[Moderator's note: the thread referred to below has been deleted. This is not an endorsement of any kind. - gomi]

Well in response to this thread which has since been closed: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16655 I would just like to clarify for all and sundry what I see as my involvement with wikipedia and why.

I edit wikipedia because I like the viewer side version of the project, WP as an encyclopaedia is not the most reliable of the bunch - but for the most part in areas I tend to be interested in its pretty good. From the reader's point of view its a useful resource and a good starting point for further reading if you wish to do so. I never take its word as gospel but for the most part I am more inclined to believe it than not, unless there is something in the text that leads me to believe it might be incorrect. If the piece of knowledge i seek is important I of course back it up with other sources - some of which WP tends to provide through its referencing.

I am an admin because I think I can do some good. Whether that be keeping WP relatively free of crap, unblocking the unfairly blocked, using the (unfortunately placed) automatic respect to agitate for the same, deleting or blocking to remove the unhelpful. Adminship for the most part doesn't require much in the way of skills except perhaps reasonable DR ones because you are undoubtedly going to upset someone.

I do not agree with the leadership. The WMF is largely incompetent (see recent handling of Jimbo's claimed of impropriety) and Jimbo's involvement is waaaaaaaaay past its use by date (if ever in it TBH), his public meddling in the day to day processes of the encyclopaedia are almost invariably half baked and unresearched - as evinced by his continuing support of the old guard like JzG who get away with murder because the community has not found an effective way thus far to deal with their offences. (though that is changing as more people who are in it for fair treatment get more of a voice and more sway in the community). Jimbo support for the old guard of abusive users probobly stems from the fact that he is too lazy to actually take notice of what is happening day to day and notice how the community is being run.

My view on the way the project should be run is this - people should only be allowed to remain as long as they are a net benefit or at least not a net loss. The public don't care about the mechanisations of how what they are reading got there they only care that it is there and it is correct (and preferably well written). Users should however be given enough of a chance to demonstrate their usefulness and if viable and the will is there, those who started out on a bad foot should be given a chance to reform. Take too many bites out of the reformation apple though and you wont have any left. At that point the patience of the community has been exhausted and that editor should be considered a write-off. In the same vein an uncivil environment is not one that fosters collaborative work those that are a constant source of trouble in this manner are those the project can do without. Thus if you are a constant source of argument because of your inability to work nicely with others you are wasting the time of many more people than yourself and I don't care how good your contributions are you are are a drain on peoples time and good humour and are a net loss. Thus the reader side is the most important ethos that I follow is played out in the argument about uncivil editors that are a source of good writing.

It is a sound discussion which makes collaborative work possible and civility is positive only because it makes such a sound discussion possible. When sound discussion is already not possible civility or not doesn't make much difference. An uncivil environment can very well not be what fosters collaborative work, but be the result of something else which fosters the collaborative work.

You mean disagreement in attempt to...
work toward an agreement? (Or
neutrality or truth or whatever you
think the end goal should be.)

My opinion is that people tend to have too narrow of a focus. They claim if only policy X were established or person(s) X were removed from power, then Wikipedia wouldn't work.

It doesn't work because it's yet another historical example of a failed attempt at social engineering, along with "freedom in Iraq," the "war on drugs," with regard to cannabis, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Social engineering doesn't work. You can't "manage" people, an idea that's often hubristically asserted in wiki "models." You can only set up systems in accordance with how people are most likely going to act and then hope for the best.

Any wiki model should therefore be based on Realism on a small-scale (see Political Realism and Legal realism). We can't make the absurd assumption that most people on Wikipedia are going to be productive.

Your proposal above seems to acknowledge this, but it follows a flawed methodology: If most people on Wikipedia aren't productive, establishing a policy whereby, "Unproductive people will be banned," will only result in more cronyism, with good editors getting banned and bad editors continuing to say.

Instead, my proposal: Scrap the current model entirely. Keep all Wikipedia content, but delete\archive all of the policy pages.

Then have a team of academics in the social sciences (Psychologists, Sociologists, Economists, Political Scientists, etc..) come together and create a system which not only gathers a massive quantity of editors but actually possibly facilitates some kind of encyclopedic quality.

Generally, my view is that the system should be semi-democratic and constitutional in nature, with a $2 fee to register (to encourage an older base of editors and discourage sockpuppetry), and the Foundation and Wikipedia should be made a single entity.

Could we get the colscott/sirfozzie arguing thread split from the AB/viridae/lar/dogbiscuit/whoever else arguing thread?

Sorry Kamryn I'll disengage at this point, as I don't think any further PRODUCTIVE conversation will occur between me and ColScott.

I think they are related....

Anyway, this was never a problem when
threads were actually fully threaded.
The Outline mode helps some, but it's
really only a poor imitation of full threading,
and breaks when people don't quote what
they're replying to. It also breaks when
people reply to more than one post within
one post, e.g. when posts are automerged.

