Printable Version of Topic

Posted by: The Adversary

Whaw: who would have guessed: after years of complaining and raging again "the cabal" on wp; the person to force me out of turns out to be...Dr. Blofeld (T-C-L-K-R-D) ,

May I introduce myself, I am Huldra (T-C-L-K-R-D) on wp (Btw; I have criticized SlimVirgin every way I could for these last few years....except for her silly user-name. As I am probably the only person on WP to have chosen an even sillier user-name )

Now, about 3 years ago, utterly pissed off by Jayjg and Slim, I found my own quiet little corner of Israel/Palestine -articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Palestinian_Arab_villages_depopulated_during_the_1948_Palestine_War

It was a strange little corner of Wikipedia; every now and then some newbie would start a horrible stub, often half in Arabic, with tons and tons of WP:OR. Typically they would only do a few edits (less that 20) and then disappear from WP totally......which then the "clean-up-task-force" (read: mostly me, Al Ameer son, Tiamut, Ashely (when he´s not blocked) ) would come along and clean up.

So we would turn http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Al-Muzayri%27a&oldid=196820747 into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Muzayri'a. And http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Al-Nabi_Yusha%27&oldid=292156293 into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Nabi_Yusha'. And http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Saqiya&oldid=289058981 into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqiya.

Not superb any of them, but at least a decent start. This last one is typical: I think someone simply put the Khalidi-text (in Arabic) through some automatic translation ..so you get gems like "in recent years on the assignment," ...meaning: "in the last years of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Mandate_of_Palestine"

Oh, and some we just never got around cleaning up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ja'una

So, slowly, steadfast during the last couple of years we have been progressing. The huge template has been invaluable...but I could only navigate around it because many of the links were red.

Until yesterday. Blofeld comes along and find he does not like red links, and decides that he will start all the red-linked villages...and turn the whole template into on huuuge green soup. And does just that.

Now, I cannot manage to navigate with it anymore.
Oh, well, Blofeld say he will work on the articles, and he does, but he does not have the sources (books). So far he has added nothing to the "public knowledge", he only copies from web-sites which were freely available, anyway. Re-inventing (or: re-writing) the wheel, so to speak. Now, if actually got hold of the books and educated himself on the topic: great. But I fear that in a short time he will be gone (he has a million other articles to attend too, as he has informed us.)

I liked this comment about reaching 3 mill articles on wp: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard&diff=308439261&oldid=308438956

Well, I leave it to Blofeld to clean up his own diarrhoea, eh, poo. I´m out.

Posted by: Mariner

You have learnt a lesson the hard way

Now you are wiser as to wikipedia

chalk it up to experience

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

I'm always disappointed when I find out the Wikipedia user name of a WR poster, and it turns out to be somebody I've never heard of. Personally, I'd always hoped that the Adversary was Newyorkbrad.

Anyway, happy trails. Will you be sticking around here?

Posted by: Somey

He won't work on the articles to any significant extent - if you press him on the subject, he'll probably make a token effort just to get you to stop, and then he'll just move on to the next mass page-creation nightmare, whatever it happens to be that week. If you "RfC" him he'll claim he's being victimized, and if anyone else criticizes him for it he'll make a big show of pretending to quit Wikipedia forever, and then return to his old habits within a week, sometimes less.

He's one of the worst there is, at least in terms of creating shit content. Maybe the worst. We often focus on WP'ers who are manipulative, pushy, and abusive towards others, which Blofeld is mostly not - but in terms of real, lasting damage to the cause of knowledge and intellectual inquiry, most of those people don't hold a candle to him.

Posted by: Apathetic

There's a proposal up at the village pump to curtain such activities, or at least get someone to vet them...

Wikipedia:VPP#Proposal:_Any_large-scale_semi-.2Fautomated_article_creation_task_require_BRFA

Posted by: Somey

Ha! About frickin' time.

Not that they'll actually do anything about it - Wikipedia's usual modus operandi is to have Jimbo announce to the press that WP is now "more concerned about quality than quantity," all while the site does nothing to stop people like Blofeld from further plunging the shrinking user community into a permanent site-wide maintenance nightmare.

Posted by: One

I saw him at Naked short selling last summer. He chipped in when Janneyryan and JohnnyB256 seemed to be doing a tag team.

Posted by: Somey

It's "her," isn't it? "Huldra" isn't something a guy would call himself, unless he were... you know. AFAIK the word refers to a kind of mythical Scandanavian temptress who lives in forests and kills men who fail to get the job done, if you know what I'm sayin'.

Oops, wait, there's a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldra...

Posted by: One

Oh. I tend to do that. Sorry.


Now you're just going to excite horsey.

Posted by: Friday

I ran into this Blofeld kid once before.. I don't remember where, but it was another case of mass-creating articles with almost no content. In that case, there was already a main article that had all the same info. He appears to earnestly believe that a higher number of discrete pages is always better.

I tried to convince him otherwise and I found him very unresponsive to reason. Almost immediately, he stopped participating in any relevant and useful discussing, and instead started whining about how evil admins are. So I gave up.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Eh, phooey -- Horsey doesn't like this Huldra. Remember, this broad recommended turning me into a gelding! I wouldn't touch her with a 10-foot pole. However, I know a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus who might be interested in chatting her up!




That's why they call him Earnest Blofeld.



Maybe you're just a lousy communicator?



That's my Blo! He deserves a big Horsey kiss!

Posted by: Milton Roe

A shame. Some people (ahem) managed to get enough teeth into WP:REDLINK some time ago to get Blofeld sanctioned for this. If you were willing to make a case of it. I don't think Blofeld's Wiki-rep underwear are quite clean, so he's vulnerable. If you know what I'm sayin. Little bald guy with a neckbrace in a wheelchair just now. No cat in evidence. Needs to meet Bond flying a helicopter, looking for revenge for Tracy....

Posted by: Anonymous editor

Dr. Blofeld is a pox on Wikipedia. He creates thousands of useless stubs without actually contributing anything useful.

He's been making a mess for years. He's pissed off many, but no one can really do anything about it.

I remember where, because you've posted about it before. It was regarding mass-creation of highway stubs.

Posted by: Apathetic

I'm no dentist, but I'm having trouble finding these teeth you speak of ?

Posted by: Tarc

Apparently Blofeld lurks here, as he's on the warpath now;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Personal_attacks

Posted by: nableezy

Since I cant say this on-wiki after a warning for "personal attacks", Blofeld is a cunt.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Oh, I love Blofeld -- good for you, character!

And a big Horsey kiss to Malleus for his input in that smackdown.

But the August Asshole Award goes to Protonk for this pithy comment in the midst of the talk:

"I'd block him for the unbelievably over the top personal attack/harangue, but I don't want the drama, honestly." - Protonk

Yes, he is staking out a damn highland on that one!

Posted by: Anonymous editor

Same old, same old. We saw this with Aitias, who tried to get EricBarbour blocked.
Even if they don't post here, a lot of the most active Wikipedians read here.

You know, because there isn't nearly enough drama provided by the noticeboards.

I guess we can now debate which is the more entertaining result. Aitias starting a thread asking for a block, or Blofeld going around personally attacking people who said mean things about him.

off topic question: what happened to Naerii/Kamryn? I recall she was made a mod, but I haven't seen her around.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Well, now Smashville unblocked him. That was fun.

Posted by: The Adversary

Ah, my very last DYK: "Did you know, that http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Tiamut&diff=prev&oldid=308746538?" (We can take that as a co-nom, Blofeld and Huldra)

And anyway, I am also a http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AHuldra&diff=308742314&oldid=308729874.

Oh boy. I have been working on these 48-villages for 3+ years. Now the "Bible" here is the book by Khalidi (1992) , + Morris (2004). Blofeldt does not, AFAK, have even these (basic) books available. When he starts all these articles about the 48-villages, he *only* copies/rehash material which is already on the net. He, IMHO, he simply does not "add value" to the net doing this. Call that what you want.

And by doing so he chase away those -at least one- who actually did "add value", ie added information which was not already freely available on the net.

I was literally sitting crying my eyes out last night, seeing what he was doing, knowing that it would chase me of WP. I felt run over by a bulldozer. So I don´t really care what he calls me (or I call him). The damage is done.

Ah yes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/Mantanmoreland

(And I´m female! And, eh, born http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian (It takes one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kristen_Eriksen#Hallaien.2C) ....and a hard-core feminist.. (That´s part of horsey that I´m eating in my avatar..yummy.. ) and yeah, I might stick around.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

In yer dreams, girlfriend!

Posted by: Apathetic

It really isn't the end of the world, though.

He has basically tilled the soil for you to plant seeds in.

Can't you sort the articles by quality through a WikiProject or Task force tag?

Posted by: Milton Roe

See the LEDE.

Good red links help Wikipedia—they encourage new contributors in useful directions, and remind us that Wikipedia is far from finished.

So redlinks help Wikipedia grow. They should NOT be killed in unfair ways, just to see them disappear. Creating a stupid worthless stub obviously does that.

In general, a red link should be allowed to remain in an article if it links to a term that could plausibly sustain an article, but for which there exists no candidate article, or article section, under any name.

But like I said, I'm sorry I didn't get to add what I really wanted to say in the NUTSHELL, which is "Unless you have a good sourced contributive article to direct a valid redlink to, LEAVE THE FUCKING THINGS ALONE."

