians and anti-Wikipedians alike, on a near-constant basis. Very few people actually like him, sort of in the way nobody ever likes the dictator’s right-hand man, even while everyone seems to think the dictator himself is a “pretty good guy.”
And yet, I can’t help but feel rather sorry for him. Why is that, I ask myself? Read the rest of this entry »
Wikipedia Review in the news
Yesterday Wikipedia Review’s RSS feeds picked up on an interesting news article titled Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services: Is the Net’s popular encyclopedia marred by disinformation? written by Ludwig De Braeckeleer for OhMy News International. This article was picked up by no less than 3 of our RSS feeds [1] [2] [3] and seemed to be relevant. This was a news story that seemed to be of a similar stature to the Seigenthaler Sr. vandalism controversy, the Essjay lying about his credentials controversy, the creation of Wikitruth (administrators disastisfied with Wikipedia), and of course the Wikipedia administrator suspected by school campus police of being a murderer (later changed in to “police harassment”). All of these cases had Wikipedia articles created about them, and all of these cases had first been uncovered on Wikipedia Review. Yet on none of these occasions would Wikipedia admit that Wikipedia Review uncovered them. In this case, however, the main set of information was posted on Wikipedia Review, and used as the basis for this case, so surely this time they will admit it?