The Non-Painful Discussion Of WP:Deny Attribution, Wikipediot Conspiracy To Violate Author Copyright Options

[Jonny Cache]

This thread begins with a selection of on-topic posts from the original thread on this issue.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

You guessed it — JustZapitGuy is in it.

As David Gerard has previously said, checking the edits and making them again in your own name is the way to do that. Yes, tedious and to an outside view somewhat silly, but when we ban people *we ban them*, if we think they should be allowed to come along and edit some then *we should not ban them*.

You need to remember that the source of this problem is not our behaviour, it's theirs. They are the ones evading a ban. They are the ones deliberately gaming the system and disrupting Wikipedia to make their point. Sockpuppets of banned users correcting typos as a way of building up an edit history is *not actually a good thing* because the aim is to do some damage that is massively greater than the benefit of the trivial typo fixing.

Policy on banned users says that we should revert all edits made by banned users after banning. And we should, even if (as with Arch Coal) we then go and rewrite a whole article from scratch, from sources. I do not subscribe to the idea of being "a little bit banned".

Guy (JzG)

Guy Chapman, Re: Featured Editors, 16 Nov 2007 UTC 09:57

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

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[Jonny Cache]

This is the ultimate in Wikipediot logic. "Well, yes, we KNOW this is technically against our license, and we KNOW that it looks silly to everyone else, but we must be vindictive against those we ban!"

I don't see anything technical about it. All an editor gets when they contribute under GFDL is attribution. If they have removed substantial edits (as is the case of a serious scholar such as Jonny) and then replaced substantially the same material (has that actually happened yet?) to deprive the banned editor of attribution without degrading the article it is the most vicious and fundamental violation of the GFDL possible. It is also blatant plagiarism.

It is the kind of blunder only a cultish true believer could make or even suggest.

I suppose they could get their GC to give them a workshop on this stuff, but he's probably afraid that JzG would ban him if he did.

Jonny (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

As David Gerard has previously said, checking the edits and making them again in your own name is the way to do that. Yes, tedious and to an outside view somewhat silly, but when we ban people *we ban them*, if we think they should be allowed to come along and edit some then *we should not ban them*.

You need to remember that the source of this problem is not our behaviour, it's theirs. They are the ones evading a ban. They are the ones deliberately gaming the system and disrupting Wikipedia to make their point. Sockpuppets of banned users correcting typos as a way of building up an edit history is *not actually a good thing* because the aim is to do some damage that is massively greater than the benefit of the trivial typo fixing.

Policy on banned users says that we should revert all edits made by banned users after banning. And we should, even if (as with Arch Coal) we then go and rewrite a whole article from scratch, from sources. I do not subscribe to the idea of being "a little bit banned".

Guy (JzG)

Guy Chapman, Re: Featured Editors, 16 Nov 2007 UTC 09:57

What a load of crap, only someone taking Wikipedia as some forum will write something like this. A banned user who correct typo's is doing something positive. No one has a mind reader reading that persons intention. What sort of disruption is he talking about? Something which has yet to occur? I didn't know any policy says we should revert all edits by banned users. I thought what mattered is the content of the edits no matter who made the edits. The policy actually say that it can be and not should be, unless it has changed.

Not everyone were banned because of disruption in articles mainspace, in fact most of those who disrupt articles mainspace get away without a ban in the name of almighty NPA. Also, not every socks have ill intent in the ban invasion. I have invaded my ban to counter the disruption of another user who was invading his ban also. And then a second time to fix stuff from a disruptor who creat countless numbers of articles FORK. I will probably invade my ban again if massive disruption is done which would harm because of Wikipedia's inflated credibility.