The part about "And if you don't like the color red, go to your reader preferences and fix it so you see redlinks as question marks," is already there.

Posted by: Apathetic

If this is what that means, it should probably be made more explicit. When I read it, I just figured it meant "don't unlink redlinks"...

Posted by: Milton Roe

I like the ones with the soft cores better.

Posted by: Emperor

Do you have permission to copy these books onto Wikipedia?

Posted by: The Adversary

Huh? What do you mean? If you wonder, have I asked Morris for permission to make http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arab_al-%27Arida&diff=prev&oldid=308506823; the answer is no...

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Of course it isn't - what stupid behavior! Besides, this is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit (even Canadians). Nobody owns these articles or the redlinks. Dr. Blo has every right to contribute, just as any of us here have every right to improve upon his work or obliterate it.

Where's Kat Walsh when you really need her?

Posted by: Tarc

/waves to Caspian Blue, who is one too.

Posted by: Emperor

Yes you've thrown a footnote in, but it sounds like you're saying that dozens of articles have been written based on two obscure books.

It seems to me like the authors of those books should have been compensated for their time somehow. Jimmy's getting plenty of traffic redirected to Wikia. When do they get theirs?

Posted by: The Adversary

I really appriciate what you have done, I really do, but I don´t see any solution here where I can continue to work in this area.

The thing is: a) I´m not a linguist, for me it is not easy to keep all these (very) similar-sounding (Arab!) names apart. But I have a strong sort of "visual memory": when I was looking for some, say, Peterson-stuff, I knew I had to look in a village-article positioned in the middle-bottom of the District of Haifa-group. Does this makes sense? Now, earlier, that was easy, as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Tira,_Haifa would be the only, or one of the few, "blue-linked"-article-names in that section. But now, if I don´t remember the name of "Al-Tira", (which I normally don´t)..I have to click 10-15-links before I come to the right one....It was a real shock for me when I could no longer find any of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metawali-villages -normally I could find them blind-folded (well...) ..now they have all disappeared into the "blue soup."

You say he has tilled the soil for us to plant in. Well, I say he has tilled *too much* soil, I cannot find my way around, anymore. Which patch (article) needs more work, which doesn´t?
Before I knew.
Now I don´t.

And the other thing is: we had a very nice little group of editors, who have worked on this for ages. That one person can come along and do exactly as he please, without doing the least attempt to communicate with the "regulars" -is rather disheartening. (When he started making these stubs, I went to his talk-page and asked him to stop...he just removed my comment and continued. Like a bulldozer. As if I didn´t exist. And he is surprised that I take this off-WP?)

Hey, it is as simple as this: I edited WP for fun. After Blofeld stormed into my little corner of WP; it´s no fun anymore. (And boy, am I being diplomatic here.)

Oh, and I really hate all the dramah-thingy over at WP. It is not without reason that my WP-persona was unknown to Sarc -and I assume, most others. I really have tried to avoid "the dramah". Heck, editing in the I/P area is *more* than enough dramah in itself....

Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. I am a collector at heart; "collecting" information about these villages was great fun.

Posted by: nableezy

Of course he has a right to create these articles and Huldra shouldnt have even asked for a block, but he does not have a right to call her a "nasty little bitch". Crying about not saying something to his face through a computer monitor, real un-bitch like.

Posted by: EricBarbour

So why do you keep giving them your labor, freely?

My worthless advice: give it up. Let the Palestinian villages go undocumented.

Blofeld is becoming a major poison on Wikipedia, and since WP loves his smelly
little bottom so very much, he should be allowed to run free--to continue to
degrade their twisted little project.
Eventually it will become utterly useless, and people will stop consulting it.

Just remember: this is an encyclopedia that gives a few very brief, smug and
not-much-informative paragraphs to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Coors, a famous businessman and a major
influence on the Reagan era in American politics. (Discussed in another thread.)

I have another example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Augustine. Former CEO of Martin Marietta,
former president of Lockheed Martin, former president of the AIAA, former president
of the Boy Scouts.....and has a list of awards as long as your arm.
How long is his BLP? Five paragraphs. Maybe 600 words.

And yet, this "encyclopedia" gives a massive, absurdly detailed article (with 133 references!) to the Daleks.

And read the BLP for obscure underground animator (and film festival darling) Don Hertzfeld.
It's FIVE TIMES as long as the one for the far-more-influential Norman Augustine.....

Conclusion: it's totally fucked anyway, stop worrying about it. Let it go.
It doesn't want to be a real encyclopedia anyway. It's lying to itself.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Well, like they say at podiatrist school: if the shoe fits...



Agreed. Believe me, no one in Gaza or Ramallah gives a flying fuck about what you're doing.




Well, goodbye, dear, and don't forget your purse on the way out!

Posted by: Floydsvoid

If I was writing that ad hominem I would've used the word skanky instead, but maybe that's me Not that I would, I don't know you from Adam ... ermm ... Eve ... ermm ... Lilith.

In the "real world", attacks like this just slide off our teflon coated underwear. In the wacky fantasy world of Wikiwonderland this, umm, violation of NPA can be stretched out for years. Committing this faux pas, Doc Blohard has shown his true juvenile colours and has probably lost whatever amount of face he possessed.

You were using red-links as a guide as to what needed to be done. Dr Blofeld destroyed all your red-links, but apparently didn't technically violate policy. In doing so, he has managed to set your progress back a buncha steps. Xeno suggests that there may be other mechanisms by which to track the work that needs to be done. That's an idea worth thinking about. As an aside, I always thought Xeno a bit of a douche-bag on WP but a rather decent fellow on WR. Funny how online personas can change from site to site.

Hang in there!

Posted by: The Adversary

I *only* asked to have him blocked when he was in the middle of creating these articles, as a way of stopping him. IOW, as a way for me to stay on WP. Basically: it was him..or me.

After he had created these articles I made clear that I did not want him blocked..as the damage was already done (from my point of view).

And I much prefer him to call me every nasty word in there is...to him creating these articles that were "drowning" me.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

You noticed that too? And I thought I was being rough on the poor flabby dum-dum. Thanks for the confirmation!

Posted by: Milton Roe

I suppose, but the other is sort of implied. Creating a title-stub with nothing in it just to see the link turn color, is not much different than simply removing the brackets from a redlink. The whole assumption behind the satement that "good redlinks help Wikipedia" is that good redlinks will be allowed to remain as markers, and not killed off as soon as they are sighted, by directing them to a title stub which says nothing more than what the original text in the original article said. What extra information is added to WP by that? None! Information has actually been subtracted, inasmuch as NOW, a colored note that reminds of a link to an article that doesn't exist, is now missing. And yet, the implication is wrong, for the article still really does not exist in any meaningful way. Any more than a town can be suddenly made to "exist" by sticking a BUTTCRACK, population 0 sign by the side of a deserted road, in the middle of nowhere.

Posted by: Cla68

Blofeld once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Cla68/Military_history_project_dialogues#Request to start an article that was redlinked in a campaign box, which I http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Battle_of_Koromokina_Lagoon&diff=prev&oldid=162632317 He likes to start new articles or see them started by others.

Blofeld, since you appear to be reading this thread, when you start a new article, please don't do like you did http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuris&diff=prev&oldid=308521779. To your credit, you tried to fix it with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuris&diff=308740902&oldid=308539022. I would suggest slowing down on the articles creation and ensure that each stub you start adequately covers the subject and is referenced appropriately.

Adversary, you didn't want those articles created because it would make it harder to navigate the template? What's wrong with having articles for all of those redlinks as long as they're done right?

Posted by: The Adversary

Nothing! ..but they will not be done right. At least not by Blofeld. (And if Blofeld proves me wrong on this; I will be delighted....) To "do them right", you need the books/litterature on the subject. Which, AFAIK, Blofeld does not have.

If other editors fix them; wonderful. But it will not be by me, and the (few) editors in wp:Palestine are extremely overstretched...

If Blofeld had not done anything, then I think I could have garanteed that everyone of those articles would have been brought up to a decent standard in the not-to-distant future.
But now? It is an open question.

Posted by: JohnA

And I'd like to see proof of the hard-core feminism in my inbox, preferably without unnecessary clothing, for I am a hard-core masculinist and keyboard-drooler.

Posted by: The Adversary

..sorry, you do not want that.. I am probaly old enough to be your mother...at least I am old enough to be Blofeld´s mother (I think)

...so go drool somewhere else


Oh, Eric, that is a facinating question. And the answer is....it was the most inexpensive hobby I had! (besides reading..)

I am a hopeless collector, normally I collect items which comes under the label of "Scandinavian design". I actually came to WP to write about some of those areas ..then, by chance, I ran into Jayjg and SV, and the rest is history, as they say

I started "collecting" information about the 1948-villages, and, it might sound strange, but I found that just as fun as, say, collecting some of the things I have collected... And a heck of a lot less expensive. Thekosher, and you, & others, always goes on about the "free work" for WP. The problem for me is that I will have trouble finding a hobby as inexpensive as WP.....

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Yeah well let's be fair. For every Blofeld and Suarez indiscriminately creating nano-stubs for every red-link, you'll find a dozen others indiscriminately de-linking red-links. However much we can belittle Blofeld's contributions, the competing immediatist approach requires an order of magnitude less vision and talent, and is much easier to automate.

