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Posted by: Kato

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hardcore_pornography&diff=265552273&oldid=264883988

Not that I'm complaining though. If someone wants to withdraw their work, they should have the right to do so.

Just as if some http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Fred_Shapiro not covered by mainstream encyclopedias wants to OPT-OUT of having a WP biography, they should have that right. Especially if the biography creator also wants the article deleted as well.

Posted by: gomi

It's an interesting situation. I agree with you regarding at least one aspect of this: those photographs should have never been accepted into an "encyclopedia" to begin with. On the other hand, the GPL is a bit of a roach motel: once things check in, they are never supposed to check out. That doesn't obligate Wikipedia to continue to host them, so Jimbo's action was technically legal. However, at least one Wikipedia admin was banned for deleting his own uploaded images en masse (I forget who at this point), so it is important to remember that deletion of anything from Wikipedia is at Jimbo's whim, rather than covered by any rational policy.

Posted by: JoseClutch

True. On the other hand, deletions of this kind are pretty routine in most cases. Most author requests are honored. I have probably deleted at least 50 pages upon the author's request, and denied zero such requests.

Posted by: Somey

Personally, I suspect this has more to do with Dave's future employment prospects than his desire to be taken seriously as an artiste, or to avoid situations where "haters" appear to him to focus solely on the hardcore-porn aspect of his oeuvre, as opposed to the more serious photographs of things like homeless women and their feminine-hygeine products, or chihuahuas.

Let's hope this can be an object lesson for all WP'ers out there with digital cameras: The mere fact that you upload hundreds, even thousands, of images to Wikipedia doesn't guarantee you that dream job you wanted in the all-male-porn industry, particularly in troubled economic times such as these. At the very least, you should consider the possibility that you might have to take an "interim" position at a bank, insurance company, or law firm before you can embark on your true calling.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Any editorial self-restraint should be encouraged even if the reasons have nothing to do with acting in a socially responsible manner. A Wikipedian having trouble finding a job seems to be a good enough reason for abandoning "information wants to free" even if concern over the exposure of children to the material is not.

Posted by: Bottled_Spider

Let us not be complacent. Shankers could be deleting his porn pics simply to lull everyone into a false sense of security prior to uploading a whole bunch of stuff that is even more filthy and depraved. Such as material involving "utensils", for instance. We must be vigilant, and Jimbo must be prepared to use his "courtesy deletion finger" when called upon to wipe off bad uploads and generally clean up the mess.

Posted by: EricBarbour

I certainly hope so. Something far more politically embarrassing.
The damn fools are bringing it upon themselves.

...Crap! That gay-porn film photo set was outstanding. So over the top
that I could http://ericsaysfuckyou.blogspot.com/2008/12/sec-in-state-of-complete-panic-over.html, and make people smile (and gag).

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Shankers is a fr00t l00p. That said, Wikipedia and its brethren should respect courtesy deletion requests, because it's the ethically responsible thing to do. The "no backsies" interpretation of the GPL (which is legally unjustifiable) that many Wikipediots cling to is unmitigated assholery of the first order.

Posted by: Kato

Indeed.

And the Jimbo / Shankers combo of quietly deleting them - without some crazed nothing-to-lose mousemob arguing the toss - is the wisest thing to do as well.

This should have been the practice for borderline or controversial BLP's, and incidents like the Virgin Killer debate - which should never be left to the dysfunctional community.

Innocents argue that decisions should be made on Wikipedia by all this "democratic consensus building" they talk about. Well it might work in a serious environment, but that kind of governance is an abject failure when applied to the anonymous, unaccountable community of Wikipedia. Instead decisions, if they get made at all, are as a result of unseemly mob-rule and naked bullying, not "democratic consensus building". And after the fact, it is usually apparent that the bullying is being led by some nut-job who isn't even playing by the conventions anyway. How many times have we looked at a dysfunctional deletion debate, and discovered that the main protagonists are sockpuppets, rampant canvassers, or abusers pushing a bizarre stance in some form?

Posted by: Somey

Good point! What we should really be asking ourselves is, how can we make Jimbo more "scalable," so as to bypass the mousemob in situations where there's a real need to get something useful or decent done with a minimum of fuss?

Maybe what WP needs is some sort of "Benevolent Robo-Jimbo," sort of like an AI construct that fixes problems, but without all the rampant irresponsible/egotistical overhead of the "real" Jimbo.

Posted by: Moulton

Shirley, you jest?

An ethical Jimbo?!? The mind boggles!

There isn't enough preposterone in the AI Labs to fuel such a ludicrous construct.

Posted by: One

Yeah, this was well-handled really. The NOTCENSORED crowd would have made this very difficult to delete otherwise, and for no good reason at all.

Posted by: Doc glasgow

What wikipedia never understood is that a democracy of the "who is motivated enough to comment in each obscure case" isn't democracy at all - it's rule by the bully, the clueless with time to waste, the blatantly self-interested, and the ideologically over-motivated. It isn't even mob rule, it's thug rule. Occasionally, you get lucky and the morons cancel each other out - but that's hit and miss.

