Shoemaker's Holiday flames out Options

[Milton Roe]

Really, one of the things I was telling the audio editors when I was trying to get this episode done was that I really didn't want to antagonize Greg especially. He's intelligent and charming, but we all have our strengths and our weaknesses. He tends to be less charming when he isn't getting what he wants.

Well, that's a quality uniquely Greg's.

Look at Jimbo. They don't let him siphon money off WP in any way, and he's still never grumpy. They even took away his editing privileges, and yet, he still smiles....



I think Jimbo takes happy pills. Greg is just a old sourpuss for nothing. Suck it up, Greg.

[EricBarbour]

More seriously, I made a public apology to Greg at the Foundation list months ago. If he doesn't want to accept it that's up to him. We goofed up that episode at WikiVoices, no doubt about it. I won't don a hairshirt forever about it, and that doesn't mean his conduct is perfect.

That's nice.

PUBLISH THE DAMN FILE.

[Alison]

We goofed up that episode at WikiVoices, no doubt about it. I won't don a hairshirt forever about it, and that doesn't mean his conduct is perfect.

Really, one of the things I was telling the audio editors when I was trying to get this episode done was that I really didn't want to antagonize Greg especially. He's intelligent and charming, but we all have our strengths and our weaknesses. He tends to be less charming when he isn't getting what he wants.

Silly question: if the file is gone-trashed-deleted, would both yourself and Greg be amenable to re-running the interview (PITA, I know, to do it again, but it's important to Greg), with a different recording engineer?

Or if it is available still, could someone else get it ready to put live?

I'm coming in late into this and don't have the full facts, most likely. I'm just thinking of a solution, is all ...

[thekohser]

We goofed up that episode at WikiVoices, no doubt about it. I won't don a hairshirt forever about it, and that doesn't mean his conduct is perfect.

Really, one of the things I was telling the audio editors when I was trying to get this episode done was that I really didn't want to antagonize Greg especially. He's intelligent and charming, but we all have our strengths and our weaknesses. He tends to be less charming when he isn't getting what he wants.

Silly question: if the file is gone-trashed-deleted, would both yourself and Greg be amenable to re-running the interview (PITA, I know, to do it again, but it's important to Greg), with a different recording engineer?

Or if it is available still, could someone else get it ready to put live?

I'm coming in late into this and don't have the full facts, most likely. I'm just thinking of a solution, is all ...

I believe that Adam still holds the file. He refuses to turn it over to anyone (yet he is still welcomed on the Wikivoices project). (Durova describes his treachery as a "goof up".) The other guy who originally was assigned the file editing job (or treacherous friend Promethean) says that he deleted it from his hard drive, but I strongly suspect that is a lie. People don't delete highly controversial property when there's even a chance that it could bear fruit for them in the future either via blackmail or adulation.

I think re-running the interview is a splendid idea, but I give it a 50-50 chance of being suppressed again, somehow. The Wikivoices team is exactly that treacherous.

[anthony]

We goofed up that episode at WikiVoices, no doubt about it. I won't don a hairshirt forever about it, and that doesn't mean his conduct is perfect.

Really, one of the things I was telling the audio editors when I was trying to get this episode done was that I really didn't want to antagonize Greg especially. He's intelligent and charming, but we all have our strengths and our weaknesses. He tends to be less charming when he isn't getting what he wants.

Silly question: if the file is gone-trashed-deleted, would both yourself and Greg be amenable to re-running the interview (PITA, I know, to do it again, but it's important to Greg), with a different recording engineer?

Or if it is available still, could someone else get it ready to put live?

I'm coming in late into this and don't have the full facts, most likely. I'm just thinking of a solution, is all ...

I've offered to host the "roundtable interview" if no one else is brave enough to do it. I'll make the same offer with regard to the Broer/Cuerden battle (though in the latter case I'd want permission of either Broer or Cuerden).

This post has been edited by anthony: Sun 22nd November 2009, 2:06pm

[Somey]

So during arbitration I got to know the fellow, discovered some of our editing interests overlapped, and was truly impressed with his work. He writes featured articles about Gilbert and Sullivan; he restores eighteenth century engravings. What's not to respect about that? The arbitration case had obviously taken a lot out of him. I was angry about how his case had gone and worried about what WMF had nearly lost, especially in terms of audio restoration: due to copyright laws, public domain audio often means restoring wax cylinders. This dude restored Enrico Caruso's singing. There was no other volunteer who who had those skills until Shoemaker trained more people.

