Sticky Prod for BLPs bites the dust. Options

[RMHED]

I'm sick of re-fighting the same wars. These people just grind you down with the same old nonsense.

I'm sorry you're frustrated with Wikipedia. But, according to the "addictive participation equals success" model that Kelly Martin (I believe rightly) posits, you are just contributing to the same system by being a part of it.

Why don't we all just try off-Wikipedia techniques for the rest of 2010?

How about a sit-in at the Wikimedia Foundation headquarters? How about a hunger strike? You're going to need the media to help facilitate any changes.

Or 1 assault rifle + a visit to the WMF office + going postal = change

[Somey]

This Pmanderson (T-C-L-K-R-D) person is a classic example of the WP anti-humanity obstructionist, throwing out strawman after strawman after strawman, showing no capability for non-binary thinking whatsoever, and ignoring pretty much anything that contradicts his "I must be allowed to do whatever I please" pseudo-philosophy. Meanwhile, he does no work on BLP's at all, judging by his contribs, but if his treatment of non-living subjects is any indication, that's a Very Good Thing.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that he's a closet Randroid, but of course I say that about nearly everyone over there...

This is from his user page:

Wiki-Crusaders

We've seen these all too often; somebody notices that an aspect of Wikipedia (usually one he does not use himself) can be abused - and calls a Crusade:

* Userboxes are evil; ban all userboxes.
* Admins can be abusive; desysop all admins.
* Anon accounts vandalize; semi-protect all articles.
* Editors can be nitwits; protect all articles.

We've seen all of these; the last usually in some modified form , because even our Crusaders do sometimes edit articles.

These Crusades have a number of common features:

* A declaration the sky is falling
* An utter absence of evidence that our normal procedures aren't dealing with the abuses.
* The EVIL practice X is usually something which makes no substantive difference to article space, but which some editors find useful.
* Reasoning of the form: "I don't do X (use userboxes/edit anonymously...); why should you have the right to do X? After all, it can be abused."

After six months or so, either it doesn't pass, and somehow the sky manages not to fall; or it does pass, some established editors are harassed, a large number of newbies are driven away, and we watch our expansion slow further - but there's never any great improvement to the encyclopedia....

The "NPOV" way of phrasing the foregoing would be something like, "I know there are problems, but I'm going to pretend otherwise because it suits my purposes to do so, and I'm also going to mischaracterize any opposing view in the most absurd fashion imaginable, and laugh at you for letting me get away with it."

This is the sort of person who makes WP "policy."

[RMHED]

This is the sort of person who makes WP "policy."

This is the sort of person who would benefit from a close encounter with a pickaxe handle.

[Somey]

This is the sort of person who would benefit from a close encounter with a pickaxe handle.

This might be a good time to point out that officially, The Wikipedia Review does not condone physical violence, no matter how much the smug little bastard(s) appear to deserve it.

I wonder if "Ostrichism" might be a good word for this sort of attitude? (Pmanderson's, not RHMED's.) It's basically head-in-the-sand, cover-the-eyes-and-ears, denialism. There's also an element of "any amount under 5 percent means everything is A-OK," with the related notion that those who say, "any non-negligible amount is unacceptable when the means to achieve negligibility exists," are somehow being unreasonable.

Unless he's saying that 3-5 percent actually is negligible, which seems monstrous when you consider the numbers involved (i.e., 3 percent of 400,000 articles equals 12,000 BLPs that contain significant and potentially damaging falsehoods, or are actively under some sort of attack, at any given time, and the actual fgure may be closer to 20,000). Given that he doesn't do work on BLPs himself, though, I suppose it's conceivable that he means exactly that!

Anyway, I just looked up "Ostrichism" on WP and it's not there, though I did learn that "Ostrich" is supposedly the name for the impossible par-six hole-in-one in golf, so I guess WP was good for something today.

[BelovedFox]

The most pragmatic way to go forward, as I see it, is to simply tend their own gardens. I've got five to seven BLPs on my watchlist; as soon as I got them to GA, I did another review and then semi-protected them. No one is going to raise a fuss about them, and the changes are monitored.

In some ways I think part of the problem is the crusaders (any side of the issue) who go on a bot spree. They often end up hurting their own cause.

[MZMcBride]

Anyway, I just looked up "Ostrichism" on WP and it's not there, though I did learn that "Ostrich" is supposedly the name for the impossible par-six hole-in-one in golf, so I guess WP was good for something today.