It seems like almost nobody (except for me and Milt) can stand the sight of a red link. Try this little experiment. Find a high-profile article and add a sentence containing a red link. Within a week somebody will:
a. write a shitty little place-holder stub "so that nobody will fuck with the links", or
b. change the link to plain text "because it should not be linked until it is created", or
c. expunge all mention of it "because the lack of article [circularly] means the topic is not of encyclopedic interest"

That's the heart of the problem: nobody can leave it well enough alone. But if I had to choose which type of automaton should strike first, I've got a pretty good idea...

Posted by: EricBarbour

I know. However, there are other wikis. Some are friendlier than WP ever will be.
You could indeed put articles on Greg Kohs's http://www.wikipediareview.com/Main_Page. Or http://encyc.org/, or http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium,
or http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Info:Main_Page, or even http://wikademia.org/Main. There are many others.

No doubt they would be a LOT happier to have your contributions than WP wiil.....

Posted by: Milton Roe

I still maintain the damage these people have done to WP is incalculable. Jimbo may think he's being loyal to his buds, but what he's actually managed to do is create a bunch of people who are angry beyond measure. People like Bagley/Wordbomb, who seems to have finally come to peace with WP after years of war, are just the tip of it. Eventually some bit of it is going to bring Jimbo down, and he'll never figure it out.


You have to add in the reflux damage to your esophagus and/or cost of the omeprozole...

I've seen people so angry at the "ruling culture" of WP that I've wondered if they're headed for some kind of tumor. Got to count all the costs.

Posted by: JohnA

Unless you're over 60 you're probably in my age range. I'm in my mid-40's and I need all the cheap thrills I can get.

Posted by: The Adversary

But I don´t. Again: go drool somewhere else

Posted by: Milton Roe

So smooth! How does that line work on on-line dating services?

Posted by: The Adversary

One of these days (when I have so much free time ) -I might sit down and find the diffs conserning Marsden (T-C-L-K-R-D) , ..the way he was treated, and eventually banned by Jimbo, still makes me want to go

Basically the whole cabal banged together ..and reverted everything he wrote...though if other editors wrote the same, it stuck! It was a course in "How to make an editor disruptive, 101"

The worst thing is, that Jayjg had -coldly- informed him of the procedure earlier, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Marsden/Archive1#Divided_attention. Then he proceeded to do it.

I was so naive in those days. The thought that you "could not get anything done" on wp, unless you had "friends", really deeply shocked me, it shocked me so much that I did not "absorb" the reality of it.. But I came from a science-background: the very idea that you should "make alliances" and all the other MMORG-stuff was completely foreign to me.

And yes; when we look back and look at which editors/admins Jimbo supported, he had an uncanny ability to choose those without any moral fibre in their body....
Just bad luck, I´m sure.

Posted by: Floydsvoid

Yo, Somey, he's making it http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Dr._Blofeld&diff=prev&oldid=308766922

BloTard, if in 99.9999% of all universes people would call your contributions shit, but in your special Wikiverse people can't say that because of the rules, your contributions are still shit.

Posted by: Emperor

Of course. I like red links. They are one of the most powerful features of the MediaWiki software. Turning a red link to blue is a great feeling, and sucks people into the project.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Not if you do it by cheating.

If the main article says that the primary Buttcrackavia commanders in the Battle of the Barf Sea were J. Larry, J. Curly, and J. Moe, and the middle one is red-linked, it does absolutely NOTHING for the project to create a bio stub for J Curly and put in it the fact that he was one of three primary Buttcrackavian commanders at the Battle of the Barf Sea. Not even if you put military history and bio cat tags on this turkey of a bio stub.

You understand? You've actually undermined the encyclopedia by doing this, because somebody ELSE, who may actually know something more than this minimum information about J. Curly, will see these all as blue links while reading, and will assume that there's probably a bio on him already which contains more info than the main article has. Which it doesn't. HENCE, the main value that a red-link HAS in that situation, has been LOST due to the action of the idiotic obscessive stub-maker and red-link stomper, who simply doesn't like the color of the link.

Posted by: Emperor

I agree, and I'd go as far as saying that one person who puts thought and effort into his writing is worth a thousand obsessive little gnomes. Wikipedia has some incentives for volume though,.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Just to clarify: is this J. Curly or J. Curly-Joe?

Posted by: Somey

Probably just as well that I wouldn't say that about "anybody" there, then.

I'd have to say there's something seriously wrong with this guy, though - I would pity him, if he weren't such a complete menace. Why does he do this? Narcissism? Inferiority Complex? Malice? Is he just attention-starved, or lacks the kind of real-world accomplishments that make this kind of behavior largely unnecessary?

A far more telling sentence from that same post of his was this one: She is still the one who left wikipedia because I tried to help her and decided to slag me off in a place she can't get blocked on. The words "I tried to help her" are indicative of a classic narcissist mentality - I'm doing you a favor by gracing you with my hard work and expertise, and you don't properly appreciate it, so I'm the victim here, not you. And the second part of that sentence is simply nonsense - she hadn't really "slagged him off" at that point, other than to call what he did "poo." I was the one who called him a menace... Her saying that he was causing her to want to leave Wikipedia is more of a way of saying "thanks," as far as I'm concerned.

Earlier, he claimed that he'd made "500 edits" to the articles in this particular maintenance-nightmare incident, as if this somehow proved he was "following up" and "improving" the worthless stubs in question. In fact, in nearly all cases he merely added the exact same three citations to all of the stubs, using copy 'n' paste - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bashshit&diff=308660910&oldid=308518244 - there were literally hundreds of these. So he's not only a blue-linking crap-article bot, he's also a liar. Which, incidentally, is yet another thing narcissists do quite a bit of.

And frankly, how dare this "Protonk" character call Wikipedia Review members "narcissistic"? Pissed off, maybe, but hardly narcissistic... He obviously doesn't know what the word means. And he says this probably knowing full well that Wikipedia itself is the single greatest example of group narcissism in human history.

Sorry, sometimes these people just kind of upset me a bit.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

I his defense, I'm a huge narcissist. Alleged narcissist MBisanz has an account here too, so...you know.

Posted by: The Joy

What was most infuriating was AdjustShift (T-C-L-K-R-D) 's comment towards Huldra when she made her AN/I report.

He's the same fool who protected thekohser (T-C-L-K-R-D) 's talk page and treated Greg like a leper. He's going http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Ryulong, mark my words.

Posted by: Somey

Mass stub creation of the sort this "Blofeld" person does is basically the Wikipedia equivalent of territorial pissing, the sort of thing un-neutered male cats do in alleyways. Whether this is somehow related to his "Blofeld" persona (since in the James Bond movies, Blofeld is often seen holding a cat) is anyone's guess, but he might not even know himself, I suspect.

It would be helpful to coin a new term for this sort of behavior - I'd suggest something like "blueshitting," since it looks and sounds similar to "bullshit" and involves turning links blue. Unfortunately, it's also vulgar, so they won't want to use it on WP itself... Maybe "bluespitting" (with a "p") would work, or even "wikispraying," though that's not as intuitively descriptive.

Alternatively, they could call it "Blofelding," since at this point everyone would probably understand the reference.

Posted by: Grep

I notice that there's rather little interest in whether red or bluelinks are helpful to the reader. If I wanted elementary information on Bashshit and typed it into WP, I would get an article telling me what sort of thing it was. Previously I would have got a search engine giving me three rather impenetrable articles from which I could extract the same information only more painfully.

Now I have nothing but sympathy for anyone who wants to get useful information out of WP. Indeed, this article is only superficially useful, possibly even dangerous, as it purports to give sourced information when, from the discussion above, the author clearly didn't bother to actually verify his references. And that is very dangerous indeed.

But it's not obvious to me that the people who still think, mistakenly IMHO, that WP is capable of being made into a useful encyclopaedia, are wrong to prefer stub articles to nothing at all.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Well, please keep it zipped out and out of sight, or else Kevin OKeefe will try to have it deleted as an attack on Wiki morality.

Posted by: jayvdb

I have created my own copy of Template:Palestinian Arab villages depopulated during the 1948 Palestine War at
User:John Vandenberg/sandbox, with the Dr. Blofeld articles "tagged".

These articles can be "delinked" using https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=User:John_Vandenberg/monobook.css&oldid=308863103.

If other editors in your group are not bothered with the added complexity, my template code can be merged into the official template.

There is also a feature which allows each person customise how stubs are displayed, however it is very simplistic, using only the page size to determine when a link is displayed in a different colour.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Link#Stub_feature

Posted by: JohnA

I don't think it works very well.

I'm just amazed that someone can announce herself to be a "hardcore feminist" and expect people to treat her with respect. If I was to announce that I was a "hardcore masculinist" who expects women to respect me at every turn, then I'd expect abuse for that position because its not as if I would be arguing for equality.

And neither is she.

In my experience "hardcore feminists" have a severe sense of humour failure and a startling incomprehension of the male sex that is rooted in bizarre sociological theories of human biology.

Perhaps I should announce myself a "hardcore white supremacist" and see how well that goes - maybe we'll find out that diversity of personal belief merely extends to those beliefs that one personally thinks are acceptable - which is exactly how I react to "hardcore feminism" that is as unacceptable to me as hardcore racism.