I realize this is a tangent, and maybe deserves its own thread or even a blog posting, but the whole issue of restored audio content on Wikipedia is a fairly interesting one from an outside perspective. It does take considerable skill to do it properly, but the software is getting easier and easier to use, and IMO more people have these skills (and these programs) than some might think.

These days it's very common for people to have programs with "scratch removal" filters to clean up vinyl conversions, though it's far less common for people to actually use them or even know how, of course. More serious home audio restorers can buy something like Diamond Cut Millenium, which is only about $60. Diamond Cut also sells CD's of restored public-domain Edison wax cylinder recordings, which were mostly done in 2005, just around the time when WP began embedding audio files. (You could always up/download them, IIRC, just not embed them.)

But audio restoration doesn't attract the sort of person Wikipedia would normally be expected to attract. Audio doesn't take up a lot of space on a page, and at the moment I don't see Featured Audio on the Main Page (though that might be an aberration - I don't look at the Main Page very often). It can be very time-consuming if you do it right, and it's not a good way to increase your edit-count (given that you're not going to upload 80 versions of the same file, each with one less pop or click in it). And whereas clicking on an image takes you to a page on which credit for the image is spelled out in excruciating detail, clicking on an audio link simply plays the audio; you have to click "About this file" to see any credits. Moreover, when you hear an old recording that's been restored, you don't think "hey, what an awesome restoration job," because you probably haven't heard the unrestored version. In fact, the cleaner it is, the less you think about how much effort it took to restore it.

So it's something of a thankless job, isn't it? I can easily see why people don't want to do it, and why they'd feel underappreciated after a while - possibly even to the point of developing a complex about it.

If WP had the manpower, I'd suggest that they try to avoid situations where people who do audio restoration work are made responsible for things like "WikiVoices." But of course, they don't have the manpower, because nobody wants to do thankless tasks for free. It may be that Shoemaker's Holiday (T-C-L-K-R-D) is the sort of person who likes to take on thankless tasks for the purpose of complaining about how little thanks he's getting, and if so, that might explain a few things. But I'd be completely irresponsible to draw that kind of conclusion in any sort of formal way, obviously...

As to whether or not someone like Durova should be involved in it, that's another issue - she might well be too ego-driven to work effectively with people who do thankless tasks. That is to say, she'll probably thank them (which is good), and maybe even be the only one thanking them (which is bad). At the same time she might be unable to avoid the appearance of taking credit in some cases, even if she isn't actually doing so, simply because of the way she interacts with people in general (i.e., she tends to "take over"). The worst thing you can do with (or to) someone like Shoemaker's Holiday, I suspect, is be perceived as taking credit for whatever specialized work he does, particularly if it's voluntary.

Ultimately I don't want to appear (myself) to be too critical of Wikipedia's efforts to provide audio content, or the people who provide it - there's a lot of material there, they're reasonably good about copyrights, and some of the restoration work is quite well-done. (Also, dissemination is a major aid to preservation, as they say.) But if they're going to really make a go of it, they should come up with a way to make it less thankless - assuming there even is a way.

[MBisanz]

So during arbitration I got to know the fellow, discovered some of our editing interests overlapped, and was truly impressed with his work. He writes featured articles about Gilbert and Sullivan; he restores eighteenth century engravings. What's not to respect about that? The arbitration case had obviously taken a lot out of him. I was angry about how his case had gone and worried about what WMF had nearly lost, especially in terms of audio restoration: due to copyright laws, public domain audio often means restoring wax cylinders. This dude restored Enrico Caruso's singing. There was no other volunteer who who had those skills until Shoemaker trained more people.

I realize this is a tangent, and maybe deserves its own thread or even a blog posting, but the whole issue of restored audio content on Wikipedia is a fairly interesting one from an outside perspective. It does take considerable skill to do it properly, but the software is getting easier and easier to use, and IMO more people have these skills (and these programs) than some might think.

These days it's very common for people to have programs with "scratch removal" filters to clean up vinyl conversions, though it's far less common for people to actually use them or even know how, of course. More serious home audio restorers can buy something like Diamond Cut Millenium, which is only about $60. Diamond Cut also sells CD's of restored public-domain Edison wax cylinder recordings, which were mostly done in 2005, just around the time when WP began embedding audio files. (You could always up/download them, IIRC, just not embed them.)

