OK, this is pretty crazy, there is something currently ongoing at the living people board.

An IP editor is trying to remove unsourced material (such as a claim that the singer Seal worked for hookers) from articles. Because he's banned (under what username I'm not sure), the preferred solution for the BLP board? to revert back in the unsourced claims Whatever the guy has done, the answer to someone highlighting negative unsourced material is NOT to blow a razzle at him and revert it on principle!

It starts here and continues in the next section:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bio...oticeboard#Seal

The IPs own (reverted) comments sum it up:



That totally nuts and just shows how far off track wikipedia has got!

Well, it looks like User:JzG agrees with you. Though I have to admit, even if the material is mostly copied from another website, most of it really was fairly non-controversial, if not actually pro-Seal.

Isn't there a big corporation called "Pro-Seal" that makes NFL logo merchandise?

But look at the next section, the IP is trying to remove the following unsourced statements from articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Harding

Harding is also special "friends" with Mani from Primal Scream and Oasis singer Liam Gallagher.

Now take a look at this mindfield, again this is taken from his posts on the BLP board:

Self-promotion was something of an obsession with James's father.

Once he faded from the public eye, James was employed in a series of low paid jobs but by his own admission usually didn't last very long before being fired or quitting.

Initially he thought himself to be gay and tried the gay lifestyle but didn't fit in.

Allen discovered that many of the qualifications had been purchased on the internet and that Harries' own mother had overseen Harries' counselling on the psychological aspects of gender reassignment. A number of other aspects of the family's life did not bear scrutiny.

Since Harries' childhood the family, who live in Cardiff, Wales, have been persecuted by neighbours who take exception to Harries' "transvestitism" and the perceived snobbery of the family. Cabbages are often thrown at the windows of their house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Harries

This might all be true, but who the hell knows!

So JzG is "proxying for a banned user" now? But banned is banned!

User:FisherQueen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:FisherQueen
having blocked the heroic anon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...ons/87.114.13.4
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...ser:87.114.13.4
…let’s take a look at the “conversation” which unfolded on the BLP noticeboard:

FisherQueen’s response:


FisherQueen’s response:

etc…
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=203846275
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...ser:87.115.6.30

Almost like you’re talking to a brick wall, eh?

FisherQueen isn’t letting herself get worked up about it:

Based on this episode alone, FisherQueen should be desysoped.

Based on this episode alone, FisherQueen should be desysoped.

The most shocking part of the conversation that "Bruce" and her have starting here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=203841275

is that at no stage inbetween cracking gags or working out what to do with the banned user, do they get in a conversation that involves one of them saying

but joking aside, what are we going to do about the BLP issues (s)he's highlighted on those articles? they really need looking at and rooting out

Bizarrely, that's all true about Harries. And I say that as a strong defender of BLP subjects. Though why there should be an article on James / Lauren Harries is beyond me.

I have no idea, the issue here is not with the particular article but what it highlights about wikipedia, leaving that information in is a breach of their own policies, yet everyone at the BLP board seems more interested in playing tough guy that seeing if the IP guy has a point.



EDIT:

This is now beyond parody


http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=203863286

I think you've hit on the problem.

Leaving the potentially-libelous material is a breach of their policies.

Allowing a banned editor to edit is a breach of their principles.

Clearly, in WikiMath, principles > policies.

Sad, isn't it?

Well Kamryn rightfully went and dealt with the BLP issues I think.

But yes this is all rather bizarre.

Hmm let's see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=79888415

YOU ARE A DISCRACE TO MY FAMILY YOU SHE MALE DUEKY FACE

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=105607246

Sadly Lauren was run over by a truck while she lay masturbating with a ceramic penguin wedged up her anus on the M1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=105872464

was tragically run over by an ice-cream van whilst she was masturbating near a bus shelter

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=106336136

the book ''My Missing Todger''

It doesn't matter that these were reverted. It matters that they were ever able to get on this high profile site at all.

Wikipedia as Barnum's freak show; see B. Peppers.

Someone Afd it. I've had the displeasure of encountering Harries's "career" over the years and probably know more about the subject that most. And even I don't believe he / she is notable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Harries

Anyone on WP who ponders and pontificates away the need to sort out BLP's should spend a few days watching the BLP noticeboard.

We should have reports from there every week because the situation is an absolute disgrace. Of course, Wikipediots whine on about them being "exceptions". Evidence shows that in fact they are the tip of a vast dirty iceburg. Jimbo Wales should be ashamed, and every tabloid hit against that man should be cheered to the rafters

I agree with the 'tip of the iceberg' view. I only took a good look at a handful of BLPs and they were all a disgrace. Moreover, the other mainspace articles related to those disgraceful BLPs were similarly problematic. Now that the general problem is coming to the forefront, I see that many of the BLPs reflect the same kind of problems as the ones I looked into.