Usually people look up words in a dictionary (though Wiktionary omits "ostrichism" as well, currently).

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

ostrichism, n.

The action of (figuratively) hiding one's head in the sand; the practice or policy of refusing to face reality or accept facts.

1834 Tait's Mag. 1 59/1 The Marquis adopted the celebrated system of ostrichism, and hid his head. 1938 Amer. Econ. Rev. 28 21 We must avoid the ‘ostrichism’ of defining away problems by simply assuming to be constant, factors subject to imminent change. 1944 J. S. HUXLEY On Living in Revol. 3 The fact that a world war existed and the ostrichism of our reactions to it were most obvious in the case of Spain. 1960 Spectator 15 July 106 A new wave of ostrichism in regard to defence is sweeping the country. 1993 Population & Devel. Rev. 19 612 Even the optimistic, once they shed all trace of ostrichism and face the facts, find that they have to be cautious.

[John Limey]

The most pragmatic way to go forward, as I see it, is to simply tend their own gardens. I've got five to seven BLPs on my watchlist; as soon as I got them to GA, I did another review and then semi-protected them. No one is going to raise a fuss about them, and the changes are monitored.

Oh ok. So if each person looks after 5 to 7 BLPs (we'll say six on average), then we only need 73,000 people to join in on the effort. Slight problem. In the entire history of Wikipedia, there hasn't been a single month when at least 73,000 people made five or more edits, and you really need someone a tad more active than that.

I'd say, you need a "highly active Wikipedian" looking after a BLP (in today's environment) to actually tend the garden. There are roughly 4,000 highly active Wikipedians in any given recent month, so that's about 107 BLPs each to watch. In my opinion, and maybe I'm wrong, that's a bit much for each person to look after, and something tells me that you're not going to convince every single highly active Wikipedian to carefully watch 107 BLPs. That's why something has to change.

By the way, who are you anyway?

[CharlotteWebb]

I'd say, you need a "highly active Wikipedian" looking after a BLP (in today's environment) to actually tend the garden. There are roughly 4,000 highly active Wikipedians in any given recent month, so that's about 107 BLPs each to watch. In my opinion, and maybe I'm wrong, that's a bit much for each person to look after, and something tells me that you're not going to convince every single highly active Wikipedian to carefully watch 107 BLPs. That's why something has to change.

My watchlist has been well over 9,000 before but I'm not going to pretend I was watching each page in any meaningful fashion, only those which interested me.

I will say it's not terribly difficult to watch 107 articles effectively, especially if half of them are stubs which only occasionally see an edit, good or bad (which seems to be the case with BLPs according to some studies).

A few things which would make it a lot easier:
*A more better watchlist system. One that will let you assign a level of interest/importance to each item, allowing you to filter based upon that. One that can be configured to warn before you eh-what's-this "unwatch" something in the BLP set, etc.
*An intelligent workload-balancer of sorts, so one person doesn't get stuck with the entire U.S. Senate while another need only glance over the medalists from Barcelona '92.
*A slack-picker-upper to redistribute (in a true marxist fashion) when people become backlogged and need help. But hell, without even a bloody minimal revision-flagging system there's no way to discern whether your fellow user has nodded on each edit or nodded right off (because the result looks exactly the same on your screen).

[Somey]

A few things which would make it a lot easier:
*A more better watchlist system. One that will let you assign a level of interest/importance to each item, allowing you to filter based upon that. One that can be configured to warn before you eh-what's-this "unwatch" something in the BLP set, etc.
*An intelligent workload-balancer of sorts, so one person doesn't get stuck with the entire U.S. Senate while another need only glance over the medalists from Barcelona '92.
*A slack-picker-upper to redistribute (in a true marxist fashion) when people become backlogged and need help. But hell, without even a bloody minimal revision-flagging system there's no way to discern whether your fellow user has nodded on each edit or nodded right off (because the result looks exactly the same on your screen).

Those things would all be nice, but this is all essentially moot, isn't it? You can't demand that 4,000 people watching 100+ articles each over an indefinite period of time. Even if you could get that many people to volunteer for it (and IMO the number of people who would actually volunteer would be well under 200), people get sick, they go on vacation...