But audio restoration doesn't attract the sort of person Wikipedia would normally be expected to attract. Audio doesn't take up a lot of space on a page, and at the moment I don't see Featured Audio on the Main Page (though that might be an aberration - I don't look at the Main Page very often). It can be very time-consuming if you do it right, and it's not a good way to increase your edit-count (given that you're not going to upload 80 versions of the same file, each with one less pop or click in it). And whereas clicking on an image takes you to a page on which credit for the image is spelled out in excruciating detail, clicking on an audio link simply plays the audio; you have to click "About this file" to see any credits. Moreover, when you hear an old recording that's been restored, you don't think "hey, what an awesome restoration job," because you probably haven't heard the unrestored version. In fact, the cleaner it is, the less you think about how much effort it took to restore it.

So it's something of a thankless job, isn't it? I can easily see why people don't want to do it, and why they'd feel underappreciated after a while - possibly even to the point of developing a complex about it.

If WP had the manpower, I'd suggest that they try to avoid situations where people who do audio restoration work are made responsible for things like "WikiVoices." But of course, they don't have the manpower, because nobody wants to do thankless tasks for free. It may be that Shoemaker's Holiday (T-C-L-K-R-D) is the sort of person who likes to take on thankless tasks for the purpose of complaining about how little thanks he's getting, and if so, that might explain a few things. But I'd be completely irresponsible to draw that kind of conclusion in any sort of formal way, obviously...

As to whether or not someone like Durova should be involved in it, that's another issue - she might well be too ego-driven to work effectively with people who do thankless tasks. That is to say, she'll probably thank them (which is good), and maybe even be the only one thanking them (which is bad). At the same time she might be unable to avoid the appearance of taking credit in some cases, even if she isn't actually doing so, simply because of the way she interacts with people in general (i.e., she tends to "take over"). The worst thing you can do with (or to) someone like Shoemaker's Holiday, I suspect, is be perceived as taking credit for whatever specialized work he does, particularly if it's voluntary.

Ultimately I don't want to appear (myself) to be too critical of Wikipedia's efforts to provide audio content, or the people who provide it - there's a lot of material there, they're reasonably good about copyrights, and some of the restoration work is quite well-done. (Also, dissemination is a major aid to preservation, as they say.) But if they're going to really make a go of it, they should come up with a way to make it less thankless - assuming there even is a way.

Actually, Durova has made they exact same arguments about the place images are given in WP (low edit count, time to restore, etc) dozens of times before. Frankly I'd encourage most audio or image buffs to head over to commons, where at least the primary focus is on low-edit count media work.

[Random832]

So you have time for this crap between your all-important photo restorations, but not to even spend fifteen minutes to properly read the explanation you asked me to make?


May I have permission to release your PMs to me?

The structure of WikiVoices is less top-down than that analogy implies. He wasn't the original audio editor. I had very strongly advised the original editor against attempting to share the responsibility with anybody else. To the point of saying if that were going to happen then I wouldn't host. But of course after the recording was made I couldn't prevent people from trying it anyway. Believe me, a couple of people got reamed out in private over that.

The horse has had a nice horse funeral and doesn't need another beating.

During the aftermath of this some people have wondered why you pushed the issue so hard and so long, Greg. Yes, you did make a positive impression during the recording. I could understand why you'd want that published. But the manner in which you've followed up has more than undone that good impression. Somebody (not from WikiVoices) linked me to this thread a moment ago and said your post is the kind of thing that makes them lose interest in helping you get unblocked.

This is the sort of argument that would be a whole lot more legitimate if the file were published now and Thekohser was still complaining about it. My understanding is that this is not the case.

This post has been edited by Random832: Sun 22nd November 2009, 10:06pm

[A Horse With No Name]

You'd be better off getting that from the horse's mouth, Greg.

Find another cliche, toots -- this one is getting long in the tooth.

[dtobias]

You'd be better off getting that from the horse's mouth, Greg.

Find another cliche, toots -- this one is getting long in the tooth.

How about getting it from the horse's ass?

[A Horse With No Name]

You'd be better off getting that from the horse's mouth, Greg.

Find another cliche, toots -- this one is getting long in the tooth.

How about getting it from the horse's ass?

Okay, how about avoiding equine body parts all together, hmmm?

[GlassBeadGame]

You'd be better off getting that from the horse's mouth, Greg.

Find another cliche, toots -- this one is getting long in the tooth.

How about getting it from the horse's ass?

Okay, how about avoiding equine body parts all together, hmmm?

Please, before we get to FT2's favorite bits.

[EricBarbour]

You'd be better off getting that from the horse's mouth, Greg.

Find another cliche, toots -- this one is getting long in the tooth.

How about getting it from the horse's ass?

[Jon Awbrey]

May I have permission to release your PMs to me?

Definition. A private message is a message never sent.