Thank you for that unsolicited moment of consenual validation! I had once felt sure that when I first started working on Wikipedia the Recurrent Mantra was some form of words to the effect that «The value of an edit is in the edit and not in the identity of the editor». I remember being struck by this because of its analogy to the teachings of some organized religions that the validity of a sacrament is in the divine grace conferred thereby and not in the person of the priest who is merely the instrument of the ceremony. And this Espoused Doctrine (ED) was applied to edits of all kinds, whether contributions to article space or comments and questions in dialogue and project spaces.

But I hadn't heard any Wikipedians talk that way in such long time that I was beginning to think that I had merely dreamed it.

Jon Awbrey

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[Jonny Cache]

I suppose "comment on content, not the contributor" only applies to some Wikipedians, eh? Certainly not, JzG!

I remember being struck by this because of its analogy to the teachings of some organized religions that the validity of a sacrament is in the divine grace conferred thereby and not in the person of the priest who is merely the instrument of the ceremony.

Obviously. I never took you to be a sacerdotalist.

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache:

[Jonny Cache]

This is the ultimate in Wikipediot logic. "Well, yes, we KNOW this is technically against our license, and we KNOW that it looks silly to everyone else, but we must be vindictive against those we ban!"

I don't see any technical about it. All an editor gets when they contribute under GFDL is attribution. If they have removed substantial edits (as is the case of a serious scholar such as Jonny) and then replaced substantially the same material (has that actually happened yet?) to deprive the banned editor of attribution without degrading the article it is the most vicious and fundamental violation of the GFDL possible. It is also blatant plagiarism.

It is the kind of blunder only a cultish true believer could make or even suggest.

In three years of contributing to this increasingly dysfunctional project, I heard only a few very brief discussions of what GFDL means and how it guides and constrains user behavior. Compare 3RR, the interpretation of which was frequently debated at length and in detail … yet which one has a meaning in the world outside of Wikipedia? Which is the matter of ethical integrity, and which is the arbitrary rule? I don't recall seeing anyone blocked, banned, or desysoped for violating it, or for plagiarism generally. Say what you will of incivility, "wikilawyering", tendentious editing … at least they're legal, and not obviously unethical. This underscores once again Wikipedia's desperate need for sound professional advice and adult supervision.

[Jonny Cache]

As David Gerard has previously said, checking the edits and making them again in your own name is the way to do that. Yes, tedious and to an outside view somewhat silly, but when we ban people *we ban them*, if we think they should be allowed to come along and edit some then *we should not ban them*.

Guy (JzG)

Guy Chapman, Re: Featured Editors, 16 Nov 2007 UTC 09:57

Man, they really don't understand anything about copyright and the GFDL, do they?

This one statement makes JzG open to legal attack. Is there any way to make this into a permanent weblink so they can't wipe it clean?

This could be important …

I'll tell you what else is important. He's using the "Arch Coal" debacle as an example, and it's a totally incorrect example. Wikipedia Review was not banned when it authored the Arch Coal article. Not only that, we authored it and posted it ON OUR OWN WEBSITE, and it was User:J.Smith who actually published interactively served it up on Wikipedia. If only JzG would read this before he spouted more of his lies.

Also, while you're reading that discourse, note how Jimbo abandons the discussion, since he doesn't have a good answer for any of his original ideas.

Greg

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[Jonny Cache]

Another flagrant GFDL violation is List of Fellows of the Royal Society. This was originally List of Jewish Fellows of the Royal Society, which was finally deleted on the third AfD after surviving the first two (when even Jayjg voted keep) and a DRV. After it was deleted, the text was taken by admin Scientizzle. He deleted all the references and re-posted it with no history. Thus all the work to establish that these people were Fellows, their subject areas, date of election, etc, which should be attributed to the relevant editors, is now attributed to Scientizzle.

And they've done a lousy job of turning it into a list of all Fellows. The great majority of names are still those on the list as originally posted (presumably all the Jewish ones).

[Jonny Cache]

I have no idea whether there is any applicable law on the subject, but it occurs to me that there is something unethical about appropriating and adopting the intellectual property of a contributing editor whilst banning them and redacting all record of attribution of their prior contributions.