Jesus. How bad is this IP that reverting him comes above anything else? Are we dealing with Amorrow's eviler twin, or what?

The anon's grievance may be valid, but block evasion is the wrong way to complain. Blocked or banned users with complaints about biographies should send a polite email to OTRS. If the anon had done that, I have no doubt the article would have been quickly cleaned up. Maybe the anon had some other goal in mind.

OTRS is a black hole. Complaints go in, and nothing comes out.

I think we need a FAQ, or rather a FTA (Frequently Told Answers).

Perhaps our newest user, Jon Awbrey, could craft a meta-template for it.

The oft repeated Daniel Brandt line?

Brandt usually beats me to the punch when it comes to publishing otherwise independent observations. (He beat my on scooping the Siegenthaler vandalism IP by a few hours.)

But Brandt notwithstanding, that's my observation from direct personal experience.

and what percentage of normal (non-admin etc) users have ever heard of OTRS? I'd be surprised if it's ten percent.

Who cares what his goal was? his complaints about the articles were legit and should have been the immediate priority.

It's often true that there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Typically the first few ways that one tries are ineffective, and especially annoying to the cat.

I sent OTRS an email after the RAB dustup.
No response.

As someone who has resorted in the past to the OTRS e-mail system, I can say that my letter went 10 days without any response, after which I sent a courtesy reminder, which was responded to in a couple of hours with a breathless note saying (and I quote), "Do you have any idea how clogged our mail queue is? We're doing the best we can", with no indication of when or whether my concern (reporting a factual error about an enterprise) would be addressed.

After another 10 days, I sent another reminder. After four more days, I received a response that Jimmy Wales had taken care of the problem (which he had). I believe it is a common myth among too many insiders that OTRS does an adequate job serving the needs of those who need to report problems to Wikipedia. Twenty-four days (after three messages sent) is not something to say is satisfying duty "quite well enough", as one Wikipediot said about OTRS's efficiency.

Greg

There's a list of all the people who are on OTRS here. Our new friend NVS seems to have a lot of permissions!!

Unfortunately it would seem that the list is somewhat incomplete .

They don't need to have heard it. The path of least resistance (for someone who has a problem with their biography) from the "Contact us" link in the sidebar goes:

• Wikipedia:Contact_us
• Wikipedia:Contact_us/Article_Problem
• Wikipedia:Contact_us/Aticle_problem/Factual_error_(from_subject)

The last of which has the e-mail address info-en-q@wikimedia.org as plain as day at the bottom.

I wrote to half a dozen such addresses, all the way up to Mike Godwin himself.

It was an exasperating exercise in futility.

I am laughing my bollocks off, this gets better and better. I've been watching the BLP board and our IP editor is back:

check out this edit summary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=204092342



so the crack BLP team spring into action, right? right?

no they revert all the unsourced material back in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=204101380

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=204098941

oh and for good measure, they of course revert his pleads for help in removing the libel from the BLP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=204101991

Now this is where it get's really interesting, because he's getting no action here, he says he's going to email all of those BLPs with an "audit trail" (I guess the diffs that show him removing and someone re-adding the unsourced claims).


http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=204102632

Wow!

Wikiadminions are reinserting statements like this....

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=204098941

This one is a dozy!



I've not linked and removed the names because where I live, repeating slander is the same as being the source. suspected of!

Why are they dicking around with stuff like that?

Is there some eleventh commandment of which I'm unaware? (no false witness is number nine.)

"Block evasion" is only wrong within an arbitrary scheme of Wiki rules. No deception or subterfuge is required to do it, all you have to do is click "edit this page" like anyone else. Unless someone promised not to evade his/her block, I can't see that they've done anything morally wrong.

In contrast, libeling innocent people was morally wrong before WP existed and will continue to be wrong when its gone.

and remember kids, the agency will deny all knowledge if you are caught or captured:




http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=204106431

What's the lawsuit?

If it's a BLP-related issue (i.e. defamation or libel), then the warning that several of us have highlighted (Lar recently wrote a blog post about it) may have already happened.

Almost all of the reverting back to include unsourced garbage was coming from User:Abd - don't conflate the actions of one user with things in general. It's very obvious to most that the lunatic "OMG USER JUST GOT BLOCKED REVERT ALL HIS EDITS" general practice is trumped by the BLP policy, and all the stupid re-additions of rubbish have been reverted.

Abd has been reverting that IP for weeks, without any regard for what damage he's doing. He's received a uniformly negative response for his actions.

I once wrote to Brad Patrick, Godwin's predecessor, about being blocked by some admin I'd never heard of, name of "Essjay". I'd been talking about legal matters, and though I hadn't been threatening any legal action (I was merely musing on how it might one day happen to WP for its BLP policy, as we often do here), this "Essjay" decided I had come close enough. I wrote to lawyer Patrick and noted the same thing I had noted for Essjay, which is that a lawsuit is a threat, but the threat of a lawsuit is only a threat of a threat. And that in my case, discussing possible filing of a lawsuit by somebody else in the future, was a third person discussion of the eventual threat of a threat of a threat. Patrick actually wrote back and said he appreciated the similie, but with such a powerful admin as Essjay , there was little he could do for me.

