Tznkai saves the day Options

[Heat]

Well done to Tznkai, who proudly announces he has blocked half of Boston, whilst playing cops and robbers with Moulton. If his claim is true, about three million innocent people won't be able to edit Wikipedia. Nice one. The encyclopedia that anyone, except people who share the IPs of a banned user, can edit.

Does anyone really want people at Harvard editing an encyclopedia?

[everyking]

Let me make this clear for you. In my house we don't do due process. WP is the WMF's house. Geddit?

Who built the house?

Unpaid immigrant labour.

So you feel the community, yourself included, has no right to insist that the project operates in a certain way?

[Viridae]

The point is that instead of teaching the youth of the 21st Century to evolve to where Rosa Parks and MLK took us, Wikipedia is regressing the youth of the 21st Century back to where humans were some 4000 years ago, long before Civil Rights, long before Due Process, long before the Rule of Law to an epoch of tribal warlords.

To my mind, regressing the governance culture back to the stone age tribal epoch is simply not a cool thing for WP to be doing.

Let me make this clear for you. In my house we don't do due process. WP is the WMF's house. Geddit?

WMF solicits donations to fund WP and sister projects, under its Mission Statement and tax-exempt status as a 501©(3) educational non-profit. Individual admins do not have the authority to abrogate the WMF Mission Statement or to the repudiate WMF's representations regarding its status as a tax-exempt non-profit educational enterprise.

To my mind, discarding 4000 years of hard-won lessons of political history to inculcate the impressionable youth of the 21st Century into an anachronistic tribal warlord culture is an irresponsible disservice bordering on fraud. Shouldn't WMF be encouraging the youth of the 21st Century to adopt the teachings of Stephen Langton, Thomas Jefferson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Mohandas Gandhi, ML King, Thich Nhat Hanh, et al?

They have no obligation to do any such thing. Ultimately they are allowed to do anything the law lets them get away with, and you can either put up with it or split.

If WMF adopts the practice of making one set of representations to the public (and to the IRS in terms of eligibility as a tax-exempt 501©(3) non-profit educational foundation), and then thumbs its nose at the reasonable expectations of donors, it occurs to me that the project doesn't have much of a future.

A lot of volunteers put a lot of effort into crafting content that is supposed to represent the sum of all human knowledge. Subverting the advertised aims of the project to insidiously transform it into a farcical parody of a medieval MMPORG in which admins devolve the site into a "Mad Max" culture, riding around on open Jeeps with machine guns ablaze mowing down rival editors and baleeting their thoughtful contributions just makes for a run-on closing sentence that is so opaque, not even Kato could diagram it.

Right to a fair trial is far from a reasonable expectation of a private organisation. WMF can operate how they feel like operating within the bounds of law. If they do something generally perceived to be "very bad" by the donating public then they lose donations and fold. However untill that time they can continue to operate however they feel like.

This post has been edited by Viridae: Thu 4th December 2008, 8:18pm

[Kato]

WMF can operate how they feel like operating within the bounds of law. If they do something generally perceived to be "very bad" by the donating public then they lose donations and fold. However untill that time they can continue to operate however they feel like.

What happens if they do a few "very bad" things to certain individuals, then try and spin it away or hush it up so the donating public are unaware, and hence get away with it? Acceptable?

[Viridae]

WMF can operate how they feel like operating within the bounds of law. If they do something generally perceived to be "very bad" by the donating public then they lose donations and fold. However untill that time they can continue to operate however they feel like.

What happens if they do a few "very bad" things to certain individuals, then try and spin it away or hush it up so the donating public are unaware, and hence get away with it? Acceptable?

At no point was I arguing ethics - just reality.

[LessHorrid vanU]

...
What happens if they do a few "very bad" things to certain individuals, then try and spin it away or hush it up so the donating public are unaware, and hence get away with it? Acceptable?

If you change "donating" to "voting" you would be describing - I would suggest - all of the democratic governments of the free world. Acceptable, no - except in the case of the freedom we are told we live in we do accept it. Apparently, because I am told so by my democratic government, things are even worse in places run by other governments... What I am saying, it seems to be a facet of human nature and the societies that it creates that there will always be those unfairly victimised and the fact of same suppressed by that same authority.

Why should this vast website, created to sustain the building of an encyclopedia, be any different? Acceptable, no - but we have to accept that it happens.

[Eppur si muove]

If you change "donating" to "voting" you would be describing - I would suggest - all of the democratic governments of the free world. Acceptable, no - except in the case of the freedom we are told we live in we do accept it. Apparently, because I am told so by my democratic government, things are even worse in places run by other governments... What I am saying, it seems to be a facet of human nature and the societies that it creates that there will always be those unfairly victimised and the fact of same suppressed by that same authority.

Why should this vast website, created to sustain the building of an encyclopedia, be any different? Acceptable, no - but we have to accept that it happens.

No, no, no. what (y)our democratic government is telling you is

a) It is a world recession that is causing problems and nothing to do with government policies.
b) It might also be the fault of the previous government
c) People who break confidence and leak to Wikipedia Review should be arrested (as should the Wikipedia Review workers who "groom" them) and they should face the full penalty of law.

I've managed to translate © can you do (a) and (b)

This post has been edited by SelfHater: Thu 4th December 2008, 10:09pm