Any Sociologist will tell you that once you get beyond a small face-to-face community, democracy needs some representative element or it is finished. Athenian democracy perished for good reason.

I suspect that's also one of the reasons why Wikipedia Review criticism has also been equivocal on those of us who've used a "screw process, screw consensus" attitude to force our way on BLPs. People here instinctively oppose the thugogracy because it tends to screw BLP victims - the problem is that the only way for the righteous to prevail in a thugocracy is to out thug the masses.

Cavemen rule.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Spot on.

Posted by: Milton Roe

This is also why we've been complaining about the need for Due Process and a Bill of Rights. Without them, even a successful democracy on WP (which we don't have, either) is merely the old classic problem of two wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for lunch.

Posted by: Doc glasgow

Process is the problem, not the solution, and Bills of Rights can be gamed.

The solution is only to have top-down leadership which enforces a proper ethos, and is willing to sacrifice some ideological necessities ("anyone can edit") to insist on larger ones ("no, we will not let you use us to pursue that vendetta").

Ironically, Wikipedia does now have a fairly well-developed leadership in administrative areas. In administration it accepts that not everyone can get to do everything, and limits certainly rights to those chosen (admin, checkuser, crat, steward, arb) - these people are allowed to make certain decisions without votes and process, and they are accountable to (fairly developed and increasingly transparent) systems; it simply utterly refuses to do this is the policy or (more importantly) content.

What Wikipedia now needs is:
1) A policy creating body
2) Chosen (and scrutinised) uber-editors for BLPs.
3) A final BLP deletion body (with "maintainability" as a consideration)

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Have to disagree with Doc on this one. Process is the solution at this point.

Firm, dedicated dictatorial leadership works when you're dealing with a few hundred, at most a few thousand people. When you get to the size of a small town, though, you have to accept the inefficiencies of deliberative bureaucracy as being overall less harmful than the alternatives.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Ermmm. It's turtles all the way down. The reason "it" refuses is that the God-King set it up so that it could. With your incorruptable "top-down leadership" you're asking for a philosopher-king, a maximum-leader or junta-of-the-just which enforces fariness and light. And with Wales, you sure didn't get one on first pass. Wups. So, where do we find this incorruptable person, or persons, to install at the top? And ensure that he/they stay there? Back we go to the problem of process.

No matter what you do, it's ugly. It's ugly in the real world, where we had to suffer W. Bush for eight very long, ugly, stupid, vicious, and wasteful years before finally moving toward correction with Obama. And our congress is still full of greedy children, using the emergency to cash in for their pet projects (I'm not sure Obama is immune, either). They aren't perfect, or even close-- just better than Bush was. And the cycle has repeated many times before that. That idea that it's going to magically find some way of improving itself on Wikipedia, where there are far more voter-reponsiblity problems to solve before we even BEGIN, seems to me naive.

Chosen HOW? In a way that can't be "gamed" as you call it? Again, this problem hasn't been solved in the real world, even with perfect voter I.D. and perfect rule-representative I.D. So who are YOU going to do it on WP?? If you find a way, you could use it to fix the whole frigging planet. But I'm afraid there's no good way that anyone has so-far found. All we've got is something better than Wikipedia, not something that is anything close to perfect, or even very good.

Posted by: Doc glasgow

Yes, and no.

If process is simply a mechanism to allow everyone to have a fair say, then it may tend to produce reasonably stable results at the higher levels. (It is fairly hard for any motivated clique to game an arbcom election. The results may be moronic, but they are systemic not arbitrary.)

However, when it comes down to control of the content of a BLP on a minor sportsman, no "process" will save you from the fact that the only 2 people who happen to care about the bio have personal cause to hate the subject and want to stick it to him, and an infinite amount of patience to do so. Indeed the more process you have, the easier it will be for those motivate people to game it, and to dive off by war of attrition the couple of editors who look in for a minute and think "hey that article sucks a bit".

The only way you can save yourself from that, is to empower someone so that in the 5 minutes before they stop caring they are able to waltz in and say "wow, that sucks, and you're both banned" and then now have to waste time explaining themselves before 12 abuse investigations, and watchlist the article forever.

The root problem with wikipedia is that it tries to produce goods results by treating all editors equally - and expecting everyone to wield power over an article by spending time arguing with all others. We need "content constables" who don't have to do that - because they system assumes that 5 minutes of their time and judgement will be worth more than 500 min of the average motivated user at least 90% of the time.

How you get a leadership like that is another story. Wales is probably as safe a pair of hands in content problems as anyone. But a) he does not upscale b) he can't usually be bothered c) on the occasions he's delegated his judgement has sucked.

What is needed is uber-editors and a process to appoint such people that will ensure anyone aspiring to be one in order to perpetuate their own biases, and hatchet-jobs, will be identified and booted.

Posted by: tarantino

Back to the topic of this thread, here's the http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=Jimbo+Wales&page=&year=&month=-1.

