well as many good folk around here will know, I've recently posted a new conversation over at 'NotTheWikipediaWeekly' featuring Somey (and who knew that it's pronounced summy?), Wordbomb, Wikipedia Review and Moulton...

thanks heaps for coming by guys - I hope the people who give it a listen find it interesting, and it helps promotes useful discussion etc....

it mightn't be the last of course...

cheers,

PM.

5/5 Stars, will listen again.

Good job gents.

I wonder if there's a way to get a big, booming reverb effect on the microphone input in this computer? That, or maybe a full-blown echo/delay, plus some bass roll-off.

Also, it would be really cool to have Prokoviev's The Montagues and Capulets playing in the background whenever I say anything longer than, say, 20 seconds or so...

Anyway, I thought it went OK, though I didn't get a chance to put in a plug for the OO/NOB proposal. I've been trying to tell myself that's not necessarily bad, since it's always better for them to think it was their idea (and after all, technically it was). Oh well, maybe next time.

Thanks for putting this together Privatemusings. Very interesting. I saw this gem on one of the Noticeboards.


Sigh...And the powers that be respond as well on Privatemusing's talk page as well.

Was there ever a shred of evidence outside of IRC-based paranoia that it was in fact Lir?

Bwahaha, Didn't Kohs bring this up?

The irony detector has overloaded and blown up by this point.

Oh and I see Raul the pathological liar has shown up has he? Probably just trying to harass and intimidate Privatemusings off the site.

I thought everyone had finally realized that it's idiotic to say "LOOK LOOK TEH FOUNDER IS A NAZI THEREFORE WR IS EVIL!" I guess I overestimated Wikipedian common sense, though...

Well the fact that the WR that exists now is NOT the proboards WR and that Igor had NOTHING to do with the WR that exists now is a fact that extends beyond the realm of Raul's fantasy world.

Personally I think Raul just wants some more attention from us.

No, but I for one would still like to know what was in that garbage.

"Admittedly violent ones" indeed... we'll just glom over that whole psychopathic-murderer angle as told from a first-person perspective part, shall we?

You guys sounded so good with those accents. Like Jim Henson creations!

PM asked me if I wanted to go on and talk about my forthright policy ideas for BLPs, but there wasn't a hope I'd figure out the Skype business in time. I would have just blown bum notes over your melodious chimes with my cigar stained Ozzy Osborne brogue anyway, so just as well.

Well done.

Liar, for sure. "Raul":


"Explicitly"?

Reward board:


Why does wikia/wikipedia generate liars?

The Rosalind Picard article is worth observing for its evolution. From a position of no knowledge of her, it first arrives with what looks like a typical CV style write up. Not sure who or why it puts up. It in passing mentions the petition. ID people then have a debate about the petition and the section wobbles around. Then, the main section which describes her career in neutral tones is simply chopped out as unsourced, leaving the hacked around, but sort of sourced, section on controversy.

I think this is such a telling interchange:

The nearly parallel BLP of James Tour was even more egregious, since Tour was already on record in that very NY Times article dismissing the slanted view that Hrafn was pushing into those biographies and related articles. Eventually James Tour was obliged to craft a lengthy piece on his personal web page to refute the false claims attributed to him and ballyhooed on Wikipedia.

I think it's because they've taken their example from the Sole Flounder.

Mr. Pellegrini (Raul654) looks like a complete buffoon... He stated:



The Wikipedia Reward Board states in several places:

"The reward board is an informal page where users who want a specific task related to Wikipedia (such as the promotion of an article to featured article status) can offer a reward to editors willing to take on the task..."

"This is purely a page for editors to offer rewards to other editors."

The Reward Board had essentially the same provisions of cash directly to editors in the Summer of 2006 when I started Wikipedia Review, as well. So, we can obviously see that Mark Pellegrini is a loose cannon. He's decided that I am either a "fool" or a "liar" -- about something which he has completely botched in public. Indeed, he is himself being a fool or a liar, so there's quite some irony there.