Jon

[Wiki Witch of the West]

We goofed up that episode at WikiVoices, no doubt about it. I won't don a hairshirt forever about it, and that doesn't mean his conduct is perfect.

Really, one of the things I was telling the audio editors when I was trying to get this episode done was that I really didn't want to antagonize Greg especially. He's intelligent and charming, but we all have our strengths and our weaknesses. He tends to be less charming when he isn't getting what he wants.

Silly question: if the file is gone-trashed-deleted, would both yourself and Greg be amenable to re-running the interview (PITA, I know, to do it again, but it's important to Greg), with a different recording engineer?

Or if it is available still, could someone else get it ready to put live?

I'm coming in late into this and don't have the full facts, most likely. I'm just thinking of a solution, is all ...

It was a roundtable candidate discussion, so not really practical. Although very good suggestion; thanks for the thought. Regarding the rest, tried that.

[Wiki Witch of the West]

So during arbitration I got to know the fellow, discovered some of our editing interests overlapped, and was truly impressed with his work. He writes featured articles about Gilbert and Sullivan; he restores eighteenth century engravings. What's not to respect about that? The arbitration case had obviously taken a lot out of him. I was angry about how his case had gone and worried about what WMF had nearly lost, especially in terms of audio restoration: due to copyright laws, public domain audio often means restoring wax cylinders. This dude restored Enrico Caruso's singing. There was no other volunteer who who had those skills until Shoemaker trained more people.

I realize this is a tangent, and maybe deserves its own thread or even a blog posting, but the whole issue of restored audio content on Wikipedia is a fairly interesting one from an outside perspective. It does take considerable skill to do it properly, but the software is getting easier and easier to use, and IMO more people have these skills (and these programs) than some might think.

These days it's very common for people to have programs with "scratch removal" filters to clean up vinyl conversions, though it's far less common for people to actually use them or even know how, of course. More serious home audio restorers can buy something like Diamond Cut Millenium, which is only about $60. Diamond Cut also sells CD's of restored public-domain Edison wax cylinder recordings, which were mostly done in 2005, just around the time when WP began embedding audio files. (You could always up/download them, IIRC, just not embed them.)

But audio restoration doesn't attract the sort of person Wikipedia would normally be expected to attract. Audio doesn't take up a lot of space on a page, and at the moment I don't see Featured Audio on the Main Page (though that might be an aberration - I don't look at the Main Page very often). It can be very time-consuming if you do it right, and it's not a good way to increase your edit-count (given that you're not going to upload 80 versions of the same file, each with one less pop or click in it). And whereas clicking on an image takes you to a page on which credit for the image is spelled out in excruciating detail, clicking on an audio link simply plays the audio; you have to click "About this file" to see any credits. Moreover, when you hear an old recording that's been restored, you don't think "hey, what an awesome restoration job," because you probably haven't heard the unrestored version. In fact, the cleaner it is, the less you think about how much effort it took to restore it.

So it's something of a thankless job, isn't it? I can easily see why people don't want to do it, and why they'd feel underappreciated after a while - possibly even to the point of developing a complex about it.

If WP had the manpower, I'd suggest that they try to avoid situations where people who do audio restoration work are made responsible for things like "WikiVoices." But of course, they don't have the manpower, because nobody wants to do thankless tasks for free. It may be that Shoemaker's Holiday (T-C-L-K-R-D) is the sort of person who likes to take on thankless tasks for the purpose of complaining about how little thanks he's getting, and if so, that might explain a few things. But I'd be completely irresponsible to draw that kind of conclusion in any sort of formal way, obviously...

As to whether or not someone like Durova should be involved in it, that's another issue - she might well be too ego-driven to work effectively with people who do thankless tasks. That is to say, she'll probably thank them (which is good), and maybe even be the only one thanking them (which is bad). At the same time she might be unable to avoid the appearance of taking credit in some cases, even if she isn't actually doing so, simply because of the way she interacts with people in general (i.e., she tends to "take over"). The worst thing you can do with (or to) someone like Shoemaker's Holiday, I suspect, is be perceived as taking credit for whatever specialized work he does, particularly if it's voluntary.

Ultimately I don't want to appear (myself) to be too critical of Wikipedia's efforts to provide audio content, or the people who provide it - there's a lot of material there, they're reasonably good about copyrights, and some of the restoration work is quite well-done. (Also, dissemination is a major aid to preservation, as they say.) But if they're going to really make a go of it, they should come up with a way to make it less thankless - assuming there even is a way.

Actually, Durova has made they exact same arguments about the place images are given in WP (low edit count, time to restore, etc) dozens of times before. Frankly I'd encourage most audio or image buffs to head over to commons, where at least the primary focus is on low-edit count media work.