Any solution that relies on more manpower is doomed to fail anyway, since there's no defined set of standards, and no internal discipline even if there was one. You'd just be perpetuating the evil, stalling for time in the hope that somehow the problem is just going to magically go away on its own. It's magical thinking (T-H-L-K-D) pure and simple.

What's needed are preventative features, and anything less is just so much hot air. The "sticky prod" tag would have helped because it would have led to a few more BLP deletions that might not otherwise have occurred, but it's still a fractional measure at best, simple and sensible though it may be. But they can't even accept that.

These people want revenge against the human race, at all costs, and nothing is going to change as long as Wikipedia lets them think they're getting it somehow.

[CharlotteWebb]

Those things would all be nice, but this is all essentially moot, isn't it? You can't demand that 4,000 people watching 100+ articles each over an indefinite period of time. Even if you could get that many people to volunteer for it (and IMO the number of people who would actually volunteer would be well under 200), people get sick, they go on vacation...

My main point is that any attempt to organize something like this is guaranteed to fail without a revision-flagging system. That does not mean otherwise guaranteed to succeed.

I agree it would require a combination of factors. My suggestions target the logistic issues which I best understand how to address. I consider them necessary rather than sufficient.

[Somey]

My main point is that any attempt to organize something like this is guaranteed to fail without a revision-flagging system. That does not mean otherwise guaranteed to succeed.

I agree it would require a combination of factors. My suggestions target the logistic issues which I best understand how to address. I consider them necessary rather than sufficient.

Ah, OK. I thought you were losing it there for a minute!

[CharlotteWebb]

Ah, OK. I thought you were losing it there for a minute!

It would hardly be the first time.

[Doc glasgow]

"[I]f an editor wants to make an edit that slanders someone, that editor will be legally responsible for any harm or damages -- not Wikipedia, the Foundation, or anyone else involved. ... The Wikipedia community makes the best possible effort to prevent or address this harm"

This rather says it all, doesn't it?

[Somey]

This rather says it all, doesn't it?

I can think of no better example...

And this is a guy (Llyrwich (T-C-L-K-R-D) ) who gives the full name of his baby daughter (but not his own!) on his user page, leading anyone who cares enough to spend 10 seconds on Google directly to his own IRL identity and location. (To be fair, older versions of his user page led to the same information, and none of them have been deleted or oversighted.)

So obviously he doesn't give a shit about his own privacy, or that of his family - why should he care about anyone else's?

Unbelievable.

[Kelly Martin]

"[A] warning about legal responsibility might prevent the majority of this unwanted content"? What sort of drugs is Geoff on these days? These people are the sort that will chain themselves naked to trees to make a point; the threat of a legal judgment for libel means absolutely nothing to them. Besides, I'd imagine that somewhere between 95% and 99% of Wikipedians are "judgment proof" anyway.

[thekohser]

LOL at "slander". I love it when self-appointed legal experts imagine that slander is something you can type out and publish.

Meanwhile, I thought that cats can steal a baby's breath?

[Kevin]

LOL at "slander". I love it when self-appointed legal experts imagine that slander is something you can type out and publish.

Meanwhile, I thought that cats can steal a baby's breath?

In my jurisdiction the distinction between slander and libel has been abolished, for legal purposes anyway.

[Doc glasgow]

LOL at "slander". I love it when self-appointed legal experts imagine that slander is something you can type out and publish.

Meanwhile, I thought that cats can steal a baby's breath?

In my jurisdiction the distinction between slander and libel has been abolished, for legal purposes anyway.

There's only sixteen people live in South Australia, so I doubt that abolition is that significant in the grand scheme of things.

[Sarcasticidealist]

In my jurisdiction the distinction between slander and libel has been abolished, for legal purposes anyway.

There's only sixteen people live in South Australia, so I doubt that abolition is that significant in the grand scheme of things.

It's been abolished in most Canadian jurisdictions too, so you'll have to add another few dozen people to that count, Doc.

[Doc glasgow]

In my jurisdiction the distinction between slander and libel has been abolished, for legal purposes anyway.

There's only sixteen people live in South Australia, so I doubt that abolition is that significant in the grand scheme of things.

It's been abolished in most Canadian jurisdictions too, so you'll have to add another few dozen people to that count, Doc.

Dear, dear, the strange things the colonials choose to do with themselves.... s'pose that's what happens when we stoppusing the privy council to help them do law properly.