In what must be a coincidence, there was a recent http://www.cjr.org/on_the_job/the_wikinews_ace.php about "Wikinews’ star reporter" David Miller.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Okay, here you're talking about not legislating, but the solving of individual neighbor-vs-neighbor disputes that wind up in civil or small claims court in our own society. And yes, you can't have one Arbcom for that, as it would be like having the Supreme Court rule on every traffic ticket.

Okay, so where are we going to get the people. In our own system we appoint judges (sometimes they are elected). They can't be anonymous. We also make use of juries (both grand juries and trial juries), which can be essentially-anonymous SO LONG AS CHOSEN at random from uninvolved people. Both these solutions (more judges, random jurors for specific cases) have been suggested for Wikipedia, and both rejected. I think they're both sitting at perennial proposals.

In theory, Wikipedia could have 100 arbitrators with power to make binding arbitrations in specific cases. In theory, that's what administraters were supposed to have been, but they ended up getting pulled in from anybody passing by, and involved people, and they've generally sucked. If both sides in any given dispute could agree beforehand to the judgement (binding arbitration, if you will) of some admin who is picked from a pool, and who has never heard of the case and which both parties agree to use before anything happens, much would improve. Another perennial.

I don't know what to do. If a system refuses to learn by what has already been tried and found to work reasonably well in real-life and the real meat-world, there's nothing to be done for them, except wish them pain.

And also make yourself feel better, by razzing them when they suffer, from the sidelines

Hey, stupids! When are you going to get tired of standing behind the manure-spreader?

Posted by: Random832

There's nothing wrong with the concept itself - where Wikipedia has a problem is in encouraging massive numbers of people who are uninformed about what they're really doing in releasing something under such a license to use it. This problem is not IMO shared with open-source software, where people tend to be better informed.

Posted by: luke

special juries - not so much proposed as http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=22026&view=findpost&p=148817. I http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/C68-FM-SV/Proposed_decision&diff=prev&oldid=224971976 a neutral facilitator to guide juror discussion, which should be in public so all can see what's being said. Consequentially no confidential evidence could be considered

Posted by: Eva Destruction

In their defence, Commons (which is, after all, what's being discussed here) makes it impossible to upload something without having the licensing setup rammed down your throat (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Upload).

Posted by: dtobias

But the good news is, I saved lots of money on my car insurance.

----------------
Now playing: http://www.foxytunes.com/artist/kathleen+edwards/track/back+to+me
via http://www.foxytunes.com/signatunes/

Posted by: Doc glasgow

Obviously a North American joke I don't understand.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

None of which ensures that you actually understand what you're actually doing, legally, by granting permission for your work to be relicensed. My time working Wikimedia OTRS made that evidently clear: most people at Wikipedia have no clue what "publishing a work under the GFDL" means.

Posted by: dtobias

It's referring to various commercials for the American insurer GEICO, some of which involve cavemen, and others having people say, as off-topic remarks in a conversation, that they just saved money on car insurance. Not to mention still other commercials involving the GEICO Gecko.

Posted by: EricBarbour

In fact, what they have instead is a role-playing game, with public defamation instead
of swords and magic.

Run by a hard-core inner society of people I would not wipe my boots on
(to borrow a phrase, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frank_Stevens).

People who are apparently out of shape, have a LOT of free time,
and harbor bizarre desires to become petty dictators.

How would a little tinpot dictatorship be any worse than letting the likes of
Gerard and Guy run it?

Posted by: Eva Destruction

Yes but… It's impossible to upload anything to Commons without seeing that "When you upload your work to commons you are donating it to the world by using a free content license which allow everyone to use, modify, and redistribute your work for any purpose. This donation is non-revocable" warning. Yes, I know people don't always read these things but short of a Microsoft-style "I have read and understood" check box, what else can the Commons admins or the WMF devs realistically do?

Posted by: dtobias

My own two arbitrary currency units on some of the things discussed here:

Regarding the irrevocability of the GFDL, well, would you rather that anybody who released anything under that license could change their mind at any time, so that anybody who's ever downloaded their works, and started using them in various ways permitted under that license, would suddenly be subject to infringement suits? Somebody mentioned the Roach Motel (check in but not check out), but perhaps it's more like the Hotel California (you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave), since any particular site is free to delete the material (perhaps at the uploader's request), but once it's been put out there under a free license, anybody else has been free to copy it and put it online in other sites, print it in paper books and magazines, and so on, and anybody running into the image in those other places is similarly free to reuse and republish it.

As for the idea of setting up formal "WikiCzars" to police stuff you guys think need to be policed... won't that just give the JzGs of the Wiki another position to aspire to where they can fulfill their dream of being able to do things unilaterally without permitting any sort of discussion or debate, because they're right and anybody who disagrees is a troll?

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Maybe an informed consent quiz would be helpful:

Posted by: Eva Destruction

Oddly, this is pretty much http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Iridescent#Are_you_responsible_for_deleting_the_uploaded_image.3F I gave someone yesterday when he was complaining about why I kept deleting "his" image when I wasn't convinced the copyright holder understood just what he was releasing his material to be used for. If someone could find a decent way to word it I'd be 100% in favor of some kind of "you do realise exactly what 'modify and redistribute' implies?" warning on the upload form.