Maybe "The Adversary" will treat males on this board with respect and without condescension - but then that wouldn't be "hardcore", would it?

Posted by: Moulton

http://moultonlava.blogspot.com/search?q=harden your core.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Everyone, sing along with JohnA:

Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Well, roll my breakfast 'cause I'm a hungry man
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll...

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

No, Newyorkbrad is Newyorkbrad, because that's how WordBomb registered me.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

Well, you could have been operating from open proxies. I was just waiting for you to claim to be a friend of the Adversary's uncle, or something.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Hey, with all of those bonuses, stock options and kickbacks that the Arbitrators receive, Brad could easily be Adversary's sugar daddy!

Posted by: everyking

That's a really good solution...I can't see why it wouldn't work.

Posted by: Lar

Which would make him what, 83 ?



I've never felt that The Adversary was treating me with disrespect or condescension. (although maybe the above snide remark is about to change that...) You have to give respect to get it, and I have a good deal of respect for The Adversary and what they achieved on WP and here.

Posted by: LaraLove

He's back at it again. Shocking. This is what he does. Creates thousands of completely worthless sub-stubs, then gets all uppity that people don't appreciate them, promises to expand them, and fast-forward a short time and he just repeated the whole fucked up process all over again on some other subject.

He and a partner or two just created a few thousand German politician biographical sub-stubs a few weeks ago. Most of them were mass-deleted after I nomed nearly three thousand in what was possibly the project's largest mass-AFD to date. His reactions then were pretty much the same as in this situation. Although, I did believe he was going to work on a project about transwiking articles from other languages. I had gotten the impression, and actually thought he had stated, he wouldn't do anymore mass-creations.

Like Betacommand only edits with semi-automation, Blofeld only edits to boost his creation count.

Ya. Typical.

I agree completely, but there's no way to make Blofeld understand what he's stripping others of by wasting the article creation on nothing of value.

Yes, because AdjustShift's time is so precious. It's quite humorous that he considers her complaint about the worthless stubs that have caused countless hours of work for others to clean up, as is too often the case with Blofeld's work, as time wasting.

Clueless admins shouldn't comment on dramaboards. And Blofeld should be banned for failing to grasp, after being told countless times after countless incidents, that his shitty one-sentence sub-stubs aren't worth the energy it takes for the server to store them.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Very few people at Wikipedia seem to care about Wikipedia's readers at all; people who do tend to get shouted down. It's very clear that Wikipedia exists primarily for its writers, not for readers.

Posted by: AlioTheFool

WordBomb registered you?

Posted by: LaraLove

Oh yea, and can a mod split off JohnA's unrelated garbage?

Posted by: EricBarbour

"Blofelding" works for me. Or maybe "Blojobbing"?


Give it a rest.

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

Yes. He didn't like the draft decision I posted for ArbCom in the Mantanmoreland arbitration case, and he e-mailed me opining that it wasn't fair that he couldn't discuss the case with me because he was banned from Wikipedia. I responded that I'd be glad to answer his questions elsewhere, and he signed me up for an account here. I then got several courteous but puzzled e-mails from WR moderators, asking if WR:Newyorkbrad was really me. I'd been following Wikipedia Review for awhile by then, but I'd never really considered signing up for an account here until he did that.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Please tell me you changed your password and email from whatever WB arranged for you.

Posted by: The Adversary

Two things: you are not a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian, are you? I ´m starting to suspect the expression means something different around here.

Secondly: as I understand you, your premise is that there is an equality between the sexes, wrt. say social & economical issues. From experience: I strongly dismiss that premise. But if you want to discuss that further: please go to a proper sub-forum (non-public), where I will gladly discuss with you. I will not discuss it further here.

"Bluefelding""?
The thing is; very early on I started sub-standard -articles myself, and, oh boy, was it exciting to see the article you had started come up as no 1 on google-search after a few days...(even if it was a shitty article).
So yeah: I fully understand/agree with, say, Emperor that this sucks people into the project.

Oh well. Bluefeld, eh, Blofeld claims he wants to help. And I actually think that is what he believe he is doing. The problem is, if someone is mainly motivated by a wish to assist, then he does not behave as Blofeld has done.

It is strange, on one hand, Blofeld http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ATiamut&diff=308727803&oldid=308725519 he likes articles such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_costumes ...but seem not realize that I started that article, and basically Tiamut and I wrote it. And Blofeld came to the 48-villages in the first place because he so much liked a DYK I had just helped made (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Majdal,_Tiberias. )

And then he proceeds to run over me, and ultimately run me off the project.

When he started making these stubs, I ran to his talk-page, screaming to him to stop, but he just removed it http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Dr._Blofeld&diff=prev&oldid=308516857. And when I said I would take them to adf, he removed that with the comment http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Dr._Blofeld&diff=prev&oldid=308523202. And went straight on, creating "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20090818093843&limit=500&target=Dr.+Blofeld." Why listen to editors who has worked in the area for years? Dr. Blofeld knows best. He´s got an http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Dr._Blofeld&oldid=303365632, remember? Why listen to others?

I wonder what he would have felt, if anyone bulldozed him, like he bulldozed me? It´s not that I´m a fragile little flower, (heck, you don´t survive in the I/P area on WP for years being that..)...but this, coming from a guy, who is saying he wants to help? And now he is telling me, that I "approached him in totally the wrong way"??
To Blofeld (yeah, I know you read the Review): Just how do you think you approached me??

I have lost all sense of joy, of fun, I had in connection with working with these articles. So thank you jayvdb, and xeno, (and others who have emailed me), I really do appreciate your offers of help. Honestly, I do. (And no thanks whatsoever to AdjustShift )

And I stand by my old comments: the stubs as most of them stand now, are perfectly, totally useless. They do NOT add any content whatsoever; it is only a copy of what is already on the net.

Now, if Blofeld actually gets hold of the literature, say, at a minimum the books he is adding to the bibliography-sections, and then start adding material which is not already on the net; well: then he might, ..just might do some good. But I´m not holding my breath. He has already told me: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Huldra&diff=prev&oldid=308524243.

Sarc, didn´t you know that Poetlister already did a CU and could http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=17414&view=findpost&p=96646?

Sarc, how could you distrust Poetlister ,
how, how, ..could you? ....

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

I've changed my WR password more than once over the ensuing year and a half, though not particularly out of any distrust toward WordBomb. My e-mail address is still the same as it was -- it's the same address I use for Wikipedia mail and which is posted on the Wikipedia page listing the ArbCom membership -- but neither he nor anyone else has that password so I don't see what the issue is there.

Posted by: Mr. Mystery

Lol... I thought you were someone else. (Slim's moniker lent her edits a sort of spectral quality though, that enabled her to more easily haunt the minds of both her detractors and devotees. Like a dementor of sorts.)

Posted by: JohnA

No, and for the same reason I don't debate racial equality with racists.

Posted by: The Adversary

I love an absurd sense of humour, especially when it is unintentional

Posted by: JohnA

I was right about the (lack of) respect for other's points of view as well.

Posted by: LaraLove

Fantastic example of his narcissism:

March 1, 2008. AN/I about creation of French village and commune sub-stubs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive377

May 7, 2008. AN/I about creation of "{{subst:PAGENAME}}''' is a [[museum]] in Bangkok, Thailand. [[Category:Museums in Bangkok]] {{thailand-stub}} {{museum-stub}} {{asia-struct-stub}}".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive143#User:Blofeld_of_SPECTRE

March 10, 2009. AN/I about creation of unsourced sub-stub biographies transwiki'd from the German Wikipedia about Swiss painters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive186#Dr._Blofeld

There are more, because I brought up the aforementioned issue with German Politicians on AN/I, but I didn't see it in the search results.

Posted by: The Adversary

From that last one was a typical quote: "Does Friday realise that several thousand stubs I've created on wikipedia are now full flourishing articles?????????????????? Does he realise that I am responsible for around 1/65th of all our articles? "

What he should ask is: how many of his stubs are *not* flourishing articles? If he has, by now, created 1/60 of 3 mil.= 50 000 articles. -and "several thousand" are flourishing, does that mean that there are tens of thousands that are *not* "flourishing"?

I really wish someone with scrip-writing ability could write a script, and see how the developement of Blofelds articles compared with other articles started the same time. Say, just as an example; if he started 50 articles on March 10, choose 50 other articles created the same day (in some specific fashion; say the 50 *first* articles) ..then compare the 50 Ba´s (Blofelds articles) to the 50 Oa´s (Other articles). It would be facinating to see the result.
Are the Ba´s as "flourishing" as the Oa´s?

Posted by: Milton Roe

Here's another suggestion which would be harder to implement, but which would produce interesting results: fix the dead-link color so that it is anything but RED.

Another: Fix things so that really short stubs still show up as deadlinks . Say anything shorter than 500 Bytes. That would force anybody who stubs something just to de-deadlink it, to actually add some content. Of course, adding "filler" content added just get over the stub size limit, would be a penalty....

Posted by: Somey

I believe you may be falling for a red herring here, Milton - people like Blofeld say they do what they do because they "don't like red links," but the real reason is because they like to brag about their "new-article count." Any aesthetic issues regarding link-coloring are of no real concern to them whatsoever - if anything, they love red links because they act as a visual signal, like a big sign that says "piss here."