The fons et origo at issue in this consideration is the normative principle commonly known as «Credit Where Credit Is Due (CWCID)». This principle is an essential active ingredient in every Virtue Of The Intellect (VOTI) and cannot be alienated from the very idea of intellectual good.

It is my common sense understanding that the Laws and Licenses of Civil Societies respect and support the aesthetic, ethical, and logical principle of «Credit Where Credit Is Due», making it accordingly a legal principle in all of those Civil Societies.

But it is not my job or place to argue the details of the Law. It is enough for me to argue from the normative principles that precede and validate the Law.

If the Law does not respect and support these principles, then the Law is an Ass.

Jon Awbrey

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[Jonny Cache]

To my mind, the Law is already an ass, independently of any illustrative examples supplied by Wikipedia. But that's a rant of a different pallor.

I must be on some kinda Platonic jag this morning, 'cause I can see the Law as nothing Butt a secular human production that does what it can to emulate the eternal essentials of Divine Justice, and so it's an Ass that has to be led over its Bridge with much coaxing and carroting, if not Gilt O'er with Φeromes and Flowers.

Don't worry — it's nothing another cup o java won't fix …

Jon Awbrey

[Jonny Cache]

I have no idea whether there is any applicable law on the subject, but it occurs to me that there is something unethical about appropriating and adopting the intellectual property of a contributing editor whilst banning them and redacting all record of attribution of their prior contributions.

That's what I felt when my own created article was scrapped by a user and that he got away with 3RR because one of the reverts was by a banned member (me). I have no say even for the articles I have created or rewritten.

How many articles have been deprived of their creator? It is disrespectable not only unethical. I would have no problem if they delete the articles I have created, but that they restrict me to touch my own creations is like stealing.

Who in his right mind would release his knowledge like this to make it general knowledge if later he is deprived of working on it, and his editing of the article he created reverted as vandalism. Why not delete them all together?

I think that we should start a thread where authors who created and remained the principal contributors to specific Wikipedia articles could certify their authorship of these articles, giving permission to all and sundry editors to blank them at any time.

This would serve as a form of protest and a wake↑call to Wikipediot Whorelords.

Come to think of it, now is a good time —

Jon Awbrey

[Jonny Cache]

As David Gerard has previously said, checking the edits and making them again in your own name is the way to do that. Yes, tedious and to an outside view somewhat silly, but when we ban people *we ban them*, if we think they should be allowed to come along and edit some then *we should not ban them*.

You need to remember that the source of this problem is not our behaviour, it's theirs. They are the ones evading a ban. They are the ones deliberately gaming the system and disrupting Wikipedia to make their point. Sockpuppets of banned users correcting typos as a way of building up an edit history is *not actually a good thing* because the aim is to do some damage that is massively greater than the benefit of the trivial typo fixing.

Policy on banned users says that we should revert all edits made by banned users after banning. And we should, even if (as with Arch Coal) we then go and rewrite a whole article from scratch, from sources. I do not subscribe to the idea of being "a little bit banned".

Guy (JzG)

Source. Guy Chapman, Re: Featured Editors, 16 Nov 2007 UTC 09:57.

Wikipedia's Deny Attribution (WP:DA) program is already in full swing.

For example, I started the Wikipedia article, The Simplest Mathematics, on Charles Sanders Peirce's 1902 paper of the same name, intending to develop it as I got time — time which I never got, of course. Here is the body of the article as I left it:

"The Simplest Mathematics" is the title of a paper by Charles Sanders Peirce, intended as Chapter 3 of his unfinished magnum opus The Minute Logic. The paper is dated January–February 1902 but was not published until the appearance of his Collected Papers, Volume 4 in 1933. Peirce introduces the subject of the paper as "certain extremely simple branches of mathematics which, owing to their utility in logic, have to be treated in considerable detail, although to the mathematician they are hardly worth consideration" (CP 4.227).