But for some reason all the fully threaded
message boards seem to have gone out
of date.

<moderator>AB related posts have been split to here

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16693

<moderator>RTFA / ColScott related posts have been moved to a new thread in the Editors forum here
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16694

My responses to Xidaf and Kamryn should
probably be in the same thread as those
posts I was replying to, i.e. this one.

Done

For clarity in the wake of Joseph associating himself with posts of mine: I don't wish to be associated with the idiotic personalised attacks that have been made in other threads. I'm sure Viridae is a decent sort, and comments about wp are comments about wp.



On the question of who's banned and why - I don't much care, really, its just wiki-soap-opera.

The systemic fault I'm seeing in "the other thread" is illustrated by this: you've reached a conclusion that Murphy's BLP should be put up for deletion, but you're ignoring that judgement because the BLP victim's behaviour is offensive. I'm not seeing how this is anything else than using the BLP as a tool of punishment. Even with the good intentions you've articulated here, the combative environment of wikipedia, rather than encouraging you to take on a role of disinterested professionalism, is positioning you to take sides in an inevitable fight.

Even if that page were deleted tonight, the underlying capability to use an unwelcome BLP to get back at someone is still available on wikipedia - and it won't go away until the controls are out of the hands of potentially partisan and unaccountable amateurs.

I think Murphy's BLP is of borderline notability, its a close call what just nudge it towards delete for me was that he wanted it gone. However that said I am very unsure about wether it is likely to be deleted at afd, in fact I find it a little unlikely - so getting that to occur would require some serious work on my part, arguing in his favour. He has done himself a disservice by spitting insults at all around him because I no longer feel inclined to put that work in. Not a punishment (though it may be seen as one from his POV).

I didn't realise you were that petty, Viridae.

That's a start, but it doesn't solve several important questions which WERE solved in the process of how Wikipedia got here, existing in all of its terrible and bloated majesty.

To wit, if you engage only in a rule of the Great Experts, then who will do the shit-work? I mean, we don't have any graduate students or interns we can just assign it to, in exchange for elevated status later. Right now, it's being done by amateurs = non-pros, which you can think of as teens in their parents' basements, if you like. But it does get done. . That's the whole magic of WP, and it's just a little bit of what Sanger thought might happen, except that neither he nor anybody ever imagined would happen on this scale. College academics aren't going to do it for free, for long. And maybe not for long, even if paid (they need recognition like air). 90% of writing an encyclopedia is this kind of crap-editing stuff, and only a small part is actual really good wordsmithing and subject-matter review. Amateur volunteers are badly needed in this project, to get articles "pre-written" and "pre-enriched" to feed into this process. Just as Sanger suggested.

So the dilema: if you let the teens do ALL of the work, they're going to want to control most of the content, and then you get The Pop-Culture Pit combined with Lord of the Flies. See WP now, where people with no Ph.D. in ANYTHING run the show. Which is fine with the sole flounder, because he doesn't have one, either, and he kicked out the one guy (Sanger) who did have one.

But if you have academics assigned to the content, they're not going to want to do the nitty gritty editiing. So nothing happens. Which is Citizendium and every other project before WP came along, including Nupedia. Making pros clean up shit may satisfy something revengeful in the minds of the Pol Pot-sytle "haters of professionals," but eventually it results in a very dysfunctional society, since the professionals eventually get tired and leave/die, and then you have a system without them. The dictatorship of the proletariat without the intelligensia is a scary thing, as even Lenin realized.

The solution is some kind of hybrid, as academia does now with the grad students being "run" by the profs. It's the old apprentice/master system that goes back thousands of years. We do not re-invent the wheel. The apprentice/master system breaks down only when it gets to be the Lord/serf system, or the slave/owner system. The sort of thing that threatens WP now, where it is prevented only by a continual flux of new professional "meat," who edit awhile, before being used up, and leaving. That same thing tends to happen in academia, of course, but at least academia knows they need new certified experts from somewhere. Wikipedia hasn't caught on even to that. But if you're suggesting that everything should be run by experts, I point you to all of human history. That's not how things get done.

-Milt

It is not petty. Wikipedia is a voluntary effort, and as such nobody has any rights to expect a volunteer to do anything. ColScott goes way beyond the bounds of being uncivil into foul-mouthed abuse to anyone who happens to express a view that does not accord with sycophancy.

He also brings this site into disrepute as supporting that sort of approach to people. I mean, we happily point out that JzG should be de-sysopped for being abusive, and then you suggest that just because ColScott is hard done by he is exempt from the same censure? That is the same excuse as Wikipediots give Guy.

I am quite happy to have arguments, and quite happy to use offensive language to make a point, but to simply post pages of hate filled bile and expect people to take notice is plain stupid. I am suspect that he is just the same in real life, and he balls out waiters, the same waiters who will queue up in the kitchen to spit in his soup.

Like or dislike Wikipedia and Wikipedians, it is rather silly to assume that the day to day social norms need not apply. ColScott lost my vote a long time ago. Joseph the same.