Posted by: The Adversary

But you could fix it so that people couldn´t start articles, unless they were above, say, 500 bytes?

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Oh, come on -- give the Blo Baby a break. He is what he is and no amount of bitching is going to make him into something else. Either deal with it, use your block buttons to keep him off Wikipedia, or move on to something else.

And now for some shameless canvassing: vote for NuclearWarfare in RfA -- now in progress! Go, NW! And I hear he is a good looking hunk -- Adversary, you ought to throw yourself at him!

Posted by: Kelly Martin

It is plainly obvious that Blofeld is stats-whoring; in his demented world self-worth is apparently measured by the number of articles (no matter how crappy) you create.

I also think part of his motivation for autocreating stubs is so that nobody else can claim the credit. They're his stubs, not someone else's, and no matter how much they grow he'll always be able to claim them as notches on his utility belt.

Amazing the sad lives some people leave, isn't it?

Posted by: The Adversary

Now, now, now; don´t you realise you are talking about one who is responsible for around 1/65th of all WP articles?

Posted by: jayvdb

Your second suggestion is already available in the user preferences. See my last post in this thread.

Posted by: Somey

Another thing that narcissists do is to latch on to nearly any positively-reinforcing or supportive comment, and exaggerate that comment's significance while ignoring or dismissing negative/critical comments. In other words, 50 people could post comments to AN/I (or wherever) saying that they hate what he does, but as long as two people post in support of him, he'll later say something like, "lots of people appreciate what I do and support me wholeheartedly," or if he's really far-gone, "most people think I'm doing something positive for Wikipedia."

However, they'll often disengage from a situation when faced with unanimous, or sometimes even near-unanimous, rejection. So I disagree that "no amount of bitching is going to make him into something else" - unanimous bitching might actually make him into an ex-Wikipedian.

Back in the last thread about him, I hadn't really given the problem of mass-stub-creation much thought, to be honest. However, the more I think about it, the more problematic it looks. It may be that I'm overstating the severity of it because this is one thing that both pro- and anti-Wikipedia types should be able to agree on, if they care about maintainability, which is a multi-layered, complex problem. Alas, most Wikipedians don't care about maintainability.

Also, I don't have "block buttons" on Wikipedia...

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Yes, but NuclearWarfare will in about six days! Hooray for NW!

(This message was paid for by the NuclearWarfare for Admin Campaign -- the producers of Wikipedia Review are not responsible for its content.)



Of course not! We're here for the WWE-style drama, the cheap jokes, and the depraved hedonism (pssst -- orgy at Keeper76's talk page at 0400 GMT). These silly articles get in the way of a good time.

Wikipedia is not about knowledge building -- it's about fun, babes and partying!

Posted by: Milton Roe

By gad, another good suggestion!

You wouldn't want to give WP TOO many good suggestions to ignore in a single day, would you? And especially not from WR.

I can almost feel the bad karma back-propagating from future historians. You know that one day some poor bastard will have to study this whole mess chronologically for his Ph.D. in sociology. It will be like http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_n5_v21/ai_7675535/, only more tragic.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Thanks for that-- I hadn't noticed it (though I had noticed the red vs. ! feature to display broken internal links). I cannot get the "page length stub detector" to work at any setting but 0 B. No matter what I set it at and "save", it returns 0 B next time I look at it. Nor does it affect how I see links to short articles (I've tried to see if it was working and setting differently, but reading out wrong on the preference pages-- no, there is actually nothing different in how short stubs are displayed for me).

It has saved all my other preferences perfectly well: I've experimented with changing several of them on the same page, just now (like paragraph justification). No problem. So it's not my computer or software.

Does this feature work for you, or are you just giving me the THEORY on it?

If you can get this thing to work, it's worth re-mentioning in the WP:REDLINK page, as yet one more alternative to seeing red links. Though, of course, Somey may be right that some editors only use this as an excuse for creating new articles. You can hardly blame them when RfA's contain questions like "how many new articles have you started"? As a metric of meaningful work done (far more than editcount, which may be nothing more than spelling errors fixed one-at-a-time, even your own), I'd like to see number of broken internal links repaired WITHOUT resort to creation of short stub (less than 1000 B) or removal of link brackets. That often takes some ingenuity, and at least more thought usually than fixing a spelling error or punctuation.

A lower length limit of 500 bytes (or pick your own number which excludes title-plus-cat-tag stubs) does seem like a good idea for stub-creation, or even stub maintenance (unless it's an orphan stub). Less than this, and you might as well leave the info as a redlink, till you have some decent blob of information at the end of where your link is "pointing."

Again, orphan stubs, which aren't the target yet of any WP links yet, might be exempt. Otherwise, for stubs that are targets of an internal link already, you'd be expected to leave the link "broken" or "down" but put content of a very short stub into somehow into the primary article, much as, according to official policy, you're supposed to do for little bits of WP:TRIVIA

And for the same reason, no? In both cases aren't we talking about the same basic rules intended to prevent the same thing-- to keep random floating bits of information from sitting around isolated on their own pages, or segregated in their own sections, like wallflowers at a dance?

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

That was pretty good.


:yawn:

See http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=25611&view=findpost&p=188437 or better yet start a thread that is actually about this.


Yeah well what if I'd like several threshold numbers, like 3k: "what I might consider a stub", 1k: "what the average person might consider a stub", and 175b: "probably written by Blofeld"...

The best approach might be to hide the byte count somewhere in the html for the link, and let various users' js decide what to do with this info.

Posted by: Milton Roe

I'll admit it's a perennial. But being a perennial there's nothing to do but mention it every so often in hopes that some newb of an admin or steward or board member or something will see it and say: By Jove, what a capital idea!. You did that yourself, so don't blame me for doing it.


Well, even the minimal one-threshhold system is not working now.

In the name of deliberately hurting the system so that sighted users won't have something the non-sighted can't use (the very idea! ), there are all kinds of informative things about linked documents which could be added to the link as it is viewed and moused such as (in theory) article size in kB along with the other piped hidden information that you see now when you pass a mouse or curse over the link. That would all be very useful in looking at an internal link and deciding if you want to click it.

But no, it's apparently not politically correct to do stuff like this (this is "accessability" policy), and one of the effects of that is that not only can you not get length info about linked articles by passing a cursor over the link, but a suggestion to simply unlink all single-word links also got shot down, on "accessiblity" grounds. Which leaves us with an endless war about how notable a single word has to be, in order to link it at all! Even though of course THAT varies from reader to reader, as well.

Bless WP-- there is no inherent advantage given by Wikis and hypertext that they haven't somehow found a way to hobble, handicap, cripple, castrate, or otherwise somehow fumble of drop.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Well right now my browser is set to show the exact url of the link when hovering over it, rather any clever (and potentially misleading) "tool tips" or "flavor-text" or whatever you wanna call it. The addition of meta-data about the linked page would be one of few compelling reasons to change this setting. Otherwise it could be displayed in some other format, like a drop-down box (see WP:NAVPOP).

Posted by: WikiWatch

Every collaborative project seems to bring out people, like Blofeld. Over at Citizendium they have a user called Howard C. Berkowitz, who creates up to 50 stubs (called "Lemma articles" over there) every day, then goes onto another new set of stubs, and so on. Apparently he joined the project because amongst other things he didn't like the way George W Bush was being portrayed on Wikipedia. ie. a pisser behind the bush.

Posted by: jayvdb

I experienced the same problem with the preferences UI, but the feature is working for me. I end up with class="stub" on these links.


I think I set it to 2K in my preferences.

I would also prefer that the software exposes more information and lets the css/js decide how to display the link. The size of the article would be a good piece of information, but I would prefer it to be based on the number of revisions. It would also be nice to have a different class for links to dab pages.

It would be possible for someone to write a javascript tool which fetches these attributes about each link on the page and alters the presentation.

I considered that approach to fix the problem that The Adversary/Huldra is having: "iterate over the list of articles in the navbox, and dull out the link to any created by Dr. Blofeld". But it looks like the "regulars" who edit this template would be happy to put up with the extra code required to allow a CSS only solution.

Posted by: Nerd

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I am fascinated to know how Blofeld has as much spare time as he does. I mean, he edits all day, every day, without so much as a break, ever. And he's been doing this solidly for three years. I personally cannot sit at a computer all day long - I have to go out for some air, or go for a walk, or do something else. Blofeld doesn't seem to.

As others point out, he doesn't seem to understand how worthless his stubs are. Stubs are, for the most part, worthless anyway, but one line stubs especially so. Here's why: if the topic is notable enough, it would have been written about to an extent that would make an article longer than a stub. If people, for whatever reason, want information on a hamlet in Indonesia, or a minor German politician, or a film released in a small town in India in 1933 they will go to somewhere that has more information than "X is a Y {{stub}}".

Until the articles he creates have some substance, they are essentially worthless. It is sad - he could be using all his free time to work on existing articles, instead of bloating the article count. Wikipedia recently hit 3 million articles - that's counting all his useless stubs. I wonder how many articles there are that are actually decent?

Lara, do you have a link to the AFD on the politicians? I'd like to read it.

Posted by: Apathetic

IANAL, but Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive553#Semi-automated_creation_of_approximately_3.2C000_unreferenced_sub-stub_BLPs and Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Claus_Peter_Poppe

Posted by: Nerd

Blofeld: "Over half of them do not even violate BLP..."