Wikipedia admin Kaldari deleted the article according to the preveiling rule of WP:P?WP?WDNNSP! (Process? What Process? We Don't Need No Stinkin Process!) and inserted the contents in the main article on CSP, destroying the author attribution and committing plagiarism all in one fell swoop.

Jon Awbrey

[Jonny Cache]

if we think they should be allowed to come along and edit some then *we should not ban them*.

Sounds right to me.

Of course, the whole idea of banning certain people while allowing anonymous contributions is completely impossible anyway. If people can contribute anonymously, then you can't ban anyone. If you want to ban people, then you can't let others contribute anonymously. How hard is that to understand?

Let's be clear. This has nothing to do with contributions made post-banning. Banning is merely the device and the excuse that Wikipediot Management uses to steal content, to deny proper attribution to those who contributed the content, and to prevent the victim from Fixing It in the wiki-way that they constantly advertize as being their ideal.

There does not appear to be an article creation log, only the article deletion log, so they have deleted the record that I created this article under my IRL user name long before I was blocked. Deleting the article also removes the edits from my contribution history and the tools that use them like the Kate-Interiot utility.

Jon Awbrey

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[Jonny Cache]

Let us now continue with current developments on the Wiki-Plagiarism Front —

Pursuant to Guy Chapman's call on the Philosophy Project To-Do List, Admin Kaldari has apparently been assigned the job of laundering the author attributions from the articles that I wrote for Wikipedia.

The metod of history wiping that these Wipediots have chosen appears to be the old «Merger She Wrot» technique of "merging" the content into some other article and then deleting the original article, thus wiping the content clean of its due attributions.

It appears that a lot of the planning for this laundry work is taking place by email or other back channels, but I will try to collect here what sites I can find where you can see a few traces of the deliberations that are taking place to launder content of its author attributions —

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy/To do/Awbrey articles
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Philosophy/To do/Awbrey articles
• User talk:Kaldari#Charles Peirce article
• User talk:The Tetrast#Charles Peirce article
• Talk:Charles Peirce#Logic of relatives, Kaina Stoicheia, etc.

Laundru Be Praised !!!

Jon Awbrey

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[Jonny Cache]

Lather, Rinse, Repeat …

Anyone who's been paying the least bit of attention knows exactly what the next phase of article shampooing entails.

After just a few hostile mergers of content that I wrote for earlier spin-offs, the main article on Charles Sanders Peirce now stands at 105,453 bytes.

Incredible as it may seem — but their comments are on record — people who wanted to delete essential material from the Peirce article, but who lacked the competence to say anything more intelligent about its subject matter than to comment on its size, actually tried using the old 32 kbyte limit as an excuse. So all of the material that I previously spun off to starticles and stubs on special topics will eventually be spun off again, this time shorn of proper attribution.

I know what you're thinking — you're thinking that the very fact that I've called them at their game will prevent them from following through.

I see that you have not being paying attention, after all.

Jon Awbrey

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[Emperor]

Interesting. I guess if the admins take responsibility for authorship of the content of Wikipedia, some things might change.

[Jonny Cache]

I have never known Ben Udell, who writes under the name of The Tetrast on Wikipedia, to exhibit anything but the most fastidious ethics as a scholar, so I knew that his being drawn into the above program of denying due attribution could only be the result of his own trusting nature and his newness to the wiles of Wikipediots.

So I wrote him the following email to advise him of the situation.

Subj: Systematic Plagiarism @ Wikipedia
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:12:16 -0500
From: Jon Awbrey <…>
To: Benjamin Udell <…>

Ben,

I realize that you could hardly be aware of what is going on behind the scenes, but Wikipediot Adminstrators are engaged in a campaign of deliberate plagiarism of work that I previously contributed to Wikipedia.

It becomes plagiarism, that is, use without proper attribution, when they delete the contribution histories of articles that I created, and to which I added all of the significant content, "merging" that content with other articles under their own usernames. Or when they induce unsuspecting others to do so.