Viridae's not petty, so much as somebody who cares more about the damned encyclopedia than about any particular person individually. Which means he's been infected, per his name, with the meme that the ends justify the means. It's how WP admins think.

"Officer CHP, did you club that motorist into the hospital"
"Yes, but he hit me."
"Did he hit you before or after you started beating him?"
"That doesn't matter. He hit many officers later as we were subduing him, and that proves he's a bad person and should be in jail."
"We want to know how this started."
"I don't know. I don't remember. He's a bad person, just remember THAT. Disruptive to society."
"Could we review the tapes to find out?"
"Why? What do you care? Why are you attacking me? I'm a great Cop. Look how many tickets I've written. Do you know what the highway would be like without people like me?"

And so it goes.

Wouldn't you say that the Manhattan Project was pretty much run by experts? Quite a bit "got done" there, and the result of the Project shaped geo-political history for the ensuing 60 years and continues to do so.

Just to come back out of wikispeak for a sec, I'd assert:
- ColScott has a right to be angry, and express it
- everyone else has a right to castigate, ostracise or otherwise ColScott for his approach
- neither of the above has any bearing on whether there should be a page about him on wikipedia.

That connection of the first two with the third is wikipedia's failing, not its victims'. The fact that admins are in the position of needing some "honey" before they can break the connection is an indicator of wikipedia's broken-ness.


There's a wealth of answers to this question if you remove the constraint "must work for free".

Actually no thats not the way I think. I think that Murphy has the choice to be civil while still strongly opposing his bio on WP, especially here where he will finder supporters for his cause. I think it is unlikely that the bio will be deleted by afd so why shoudl I waste my unpaid time arguing for someone who is completely unappreciative of the efforts and like to turn around an insult me if the deletion does fail to go through and probobly even if the article does end up being deleted. I would appreciate it if you didnt put word into my mouth in future.

Look I don't know WHY you deleted it after I spoke to Wales today but I THANK YOU.

Yes I shouldn't have had to go through this.
Yes your RTFA ploy was weird.
Yes I am a dickhead- fine.
But whatever and whyever, thank you for this early Christmas present.

The appreciation is nice, I'm not RTFA and I havent spoken to Jimbo. I just decided a speedy on BLP grounds might have more of a chance of sticking than an afd. However I make no garauntees about it staying deleted, I am only one admin.

Oh, excellent. : )

Discussion page is still there.

yeah and they brought the article back

Viridae is almost certainly going to get desysopped for acting as a proxy for banned users, etc.

Somehow, I doubt that.

It happened to everyking, and all he did was offer to show someone a deleted revision.

Well I warned that that wouldnt stick. WP isnt loading so I can't see which admin undeleted a BLP deletion.

Edit: its running like a pig. Nothing is loading.

John Reaves
Previous Don Murphy Hater- admits as much in recent contribution though I don't recall him.

He has reverted you and brought the whole history back too.

Can you have him shot please?

yeah thats really pissing me off right now

I got through a second ago and promptly lost the connection. I saw that John Reaves removed a link/webpage on the talkpage. I thought we reached consensus that Murphy's site was allowed.

what do you mean "we" kemosabe?

Ha, well you got me. I meant the general consensus on Wikipedia was to allow it to stay. Meh, I've changed my mind in the time.

what I don't get is
Admin Viridae blanked it and said do not recreate without some code thingy
Did this Reaves guy do as instructed?
Or is it all just mayhem?

Viridae doesn't outrank Reaves. In fact,
Reaves probably has more 'favour' at
WP than Viridae... posting on WR
probably reduces Viridae's 'favour'.

Basically means that deleted for BLP, don't undelete without deletion review.

Basically means falls outside of ignore all rules policy.

So yeah, mayhem because Reaves wants it to be!

And now there is some wheel warring going to happen, Viridae is likely going to be desysoped because he is "working for the subject" and the article will be put up again. Yeah. Prepare for some fun.

It was bogus deletion. Viridae was probably tricked by Murphy. John Reaves 01:33, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Totally bogus man. Like, in the wrong. You know what I'm saying?

You mean like the content of Wikipedia? So bogus only a child would trust it?

I have no idea how a generation Xer would respond to that But yeah, I am surprised he restrained himself enough not to recreate it, call Viridae a heathen, and add in RTFA's edits.

Begun the SPA Wars have.

As predicted, DennyColts -- mysterious single purpose sockpuppet accounts -- are being created to railroad the process and punish the subject. RFTA, another one, boasts that he had been expanding the article on Murphy "to cement his notability".

Wikipedia will fail to get to grips with these cheat accounts, as they did before on the earlier Brandt discussions, and the community will be led by the nose by another small group of BLP extremists, who simply have to have an article on an obscure Hollywood backroom fixer. Because the subject had denounced their cosy cult.

Please, I assure you, I was only there to stir up shit.