I stopped reading his rant when I saw that.

Posted by: LaraLove

I just saw this gem from Protonk: "I'm fine w/ these articles being created. I don't think it is necessary to hassle people or create a rule that prevents the mass creation of like articles. Protonk (talk) 2:14 am, 24 July 2009, Friday (27 days ago) (UTC−4)"

Protonk, just know that for however much disdain you have for me for my participation on WR and for whatever else, I think so much less of you.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Well, you know that Protonk was once in the Navy. Would it be a copyvio if we gave him a theme song that riffs on the tune of a well-known cartoon figure:

I'm Protonk the Sailor Man
I'm Protonk the Sailor Man
When my Wiki's work is finished
It looks like chopped spinach
I'm Protonk the Sailor Man


Or maybe I should leave the song parodies to Moulton?

Posted by: grievous

Self-fluffing creation of meaningless stubs aside, this guy quite possibly has one of the most ridiculous usernames in WP history.

Posted by: The Adversary

Nope. I beat him.

Posted by: LaraLove

I got an email from a butthurt Blofeld with threats to me and everyone else who commented here negatively about him. Not physical threats or anything to be taken seriously, just hardcore with a keyboard stuff. Internet tough guy syndrome.

He also dropped a wall of text on my talk page that I scrolled to, saw a list of articles, and quickly went back up to the history tab to undo. Feel free to inspect that, but I have no desire to read it.

I've created a handful of articles, and trust that my quality stats are far better than his. I don't care if he's got two FAs out of tens of thousands of creations. He's still got tens of thousands of worthless articles on the list.

Posted by: Apathetic

I'm partial to A Nobody's prior username, Le Grand Roi des Citrouilles (King of the Great Pumpkins)

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Blo should hold the phone -- Horsey isn't attacking him. In fact, I remember that Blo used to have bio stuff online that said he lifted weights and was into surfing. Hmmm, he might be giving Steve Smith a run for the money in the hunk department. I want to see some photos of this Wiki version of Laird Hamilton. Who knows - Blofeld might be able to ride the waves into Adversary's romantic fantasies!

Posted by: Nerd

I did always wonder what that meant. It suits him actually.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

I had no idea that those two were one and the same.

(Also, it's "Great King of the Pumpkins", not "King of the Great Pumpkins". What kind of Canadian are you, anyway?)

(One of my favourite account names is, I think, an Awbrey sock: My Lebowski is Bigger Than Your Lebowski.)

Posted by: LaraLove

His user space is sprinkled with images of himself.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

That's not him. He is not Moshe Dayan or a white cat (at least I don't think he is a cat - not that I should be casting doubt on other quadrupeds). I think the only photo we had of the lad were a shot of blue jean-encased legs and black boots -- that would rule out the cat (and, I presume, Moshe Dayan).

Posted by: Apathetic

The french commune articles (all thirty thousand of them) are being slowly improved, one bot (or semi-automated) edit at a time...

i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Saint-Vincent-les-Forts&action=history

Posted by: Nerd

Oh? The only image of him I ever saw was of his http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/Blofeld.jpg. (I'm not going to embed the picture because it's far too large and I don't know how to shrink it).

Surprisingly he's not a teenager either, but in his late 20s according to his profile.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

We already went over this in another discussion about Lara's used underwear: he is a fuzzy-haired, flabby, enervated, anti-social, uncouth, mean-spirited, hygiene-challenged, oxtail stew-gobbling, Tanthalas39-worshipping, irresponsible, capricious, environmentally unfriendly, cigarette mooching, tone deaf, uncoordinated, egomaniacal, cheats-at-poker, excessive Nietzsche-misquoting, Mila Mulroney-obsessed dum-dum.

Really, do I have repeat myself?

Posted by: Apathetic

Uses a Dell keyboard, I see... Same one I have here =]



One who uses Google translate to pretend he knows French?

(and subsequently, is too lazy to repair up obvious errors - I like King of the Great Pumpkins better anyway ;p)

Posted by: Eva Destruction

"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJennavecia&diff=309094960&oldid=308908169" I think you hit a nerve.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

I think the initial complaint against him on the Palestinian thingie was stupid, but that he ultimately overreacted and is still overreacting.

I will gladly take a minority view: If he is reading this, he should know that I believe he is trying to do the right thing. He may not know how to do it, but the heart is in the right place. I know first-hand that Blo is a genuinely nice guy.

Blo baby, listen to Horsey - just shake it and don't worry what people or barnyard animals say about you.

And, Blo, if you have some beach photos, please post them!

Posted by: LaraLove

I though the images of the bald guy were him. I just assumed he resembled the actor and thus went with that persona. Well, whatever. I recall the image of the leg and remember thinking he looked like someone with class. You know how rare it is to see a guy wearing jeans that actually fit him? Much less designer jeans. Jesus. Too rare.

Interesting. I didn't read that, but whatever. Seems hypocritical, considering his initial email chastised me for off-wiki comments. Regardless, subsequent emails have been productive and he says he'll be focusing on article improvement rather than creation now. I hope this is something he is being honest about and that we'll see more quality work from him. He's apparently capable of it, as I'm told is displayed in his list of works.

Posted by: LessHorrid vanU

I wonder if a bot could be written to auto delete stubs (those classed as stubs by whatever bot is used for that) that are below a certain size - 250kb for a two short or one long sentence? - and have not been edited for over a year? This returns that potential article to a red link, one which will hopefully be either created as a substantial article or at least quickly expanded as per Adversary and her (strange how quickly a brief comment changes a username into a person) co-editors were wont to do. Might even consider floating the idea at the Village Pump.

Posted by: Apathetic

It could easily be written, but would it be approved?

(P.S. I think you mean 250b. Second time I've corrected you on byte sizes! ;>)

Posted by: everyking

My problem with Blofeld's stubs isn't that they're short or lacking detail, it's that they are typically created in total or almost total ignorance of the subject matter. He created a whole bunch of substubs in an area where I'm active, Gabonese politics, some time ago, and they were riddled with problems.

For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Simplice_Guedet_Manzela&oldid=266593664 of the article on Simplice Guedet Manzela mistakenly uses a female pronoun and fails to mention the most notable aspect of his career, that he was secretary-general of the ruling party for years. Clearly the article was created by someone who didn't know the first thing about the subject. In another case, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guy_Nzouba-Ndama&oldid=266600379 of the article on Guy Nzouba-Ndama describes Nzouba-Ndama as simply a "a Deputy of the National Assembly"--it does not mention that Nzouba-Ndama has been President of the National Assembly for over a decade and is one of Gabon's most prominent politicians. (Compare the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Nzouba-Ndama--still labelled as a stub, but it reports all the important details. There are dozens of other cases like that, but I don't have the time or inclination to expand them all, so they remain in the condition Blofeld created them.) So I would say: if you want to create a substub of one or two lines, go ahead, but only if you have some basic understanding of the subject.

Posted by: LessHorrid vanU

Feh! When I was at school the smart kids at maths were allowed to learn computer programming - I took typing because it meant I was the only other guy in a class of 30+. Computer programming, it turned out, was how to punch holes in the correct sequence in reels of paper tape - today I can write good English faster than most of the population on my pc. My brother, who wrote programs as a living, has employed me to write up his instruction manuals and to test his software from a user only perspective.

I am, however, thankful that there are those who understand the quantitative values and can point our the errors in a non patronising way. Thank you.

our = out (I think I will allow the hubris to engulf me rather than just correct the original error...)

Posted by: EricBarbour

This is all pointless.

Speculating on how to prevent mass stub-creation is all well and fine. But as long as the mucky-mucks drag their feet on implementing flagged revisions, while allowing little shits like Blofeld to run free on their database, filling it up with crap.......

Nothing's ever going to be fixed over there. Face it. The whole thing is going to continue declining, until it becomes a joke and a dark, ugly footnote to Internet history. The Something Awful of wikis.

Posted by: Robster

Isn't that some level of threat? Doesn't WP pretend to have rules about making threats?

I would have hauled him in front of the Star Chamber ArbCom and let Dr. Blofeld see what real evil is.

Posted by: LaraLove

And that's how you and I are different.

Posted by: Robster

You know that if you had been the one to make any kind of implied threat, you'd be defending yourself in front of the Best and the Brightest (cough)... the system is a mess, but why not use it to your advantage when you can?

Get him bounced for a while for threatening you, and the world will be safe from stupid auto-created stubs... at least for a little while...

Posted by: Malleus

Perhaps because Lara and I share the view that aping what the bad people do is no way to make things better? Just a thought.

Posted by: LaraLove

Indeed. If it had been a serious threat, I may be inclined to consider it; but like I said, it was internet tough guy stuff, not a physical threat.

I'm not intimidated by people. Why would I make an issue of it?

Posted by: everyking

Normally that would be understandable, but as I recall Dr. Blofeld is an evil genius, so in this case maybe you should be concerned. Who knows what sort of mad scheme he's cooking up at this very moment?

Posted by: Cock-up-over-conspiracy

Ha!

You got snitched on by that ace snitch and serial admin cock-sucker Caspian blue ... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=308780066.

But - without knowing what this was all about - I rather respect you for having stated

I am sorry, but was that written about Blofeld or Caspian blue? (who I see has entered back into the Japan-Korean fray already).