There is some background about this issue on the following Wikipedia Review threads:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=13974

The above thread went off-topic, as often happens, so I started reorganizing the on-topic posts on a new thread:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=14192

Regards,

Jon

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[Jonny Cache]

This Just In — And I Use The Word "Just" Very, Very Loosely …

I will have to let others who know more about GFDL comment on the legal adequacy of the citation method that WAS 4.250 suggests in this note.

GFDL

Note to whoever moves contributions from one article to another: The GFDL requires author attribution to be retained, and the customary way to do that at wikipedia is to add appropriate information into the edit summary and/or the talk page. In the case of articles like these that basically have one author, a statement like that indicating Jon Awbrey as the primary author of material in the article prior to (January 2007?) in both an edit summary (perhaps of a null edit?) and on the talk page would be appropriate. (Often I move content from one article to another and say in the edit summary "moved from name of article". That doesn't work if the article is then deleted. Why people don't just make the articles redirects instead of deletions makes no sense to me.) WAS 4.250 (talk) 18:13, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

It is of course woefully inadequate from the standpoint of respectable scholarship.

Jon Awbrey

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[Jonny Cache]

When Ben Udell asked me to clarify my position on whether I wanted my work in Wikipedia to stay or go, I wrote him back with the following bit of background that may be useful by way of review for other readers.

Subj: Re: Systematic Plagiarism @ Wikipedia
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:02:05 -0500
From: Jon Awbrey <…>
To: Benjamin Udell <…>

Hi Ben,

A bit of explanation may be necessary …

I wouldn't wish on any living soul the tedium of having to read the "Wikienlist", namely:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/

But, as it happens, that's where a lot of the Wikipedia Big Wiks hang out and argue endlessly over various policy and personnel issues without actually doing much of anything useful but somehow managing to defame just about anyone who isn't there to defend themselves.

Up until a couple of weeks ago the usual suspects had pretty much left my name out of their spells and curses — for fear of speaking of the devil, I guess — but suddenly out of the blue Guy Chapman (JzG) and David Gerard started laying down this whopper that I was banned from Wikipedia because I persisted on pawning off a bunch of my original work as sourced research, and that I tried to alter the WP:NOR policy in such a way that it would allow me to do that.

It began on the 2nd and 3rd post of this thread:

lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-November/thread.html#84914

And it when on and on and on. When Guy was asked very politely on wiki to show his evidence, he banned the askers as my socks and deleted the requests from the associated talk pages.

So I called my little "Blank In" or "Writers' Strike" in response to that.

Of course I would prefer the material to be made available there — or why would I have spent a year's worth of work putting it there? — but some of those lying bastards need to be taught that they cannot take your work and then thank you by impugning your integrity on top of all their other abuses.

So my call to have that material removed is genuine at this writing. What they cannot do, however, is recreate material that derives from my contributions with giving proper credit for whatever they use.

Of course, all of this would go without saying among ethical scholars, independent of whatever license technicalities are in place, but some of these Admins, whom you would expect to know better, simply have no clue when it comes to ethics or scholarship.

Gotta run ...

Jon

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[Jonny Cache]

Of course, Faithful Readers of The Wikipedia Review will all have their hands in front of their mouths vocalizing inarticulate sounds to the tune of Ho-Hum at the "news" that Wikipediot Admins engage in the fraudulent falsification of their "transparent" records, all for the purpose of denying due attribution to their good faith contributors and of disguising the derivative use of those contributions.

Nothing New To See Here …

Nothing To Get Excited About …

Move Along …

Yawny Cache (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/cool.gif)

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[The Joy]

They would have done well to just delete all your contributions, Jonny, and just start all over. Disconnecting the idea from the idea creator is... well... unethical and possibly illegal. Even though you "release" your ideas when you edit WP, they still have to require appropriate attribution or else violate the license.