I don't want to have to contact my attorney friends in Delaware (where Pellegrini is in school, and where I lived for over 8 years).

If the Wikipedia administrator community hasn't learned by now -- it's neither polite nor wise to call me a liar. User:Durova did it in the Spring of 2007, after Jimmy Wales unblocked my account, and the pressure I and others applied escalated into her eventual abandonment of the admin bit.

I'd like to discuss this amicably in the medium where the damage was sown, but seeing as I am blocked from rebutting Raul654's aspersions where they have been cast, I hope someone will please reply publicly to him that he would be advised to redact or modify his statements, so that they are not defamatory claims backed up with utterly nothing but conjecture!

(And if someone could again replace the "buttocks" picture with Mark's headshot, that would be quite satisfying, too.)

Greg

I liked this episode. Good choice of guests, and privatemusings is settling into his role well, I think. Good work.

Raul654 is emblematic of the appalling lack of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in online journalism. On the one hand he admits that he doesn't know the circumstances of the situation, but that doesn't stop him from fronting a haphazard (and demonstrably erroneous) theory of mind regarding what the subject of the BLP does or doesn't want known. Haphazard and unverified theories of mind about what someone believes or wants have no place in encyclopedic articles. Had Raul654 bothered to look into it, he would have found that Picard herself made a pair of edits to forthrightly disclose the fact that she signed the petition in question. What she took exception to (as did James Tour and several other co-signers of the original 2001 version) was the suggestion that the statement they signed was either anti-evolution (as suggested by the headline in the NY Times) or a 'dissent from Darwin' as later spun out by the Discovery Institute.

The unpopular point of view that I proposed is the one favored by rigorous scientists everywhere, namely that when examining any scientific theory, it is essential to adhere to the protocols of the Scientific Method.


Clearly the adversarial editors preferred the Discovery Institute's political point of view rather than the scientific point of view offered by the scientists themselves.

Ah, but anything we communicate would be acting for a banned user and would have to be deleted, and suggesting that he redact to avoid legal action would clearly be a legal threat, so it will take a Respected User (i.e. nobody who admits to being here) to get away without a ban. So, Wikipedia policy means he's screwed, then?

The episode page has been nominated for deletion by NonvocalScream, a rather obvious sockpuppet.

Sorry, I haven't been following this.

NVS used to be WordMachine? But WordMachine also looks sockish?

Jonny

How DennyColt-esque. It's actually very funny. I hope that NonvocalScream gets some supports in the AfD, just to make it more interesting.

Likewise, I'm pretty sure if Mark Pellegrini refused to recant his errors about the Reward Board, it just serves our purposes all the better in mainstream media and in discussions with First State attorneys. (Note: the preparer of my last will and testament has his law office about 1000 yards from the University of Delaware campus. Raul654 better hope he finishes that PhD he's been birthing the past few years, so he can get out of Dodge before my vulture clasps onto him.)

Greg

Secretlondon ??

A delete from Calton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Calton

who doesn't seem to be a fan of this site 9('banned means, wait for it, banned'). Also now JzG and Phil Sandifer.

[edit] Some of what's going on in the page right now is jaw dropping. Accusations of sockpuppetry, checkuser requests &c. Can someone illuminate me, why is it an obvious sockpuppet a/c?


[edit]

Snippets:

Personally, I doubt NonvocalScream is a sock. Archfailure, on the other hand...

I was sort of hoping that you would have wacky soundbytes to play, like a toilet flushing and a zany "wah, wah, waaaaah" or something.

Which reminds me...there used to be a guy that ran a website that would get on teamspeak and disguise his voice so no one would know who he was. I wonder how long it will take for a person to do that on PM's show?

I thought that this interview would have a good effect. It's easy to miss things like emotion and that sort of thing when communicating in text only and of course you have to trust that the other person is actually reading your words. It appears that some not only do not pay attention to what people type, but they don't listen to what they say either! As evidenced by Raul's refusing to listen to Wordbomb's explanation of the "spyware" (more like a web bug) that he sent slimvirgin.