It must really piss Koreans like her off to think that 'Korea' will always come after 'Japan' when listed in the Roman alphabet. I mean, does it really take http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Japan–Korea_disputes&diff=prev&oldid=306996455 to accuse the Japanese of plagiarism when one would do!?! Talk about rubbing it in ...

I tell you, the snitches really lay on any connection to this website when it comes to underlining their snitching.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Oh, I think there are other ways where Rob and Lara are different!

Posted by: Cedric

Posted by: grievous

All you have to do to get a long list of FA credits is go to the FA nominations page, pick some that look likely to pass, do some gnomish editing on them, then claim credit for nursing them to FA status. Since no one person "owns" an article, who would question you?

Posted by: Milton Roe

I also want to put in my vote for typing as one of the more useful classes I had in high school. I got a crappy grade, but when I emerged I could do a very slow 20 10 WMP in the correct two hand style, with lots of looking. I took me decades to translate that into full touch-type at 80 WPM. But once you do it right, it's a self-practice thing and you don't need any more instruction to get better.

So typing gets my vote for THE mandatory high school class. Followed by "Health," but only if they tought you really useful stuff like CPR, first aid, use of antibiotics, gum disease and tooth care, STDs, contraception, etc. Which, of course, they don't.

Posted by: Malleus

I would, as I have challenged others who've tried that trick.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

On the other hand, I'm glad I never took typing. Why? Because I started typing at age 8, and, being self-taught, I learned a typing style that is idiosyncratic and inconsistent with the "standard" method (to the point that those funky "natural" keyboards with the split down the middle are almost unusable for me). Despite this, I still type 90-100 wpm (on a good day, at least). I can't imagine that a typing class would have let that stand.

Posted by: The Adversary

I read the "The Bell Jar" when I was 19, and swore I would never take a typing class. (Read the book and see why). One of the most stupid mistakes I ever made (Sylvia Plath: you have a lot to answer for!)

I would, possibly, put "personal economics" above, or at least along side "Health". After being stunned by teenagers, or 20somethings, who think that paying 1-2 % interest per month on a loan isn´t too bad....

Ok, ok, I will beat Eric here:

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Gee I never realized Mike Myers and Derek Jacobi looked so alike.

Posted by: LessHorrid vanU

I even briefly looked for a picture of the archetypal "glamour girl pose" of a (nude) girl bending forward and looking back over her shoulder to the camera, with a finger held against her lips* with an expression of mock surprise... and then realised it would be even more ironic to simply describe it.

The question is; would it also be considered as similar to the two images above?

*Edit: The ones between her nose and chin...

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Well we'd have to see it to know for sure. Which finger dare I ask? Index vs. pinky would seem to be the most significant difference between the previous two, and one does not even notice that at first glance.

Posted by: Moulton

Index finger to the corner of the mouth signifies a contemplative demeanor.

Pinky finger to the corner of the mouth signifies evil intent.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Egad...we're talking about being fingered by Dr. Blofeld?

Posted by: Anonymous editor

He got himself renamed to Himalayan Explorer.

Not a fan of renames in general, unless there's a legitimate reason.

Posted by: Eva Destruction

I agree with you but in this case I can see good reason; "Blofeld of SPECTRE" sounds like a name a kid would pick and (assuming he's not a kid) I can understand not wanting everyone's first assumption on seeing you to be "immature".

Posted by: Nerd

And Himalayan Explorer doesn't sound like a name a kid would pick?

LET'S GO EXPLORING!

Posted by: One

Oh, God. He does this with BLPs too? It's bad enough when you click a "blue link" to find no useful content, but thousands of Google-topping blank slate names is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Claus_Peter_Poppe--worse than Pumpie, even. Maybe if he had a community ban against creating new pages, he might have some time to add content to some of his stubs. Maybe he could even make them all worthy articles (unless the heat death of the universe occurs first).

Public nuisance.

Posted by: LaraLove

My thoughts exactly. I don't recall if it was me or someone else who proposed he be banned from new article creation, but his reaction was not a good one. He's promised to lay off the creation and focus on expansion, though. So we'll see.

Posted by: One

Yeah. I've just caught up to the end of the thread.

Is he still reading? Please do focus on expansion, Himalayan Explorer.

Posted by: LaraLove

Yes, he is. He sent me another email a few minutes ago. He requests attention be directed to Special:Contributions/Himalayan Explorer.

Posted by: The Adversary

Just the idea to start hundreds of BLP articles in... 2009.....makes me at a total loss for words ...

BTW, he emailed me saying I missed "All the fun", citing articles which had give him DYKs, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barfiliya and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashshit.

Well. "Barfiliya" was an article I was developing in my user-space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Huldra/Sources#future_article:_Barfiliya.2C_District_of_Ramlah).

And "Bashshit" appeared as a DYK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bashshit: "Did you know ... that a 1999 excavation by the Israel Antiquities Authority inside a sewer pipe in the depopulated Arab village of Bashshit revealed ceramic remains dating back to the Early Islamic period?"
AAAAAAAAAAArrrrghhhhh! For those who don´t know: Bashshit has one of the finest old shrines in Palestine, (though the present building is probably not older than the sixteenth century......pictures can be seen http://www.palestineremembered.com/al-Ramla/Bashshit/index.html.) And that is not mentioned at all in the article! Sigh. (Hint: read Petersen, p.110)

As for another 1948-village-article which has given Blofeld a DYK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulayl, District of Safad:
Well, Dr. Khalil Rizk put the Khalidi-stuff of all the District of Safad-articles on the net, http://www.villagesofpalestine.com/safad.htm, (and by Khalidi-stuff, I mean material from the 1992 Khalidi book: "All that remains"). Which Blofeld/H.E. has not linked to from his articles. But, compare:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulayl
with
http://www.villagesofpalestine.com/Tulayl.htm....?

Finally: I said I NEEDED the big http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Palestinian_Arab_villages_depopulated_during_the_1948_Palestine_War ...that template was what I "lived by" on Wikipedia, so to speak. After Blofeld/H.E. went and "made my whole world blue", ie started articles on every single village, John Vandenberg went and fixed it---so the template could appear "red&blue" again. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Palestinian_Arab_villages_depopulated_during_the_1948_Palestine_War#coll..or_not)
But what does Blofeld/H.E. do then? Ah yes: removes the "big" template from every single article ...(and replace it with several -all blue-"broken up"-small-and for me: totally useless- templates.....)

AAaaaaarrrrghhhhh.........

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Wow, this guy is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Keep at it, Himalayan Explorer -- you're keeping up busy!

Posted by: Somey

As they say, the darkness of vanity is often accompanied by the brightly-glowing need for personal retribution. I forget who said that now, actually. Maybe it was me...

Anyway, perhaps he'd like to http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showuser=13284 why he believes WP should become an ongoing maintenance nightmare well into the next several decades...?

Posted by: everyking

There is a big difference between naming and shaming someone by pointing out low quality edits and threatening corrective punishment, which is the instinctive arbitrator reaction to any situation.

Posted by: Somey

I was under the impression that he'd been warned, if not rebuked, for that behavior before, though I personally only recall one such occasion. I/we often criticize WP (and ArbCom) heavyhandedness in their approach to these kinds of things, but this is one case where it's almost certainly warranted. And needless to say, if it were up to me, I'd get a bunch of admins together to go back and delete some (if not most) of those stubs.

Posted by: Dr. Blofeld

Hi! Finally I have been able to get through here and set the record straight. Well you might have heard I abandoned my old account for creating those stubs . Maybe your grilling of me at WR was what was needed to really make me think about the short term consequences of drilling small stubs and not to be so engrossed in planning covering topics. But I am honestly not a vindictive editor.. Believe it or not I do have respect for the views of you guys as at the end of the day the site is supposed to be enjoyed but if people really hated those stubs and me as a result this is not good. The thing is I do have good abillities to write articles but because the amount of notable content missing was often unbearable I resorted to low grade stubs to try to start as much as I could. This was not for narcissistic or malicious reasons, genuinely it wasn't I actually thought I was doing what was right. However recent events and hitting 3 million and realising the amount of shite articles that exist on really notable subjects
as really made me stop and think. Personally I think it is better we have half decent articles on notable topics than drilling in new stubs to add to the workload. I have been trying to get hold of you for ages as I really do care about content and am actually a person with feelings too!

You'll be pleased to know I abandoned my old account and started afresh a week ago and have recently been fleshing out articles on German politicians and Greek museums like Dion Archaelogical Museum, even Bashshit if you care to look not to mention adding references to articles in the BLP list (on my item list check my new user page) and rmeoving spam from south asian articles like Pakistan. I am actually much happier creating good content and slowing down rather than having to resort to robot mode. I will still create the odd new articles every now and again but will try to make it a start class if possible and maybe DYK.Will never create a "sub stub" again, that is a promise, I mean it. As yet nobody on WR has really acknowledged what I've been doing with my new account and that I've reformed and that I really dislike stubs as much as you guys do and that I only did them to try to work towards improving coverage in the long term however bad an attempt
it was. I geuinely am very sorry for the trouble it caused.. A few days ago I actually redirected hundreds of politician stubs back into a list because it was pintless having them and I want to help cleanup, You are just waiting to see "Dr. Blofeld" spewed across the new pages in robo format. Never again, seriously. Only time will tell, and if everynow and then you check to see what Himalayan Explorer is up to these days you might even be pleasantly surprised....