Of course, this is much funnier in the memory and the retelling. Suffice to say, that both are now historical figures-- Essjay AND his legal staff. Both worth about what Jimbo was paying them. But, my, my, wasn't Patrick impressed by Essjay, before it happened!

After the Essjay fiasco was all over (sorry to say that I had nothing to do with THAT) I wrote back to Patrick and called him a few choice things, including I believe, dickless-wonder. But I never got an answer back from him, denying being a dickless-wonder. So that should probably go into his bio, which should, in turn, probably go up someplace on the web. As a permanent memorial to his lack of a dipstick, the poor man.

And good riddance too...policy wonkery on BLP is always bad news.

Milton, I also had some choice engagements (including a 15-minute phone conversation) with Brad Patrick. We should write a little factual biography about him on Wikipedia Review, and see if he comes to claim it away from us.

Greg

She's been on the BLP case lately. If WP were any good, they would make her an admin.

The fear of rocking the boat, when some powerful (but misguided or even corrupt) admin is at the helm, appears to be a recurring theme in the annals of Wikipedia.

The significance of the Jonah Story (which I take as a Jungian Archetype) metaphorically models the likely course of dramatic events when one rocks the boat in the process of setting out to speak the truth to power.

What's more important than the details of any one instance is the general parameters of the liminal social drama that arises over the population of comparable cases.

It would appear that our personal experiences are parallel in ways that suggest an invariant underlying model of Wkipedia (anti-)social dynamics.

Why is your name so familiar for me? I think I've seen it somewhere as being a nickname short for something. Am I right or am I crazy?

So it is, but the net goes wider than tossing overboard those speaking truth to power. Almost anybody can be identified as a Bad Luck (see witch) if the group is in trouble. They're hunted down one by one and tossed over exactly as you see on Survivor. There have been many tales of this happening litterally on ships (where one person is perceived to have bad luck dogging them personally), and the usual result was far less gentle historically than our Coleridge-ian tale of hanging the albatross that somebody shot, around their neck! Mill-stone, more likely.

I have a private theory, which I should publish somewhere, that our huge brains were developed entirely for witch-finding (and defense against it, too, of course). Not for doing calculus. Not even for finding a suitable mate, since other animals with smaller brains do that perfectly well. Not for technology, since there are tribes of people who hardly have any, but have the same-sized brains, and are about as inately capable of learning technoculture, if taught early. But even these cultures have a complex social culture, and it usually revolves around finding somebody to blame for bad luck. All "primitive" religions are about this theme. Yes, folks, the bad news is: our giant cerebrums are for playing Survivor and The Apprentice and American (or paleolithic sanana) Idol. Our passion for following sports is just this same drive. In fact, finding witches, food, and mates is about all we as a species DO, as a main vocation. Everything else is avocation. And the food and mates part is not that complicated, especially if you live on a seacoast.

Take a look at WP. There are these little spasms as they identify and toss out editor-witches. And then, for the edification of the crowd (panis et circences), there are even larger main-arena events where we collect evidence against some particular bad admin, and try to toss THEM out (sometime even succeeding, if they screw up). Everybody has their favorite gladiator, lion or Christian. A big kill settles the crowd for about a day, and then you can feel the bad juju building up against somebody ELSE. This goes on endlessly. And also at the office you work at, too. As I said, this is really the main thing we do, as a species. Eating and reproductive issues being second and third.

Yah, the scapegoat/witch-hunt paradigm dates back to the dawn of civilization, and is linked to another misconception introduced at roughly the same time -- the Hammurabic notion that laws generate a stable and predictable social order. So when the inherent dysfunctionality of an ill-conceived regulatory structure becomes manifest, the system is obliged to find a handy scapegoat.

Please. Don't assume the worst. Maybe the so-called banned user slept with someone, and is now receiving his or her due priviliges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adm...p_libel_actions.

Still seems to be rumbling on - quite interesting this in the sense that it brings out the differences between the "order at all costs" and the "but what's he actually doing? crowd".

The OTRS members are trusted. If you had a valid complaint, I am sure they would answer it.

Complaints should be answered, even just to deny their validity.

Various people have complained about Guy. They might complain about him via OTRS. Guy handles OTRS. QED.

Some other thoughts for you. OTRS is supposed to be confidential: what contractual agreement does WMF have with the OTRS handlers to ensure that? It's just some volunteers you know.

What is the service level agreement that OTRS works to? Acknowledgement in how long? Response after how long?

Have you noticed that if there is a copyright take down notice required, it has to be sent to Jimbo according to Wikipedia? He is in the office when?