I do not think Raul reads here, but someone please tell him to go back and listen to that again. He seems to have whipped himself into a frenzy and did not pay any attention to the explanation. If he chooses to disbelieve the explanation, that is one thing, but he out and out misrepresented it or misunderstood it.

Raul made several very ignorant remarks on PM's talk page, including stating that:



I considered rebutting him on wiki, then I thought that it is so ridiculous that it is better for people to see how stupid he is for themselves and I shouldn't do him the favoring of convincing him not to be so stupid.

Actually, I don't think Raul is lying, exactly...

Wikipedia:Bounty board was and is precisely as he describes, and he may have mixed the two up (and since he for whatever reason doesn't trust you, there's no reason for him to bother clicking to check his facts)

Now we're f'in' TALKIN', guys! Now THIS is an Article for Deletion debate!

I can't wait to see the Henrik-o-meter in a few days for these pages:

Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:NotTheWikipediaWeekly/Episode_6

Wikipedia:NotTheWikipediaWeekly/Episode_6

Wikipedia:NotTheWikipediaWeekly

Check these links again on April 7th or so!

Greg

Why? It seems pretty obvious to me that they are. They know way too much about WP for someone who's just been there 3 months

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=200964021

"== Characterizing others work ==
Characterizing the book as critical would be ok, as long as we are restating the books judgment and not our own. I just want to be sure that we do not reinsert this [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Don_Murphy&diff=200760136&oldid=200692714 this edit] regardless of the sourcing. This is not aimed at any one editor, however, it is a general statement about the edit. The edit did not appear to adhere to [[Wikipedia:NPOV#Fairness_of_tone|Fainess of Tone]] or [[Wikipedia:NPOV#Characterizing_opinions_of_people.27s_work|Characterizing opinions]]. We should be careful here and go slow. Regards, [[User:NonvocalScream|NonvocalScream]] ([[User talk:NonvocalScream|talk]]) 02:04, 26 March 2008 (UTC) "

Anyone recognise the tone/mannerisms?

Well, I never said he's exactly lying. He might just be exactly a buffoon. He said:



I don't see how that could be a "mix up" of the two policy pages. I do see how it evidences a buffoon.

+++++++++++ ============= +++++++++++++



I smell expensive wine, perfectly cooked filet mignon, and a hint of Russian massage parlor oil. Woah! What was that bright beam of high-intensity flashlight light that I just saw?

Could it be???

Greg

A slip? They don't know their grammar either.

I'll work on that... there has to be a way to do it...

As for the MfD, howzabout I throw out this hypothetical: What if it had been just me being interviewed, and Moulton, thekohser and Wordbomb hadn't been involved at all? Or maybe me and Kato, or The Joy, or Guy, or any one of the majority of WR members who aren't banned from WP? I don't even have an account, and given that the others wouldn't be "banned users" - does anyone here honestly think they wouldn't come up with some other bogus reason for deleting the episode page and the associated files?

For an even more interesting example, what about Poetlister? She's (currently) banned on en.wikipedia, but an administrator on en.wikiquote - and like the people are saying, the audio files are hosted on Commons.

Also, this is perilously close to the kind of logic that would force them to delete the article on the movie Shoot 'Em Up, because "banned user" ColScott makes an appearance on the DVD "making of" bonus featurette.

I find this funny, from Filll:



Oh, you mean sort of like the co-founder of a huge web encyclopedia project contacts WP and threatens to go bat-feet insane if Wikipedia mentions the other co-founder as a co-founder?

I dunno.

What do we do, Filll?

The deletion debate is going so heavily in the direction of keeping that it must be pretty embarrassing to Guy and company to find themselves so clearly on the opposite side of an issue from the community consensus, and no longer even able to rally a sizeable clique to gang up on their side.

Isn't it about time for the Wiki Defender to write another blog posting about how the trolls are winning again?

My perverse nature indicates that perhaps they should do precisely that. Go all the way into Stalinist airbrushing, and start erasing the existence of everything that in any way relates to people they don't like.