Although it really is time to change focus on wikipedia anyay and focus on quality, really it is very worrying when you hit a random category and you just know most of the articles will either be short or unreferenced, I am admittedly imfluenced by what others say and think of me and if people view me in hate as this robotic kid it is definately time to change. I do thrive on encouragement, as most people do, and have always been affected by criticism, if I can help make people happier with doing something useful rather than problematic I would prefer not to have a lot of people hating my guts. I think time is too short to not enjoy things and if none of us enjoy short stubs (it wasn't exactly a bundle of fun for me creating them either) then it will be no more. Given that I have had a lot of eperience as Blofeld on wiki this has not been an easy thing for me to do and I hope you at least show me some respect for changing and now focusing on expanding those stubs that
that that "bastard" Blofeld created.

I am equally keen to support Huldra, and am willing to do what takes to convert problems into something beneficial.
Keep in touch if you want, I am, well, a little different from what was said about me in person, anyway.... And the Blofeld name was not because I am a juvenile spotty teenager, I'm 26 years old and actually dress quite well and do actually have interests in playing guitar and piano and sports although I admittedly spent way too much time on wiki as I'm sure a lot of people can confess to, but we have a lot of potential which needs to be fullfilled!!... The name was to provide a bit of relief from the stress and serious issues that often go on there at ANI etc and to try to not take myself too seriously....

Anyway thanks for whipping my arse into shape, I definately feel better doing what I#m doing now, but please try to not attacking me as this dreadful lowlife and at least recognise I have changed because I do partly respect you views on wiki and partly feel the same way as you do in regards to quality anyway as hard to believe it may seem, this is why I give enough of a damn to have abandoned my old account and ending it. I really hope you will start to see me in different light and that I have feelings, as well as goals to work towards on wikipedia and want it to be an enjoyable site as much as you guys do, and most of all, I am on your side!!.

Now you are free to burn Blofeld on the stake if you think that would put an end to all his "Aevil" but I would rather move on and work towards expanding those stubs that Blofeld created as well as cleaning up the shite from the Pakistani and Indian place articles. Man have you seen them? They glorify the local taxi driver as a famous dude LOL. List of 2500 schools in CAP LOCKS. The thing is we have recently gained 17,000 new articles not through me but by other people, as we speak there are people generating one liners about insects without any content, it will always be a problem until something is done to curb growth. IN thinking about it, it might not be a bit idea to set a minimum new article at say 1 kb of actual text to stop sub stubs being generated in future. I for one am certainly open to this and would be happy to discuss. On a personal note, if you want an article expan ded please let me know, as long as it isn't about something like physics
or maths LOL. Name a geography or cultural article you want expanded and I'll see what I can do.

Best regards,

P.S. I like you too Horsey.....

Posted by: Dr. Blofeld

The dilemna I always faced was balancing the sheer amount of missing notable content with quality. I found it was practically impossible to tackle many articles and spend a lot of time on each one, because as I was editing one article I knew we we were missing a huge amount on similar or other topics and I just couldn't accept it. In theory I think the articles that Blofeld created and other users have are typically articles about solid encyclopedia subjects and are done in good faith because they genuinely want to improve the encyclopedia in the long run. (Notice they don't create articles about Pokemon characters or 14 year eastern 24th league European footballers).The problem lies in that the sheer amount missing means that quality is often affected because of numbers. Potentially every article given the traffic of wikipedia could be expanded fully by whoever is willing to, the problem is that most editors tend to tackle maybe a handful that they can manage and the other stubs are left lying around. I do think we should have good articles about towns and rivers and wildlife, these are traditional encyclopedic subjects which we should be covering. The problem lies in the amount of editors actually needed to expand them. We have seen much evidence that actually a lot of stubs do get expanded but others don't, it is not always easy to tell. The Greek museums for instance I'd have thought would have generated much more interest. Might I also point out if there was something in place that could replace lacking human creation with much more information and pay a lot more attention to starting them with more content and more consistently and reliably then I am certain these sub stubs would not be created. Above all I think most of the guys who have created stubs enmasse on wikipedia is because they kind of see it as "planting seeds" into a project they genuinely want to see develop. I think a lot of people often assume bad faith. I am hoping that the new transwiki project can actually do something much more efficiently than Blofeld ever could.

I am BTW referring to a new editor called Tim somebody or other generating new self referenced stubs on creepy crawlies. At least if they were generated with a external reference or proper citation that others give.... I am sure he is doing it in good faith, but having seen his IP account when he forgot to sign in it makes me very concerned....

Posted by: RMHED

Yo Blo, 'tis obvious you care about da 'pedia, dat you care too much 'bout da 'pedia be da problem. Let it go Blo, da 'pedia is eating into your soul bro.

Time for an extended no show. Blo take a breather and excise the hold of the 'pedia.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

You need to stop watching Fred Williamson movies.

Posted by: Apathetic

Glad to see you turning over a new leaf.

Best of luck!

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

And, Blo baby, don't be a stranger here -- I could use some tag-team help with Xeno.

Which reminds me: Tag, fuzzy head <Horsey whacks Xeno across the buttocks> you're it!

Posted by: everyking

You deserve a lot of credit for this. Thanks for accepting the criticism (and looking past the mean-spirited parts of it), and I hope you keep up the good work on Wikipedia.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Emphasis on "good work" -- really!

Posted by: The Adversary

And welcome to the Review, Blofeld/HE! I will keep this short, as my computer is failing (as of this weekend, it no longer types n´s & m´s & spaces, so those characters has to be "copied & pasted"...making typing something akin to walking with two broken legs......and I learned today that my new computer will take two weeks delivery (special configuration, etc ))

Anyway, I am very happy that Blofeld/HE now wants to concentrate on expanding articles: good! (and there are many ways to expand the 48-villages even without the proper books ; I will return to that later, I hope).........butIfItrytotypeayoreowIwillturisae.....

Posted by: Malleus

Amen to that.

Posted by: Dr. Blofeld

Thankyou all. Huldra you may be pleased to know I got the singular big template restored which required about another 350 edits to restore! Anyway the template is back we just need to find a way to eat up the blue soup and turn it all into one grand Michelin starred main course..... It will take time, but if you use John's coding to hide the stubs it should now work... Meanwhile I'll gradually flesh out the stubs so they at least contain some info, safad and tulkarm are the main ones I'm ploughing through now, I'm past half way with adding now anyway... Once I have fleshed out the stubs, all of them with some info later I will try to turn a few of them into start class articles using Benny Morris??'s book and any other book sources I can find on google books. Now I do have a LOT of articles to expand and cleanup but I am interested in your field and will happily contribute what I can every few days to fit in with my other editing (NOT stub creating)!!!

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Hey, Blo, nice work on the DYK for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma,_Palestine

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Dunam is an ambiguous measure of land area. I think the tables should be converted into acres/hectares or square miles/kilometers.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Still, Blo did a great job on this article -- sort of refutes the crap dumped on him as being a stub machine, no?

Posted by: Dr. Blofeld

Officially the area was measured during the 1945 census in dunums. This is used is all of the other Palestinian articles including the ones Huldra has written. Myabe there should be a conversion option in square km/hectares but the fact remains dunums is officially given in the statistics.

If you really want to see a good expansion check out http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Culture_of_Tunisia&action=history Culture of Tunisia, transwikied last week. Also see one of my latest expansions from a one line stub, Naqa, an ancient city in Sudan. Scheduled for DYK later this week.... I have expanded some more Palestinian village articles but couldn't find enough info to quite make it to DYK...

Posted by: Apathetic

Take a break from that and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Xeno/sandbox2&oldid=313164307 before I nukez0r them ;p

Posted by: Malleus

Dunums or no dunums, I continue to be very impressed with the effort you're putting into this.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

That would be fine. Just something to think about in advance if you plan to add similar information to other articles (perhaps thousands of them).

Posted by: thekohser

In the interest of disclosure, it was Blofeld who created the Bob Welch song articles I had requested, and now my money is (slowly) being converted by PayPal into British pounds.

Funny what strange bedfellows Wikipedia forces together!

Posted by: nableezy

Me too, you're not a cunt. I'm sorry for saying that you were.

Posted by: The Adversary

Yes, great to see that Blofeld, or rather HE, is expanding the articles, hope he will do the rest of the District of Safad-articles, too...they are all there: http://www.villagesofpalestine.com/safad.htm

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunam -article is actually correct about this: "in 1928 the metric dunam of 1000 square metres was adopted" ...this was the one used in the 1945 census. Hadawi, 1970 http://www.palestineremembered.com/download/VillageStatistics/1-Forward/Page-009.jpg clearly states the same: One dunum equal 1000 square meters, or 1000 dunums makes 1 square kilometre, or 4.04 dunums makes 1 acre...

Ahem, does "someone" feel like writing/inserting a nice little converting option?

Btw, nice to be back online after computer problems you really do not want to hear about (I was reduced to surfing on my ipod touch, there, for a while )

And thanks, Blo, for inserting the old template...I think I will try the Jayvd-option..as soon as I have caught up with a zillion things...

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

You could add new units to Template:Convert but this particular unit would require disambiguation. That is, it would have to be something like {{convert|55|dunam (israel)|acre}}, which might cause http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre,_Israel.