Some good points, Somey. Bear in mind that although it's easier to restore audio these days, no one was doing it at WMF until Shoemaker. The featured sound program was lifeless; he revived it. And he really drummed up interest and trained other people to make the FS program sustainable.

And Matt except for rare situations in copyright law, Commons is exactly where this material does go. Shoemaker had been attempting to get Commons to feature sounds. The Commons featured picture program there had been mostly about digital photography until he and I and a few others brought in historic restorations.

This post has been edited by Wiki Witch of the West: Mon 23rd November 2009, 5:08pm

[dogbiscuit]

Here's some advice how to become a better Machavellian: accept the offer first, get the dude unblocked, wait an interval, and then lay into me.

You haven't got it yet, have you?

Essentially this is about process and how Wikipedians use and abuse processes rather than an individual. I hadn't really conceived that people here are at all interested in achieving an unblock of an individual to work on a website held in considerable disdain by a sizeable proportion of those who post here.

The principle is: understand the flaws in the process, understand why people abuse the processes then you can understand whether the processes are wrong or simply the operators of the process.

At WR there is a fairly strong consensus ( sorry!) that BOTH the processes and the operators are wrong. However, Wikipedians are blind to all this, they see a perfect process gifted from Jimbo and refined down the ages, and presume that Wikipedians themselves are able to perfectly apply such processes - any mistakes are a temporary aberration. So the question is: are you capable of seeing the flaws in Wikipedian processes and then work to resolve this, or do you simply take the typical route of throwing your hands in the air and cry out "What do you expect? It's only a game you know, it's not real life."

You are not so well skilled in deflection as SlimVirgin, but the irritation in hearing you spout runs about at the same level.

[Wiki Witch of the West]

Here's some advice how to become a better Machavellian: accept the offer first, get the dude unblocked, wait an interval, and then lay into me.

You haven't got it yet, have you?

*snip*

At WR there is a fairly strong consensus ( sorry!) that BOTH the processes and the operators are wrong. However, Wikipedians are blind to all this, they see a perfect process gifted from Jimbo and refined down the ages, and presume that Wikipedians themselves are able to perfectly apply such processes - any mistakes are a temporary aberration. So the question is: are you capable of seeing the flaws in Wikipedian processes and then work to resolve this, or do you simply take the typical route of throwing your hands in the air and cry out "What do you expect? It's only a game you know, it's not real life."

Yeah, but the weakness of WR criticism has always been quality control. Notice how the spurious claim that I was doing original research went completely unchallenged here, even though the correction was actually done by Roger Davies and the Signpost had run a report on the Library of Congress's confirmation.

This post has been edited by Wiki Witch of the West: Mon 23rd November 2009, 5:14pm

[GlassBeadGame]

Here's some advice how to become a better Machavellian: accept the offer first, get the dude unblocked, wait an interval, and then lay into me.

You haven't got it yet, have you?

*snip*

At WR there is a fairly strong consensus ( sorry!) that BOTH the processes and the operators are wrong. However, Wikipedians are blind to all this, they see a perfect process gifted from Jimbo and refined down the ages, and presume that Wikipedians themselves are able to perfectly apply such processes - any mistakes are a temporary aberration. So the question is: are you capable of seeing the flaws in Wikipedian processes and then work to resolve this, or do you simply take the typical route of throwing your hands in the air and cry out "What do you expect? It's only a game you know, it's not real life."

Yeah, but the weakness of WR criticism has always been quality control. Notice how the spurious claim that I was doing original research went completely unchallenged here, even though the correction was actually done by Roger Davies and the Signpost had run a report on the Library of Congress's confirmation.

This post indicates just how clueless you are about what constitutes a significant critique. The result is that you have found yet another venue to embarrass yourself

[Somey]

Yeah, but the weakness of WR criticism has always been quality control. Notice how the spurious claim that I was doing original research went completely unchallenged here, even though the correction was actually done by Roger Davies and the Signpost had run a report on the Library of Congress's confirmation.

I think you misread that post somewhat, actually...?

Your effort to determine that the Library of Congress was wrong actually was "original research," but in this case (as in many others) "original research" is actually a good thing. Mr. Dogbiscuit's point was that what you were doing went against standard WP operating procedure, which suggested that maybe you were starting to think outside the WP box. Again, a good thing, from the perspective of those of us who prefer truth and facts (gained through research and inquiry) to inflexible reliance on published "sources," many of which, as you indicate, are sometimes wrong despite being deemed "reliable."