Thereupon, WP will finally become what Messrs. Sandifer and Pellegrini obviously want it to be;
the North Korea of the internet. With themselves as top-ranked toadies to Dear Leader.

Wish I had a few of "Raul's common sense bricks", for throwing at certain pointy heads.



Heh heh heh.

It's interesting how some of those commenting adopted the notion that all of us were "banned for good reasons" even though Somey has never even registered or edited on Wikipedia.

And I am not technically banned, but indefinitely blocked, for a remarkable reason that I wonder how many people there (or here) know or remember (let alone examined for validity).

More-o da Same-o:


Why would that be a good point to "put towards" me? I had nothing to do with that, and I didn't know it was going on. (Not that I would have cared!)


Except that all the examples he cites happened before I even became a member...


Never mind the conflict of interest, of course. And she "had to quit" Wikipedia, not her job. Let's just make that clear.


Aren't all my answers idiotic? I thought that was the whole point...

Anyway, I'd probably mention that ALL of those things happened two years ago before I mentioned the fact that they're the acts of individual Wikipedia review participants and can't be used to judge the whole site. "We" and/or "WR" don't encourage anything, except to the extent that any web forum encourages people to do whatever it is they do.

And this, from User:Filll:

Classic WP double-talk! Claim your opponent is wrong and doesn't "square with reality" without actually explaining why! Darkly hint that you've got more and/or secret information that you hasn't revealed! Tell everyone that it's "really obvious if you pay attention"!

Yes or no, "Filll" - did you, or did you not, edit-war over articles on people who had signed the ID petition, in order to keep their BLP articles in a state in which the petition appeared to the reader to be the single most important event in their lives?

And as for Filll's little "hypothetical," it's completely diversionary and irrelevant. However, in that case you'd give the person the option of having the article deleted completely, or else work within WP's strict, rigid confines to help shape its content. I think WP'ers would find that the vast majority of article subjects would end up not really objecting to the strict, rigid confines all that much, given the choice - except for people who are being targeted by WP attack editors like User:Filll, of course! The opt-out policy proposal is designed specifically for them.

NonVocalScream responded to the sockpuppet claims here- to answer why they seemed so experienced in regards to wikipedia they claimed that they had experience on other projects (how that would make them seeingly completely au fait with every aspect of policy on en.wikipedia I don't know).

When Lawrence Cohen asked if they could point to accounts- NVS stated "Anywhere on any Wikimedia project you see contributions from NonvocalScream "- but Lawrence couldn't find any and neither can I.

I rather doubt I was the first person to raise objections to BLPs on the grounds of accuracy or ethics.

But at least two highly respected Wikipedians (NewYorkBrad and Doc_Glasgow) have recently acknowledged that the BLP problem is one of the most serious ethical problems facing the site.

The two or three BLPs which I ventured to correct were among the very first that I dug into at Wikipedia. Eric Barbour commented just a few days ago that he thought those particular BLPs were among the most egregious examples of BLP abuse that he had ever seen on Wikipedia. Unlike Eric, I had no frame of reference to compare the biographies of Picard, Tour, etc, with any others to assess how bad they were compared to any other BLPs.

There is little doubt in my mind that there is a real problem with BLPs in general, and those two or three in particular. I cannot fathom what Filll had in mind when he launched that RfC to examine the problem, but it's amusing to note that KillerChihuahua was hard pressed to come up with a valid reason for executing an indefinite block, and so she ended up concocting a haphazard (and patently erroneous) theory of mind to the effect that I "had no interest in writing an encyclopedia."

Here's another:

Uh, exactly where it is now...?

Anyway, this rant of his about the guy with the co-author wife was a classic strawman argument, for which the "conclusions" were based on pure lies and gross distortions that didn't even have much to do with the example. It's one of the worst I've seen, in fact.

Nobody here is insisting that WP abandon its BLP strictures in favor of including things that are "contrary to reliable sources" - AFAIK that's the polar opposite of what people here are suggesting. And of course, he's conveniently ignoring the OO/NOB proposal completely, which sort of goes back to why I was unhappy about not getting a chance to explain it. Then again, just about everyone who listens to that thing should be familiar with it, I'd imagine.

I presume PrivateMusings and the other moderate editors here are following this, and appreciate the opportunity and need for dialogue on the issues that divide us on the BLP problem (both in general and as revealed in the particular cases where I did battle with Filll and his allies on the Wikipedia Project on Intelligent Design).

I hope the moderate editors here, including Lar, Viridae, NewYorkBrad, Doc_Glasgow, SirFozzie, and Alison (who am I leaving out?), will lend their good offices to these questions, in search of a reasonable resolution of both the general problem and the kind of specific examples which I happened to stumble onto last Fall.

So much text, there for so little time.

block log

Note: block log will remain, but this AN/I comment will be lost.

The likes of Filll are so involved with their own distorted view that I am sure that they really believe they are right. I suspect they assume that they are up against a clever argument which they can't quite put their finger on the sleight of hand, but they know it is in there - hence the comments like: "You only have to listen to here it": THEY can hear it, but they can't articulate it. It is much like they cannot hear the arguments from Moulton et. al. that the petition is not as they have described, therefore their whole raison d'etre for the conflict is null and void.

Rather like a day or so ago, where the thread here on "outing" a Wikipedia user who already had publicly identified himself (I guess that is a bit like outing Tom Robinson for singing Glad to be Gay) is the worst ever attack in the world ever. Brains don't engage. Unfortunately, though we think that having these faux-pas lying around helps, most readers just seem to accept the BADSITEs theme.

My bad. I got about 3 sentences into that, nodding to myself that ya, that scans like a Jonny Cache screed might, full of dense alliterations, hidden meanings, etc, and do I have time to puzzle it out just for fun.... when...

...alarm bells went off and I recognised it for what it was... Scott Pakin's work. Jonny, I'm disappointed in you, you're slacking.

That's no Cache. To be honest I didn't think much of the guys's arguments, nor the pretentious prose. Cache uses all manner of techniques but they are playful rather than pretentious -- and they're usually funny if nothing else.

Update: I get it now...

I totally have to get my hands on the source code for that thing...

So, can we say we have another innocent user blocked as a sockpuppet? Because I know this HarryPotter editor wasn't me. And Jonny could confirm that it certainly wasn't him.

Greg

NonvocalScream realized that he/she was a doofus, and thus closed his/her own AfD early, as a Keep.

Quick eyeball of the "Delete" votes shows our rogue's gallery of the most brain-deficient characters on Wikipedia:

Calton "Everything is spam" Bollick
Guy "Riding to restore havoc" Chapman
Phil "The Chill" Sandifer
Michael "Der President asks, 'Mommy, is my Swiss cocoa hot now?'" Bimmler

What a lonely patrol, out on point, completely fragged by not just the rest of their company, but the whole regiment.

Too funny. Congratulations, dipwads!

Greg

BTDT — I can't even get that poor AnonIP from Deutschland cleared!

Ygolohcysp Esrever being what it is in Wikiputia, our most earnest efforts to exonerate the Grim HPWD would only be taken as utterly j'accusatory condemnations.

Jonny

Is anyone aware of Raul attempting to correct the "mix up" yet?

He did backtrack a little:



1. Not as dirty as passing on what I would expect to be a confidential conversation to the subject of the complaint. (And anyone with any sense ignores receipt requested prompts!)

2. Which if Raul listened, he would be aware that this issue was discussed at length and an agreed solution found.

It's remarkably difficult to correct an error without offending the party whose error is being corrected.

You sounded fairly reasonable in that podcast... (for the most part). However, comments like "Congratulations, dipwads!"give me pause ... I have to wonder how they help anything. Why give the detractors of your message ammo?


That struck me as a throwaway sock of someone or another, based on behaviour patterns, with contributions that were disruptive (if amusing), so I'm not seeing unblocking as a good use of anyone's time, really. You knew that already, you just wanted to see if I'd respond this way, right?