I wonder how may will sign up for this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Res..._Editing_Pledge

Shouldn't you have gotten some collaborative feedback on the pledge itself, before you posted it?

Now that it's posted, no edits can ethically be made to it, without re-notifying all of the signatories.

I.e., you have typos peppered throughout the page, not to mention that the policy could have been tightened. To wit, how does someone like me sign the page?

Greg

I don't know how many takers you'll get on that. I'm sure someone will argue it's a right to be anonymous and nescessary or some other horsesqueeze.

Is this voluntary Doc?

It don't have a hope in hell!

Ever see a turkey voting for thanksgiving?

O.G., I'd wuv to —

BUT I CAN'T !!!

Well, not without being reverted and permablocked …

F.U.2 —

Jon

I'm sure that this is well-intentioned, but to my knowledge the two most indefatigable defamers at are Chip Berlet and Dennis King, editing under the usernames Cberlet and Dking respectively. They are actually trying to call attention to their real life identities, in an attempt to revive their flagging careers and establish some "buzz" for themselves as "experts."

I think it's a good pledge, because it invites Wikipedians to adhere to an appropriate and essential ethical principle.

No need to quibble over non-substantive edits, surely?

I'll just echo the already-stated opinions above - it's well-intentioned and certainly not a bad idea, but you'd need at least 75-percent (i.e., "consensus") buy-in to reach the point where you could start doing things like revert people's addition of attack material to BLP's based on their use of anonymous accounts alone.

I'm not even sure such a blanket approach is all that necessary, even. The real trick is to develop a way to identify "flash points" and specific attack editors, and deal with them without necessarily hindering the "good-faith" types any more than might be required.


And don't forget JoshuaZ, of course... And more importantly, the fact that most WP'ers, anonymous or not, don't even have careers of that nature in the first place - you can't risk a reputation that doesn't exist. If I've written an attack bio on some barely-known person, and fighting tooth-and-nail against any attempt to challenge it or delete it, and I work at a car wash and live in a cheap efficiency and drive a 1992 Ford Fiesta, what am I really risking by doing it under my real name?

You have a point. It's also the case that people with uncommon names are more affected by such a proposal. I share my name with multiple high-profile people, so it would take some fairly creative searching to find anything substantive on me online. Ironically, I could achieve greater anonymity by switching to editing under my real name.

I see some turkey got at it. It's gone!!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Res..._Editing_Pledge

I daresay that Doc Glasgow's proposal about not hiding behind a screen name means more than just disclosing your first and last name. I take it to mean identifying oneself unambiguously.

Doc glasgow deleted it himself. He's announced he's leaving Wikipedia, which is Not A Good Thing.

Newyorkbrad

Sorry Doc, thanks Brad!

Doc posts his farewell comments on his talk page at User_talk:Doc glasgow.

Tanks, Martha, But We Already Knew Dat …

Jon

The bright side of this terrible development is that WR cannot be blamed for running Doc off...Wikipedia did this one all by themselves.

Never underestimate the creativity of Wikipediots when it comes to finding scapegoats other than themselves.

Jon

I hope in the due course of time, Doc will write a thoughtful and reflective essay setting forth his experience and insights regarding the issues and considerations that led up to his decision.

There's no cure-all for the BLP problems (except for abolishing Wikipedia, which I understand is the solution advocated by some of you). Reducing anonymous and pseudonymous editing will do something. Semi-protection will do something. Increasing the threshold for keeping a BLP will do something. None of this will do everything, but pointing out why a given proposal won't do everything is actually, in my experience, a favourite tactic on Wikipedia of those who would do nothing. At this point, I'll support anything that will do something.

Yea, I signed it, cause, well, I read the pledge, and I don't see anything wrong with it. My current username is already linked to my real life name, I don't contribute that much to BLPs to begin with, and only have my primary account and MBisanzBot, andwell yea, I'm not a coward when I do write things on-wiki, so what should I have to fear.

I liked the proposal enough that I wanted to sign it, but I am a banned user who (up until the block-fests) always identified himself on Wikipedia.

Another one bites the dust. We move on.

Greg

Well I don't know the technical details of how this forum works, but it is GFDL'd, so it could be copied here, for other users to sign to.

And Greg, thankfully, I don't count you among my enemies. When you make baldness jokes, at least their funny, unlike the ones I've been receiving via email as of late from another ofrum participant.

Moulton sez we're supposed to use the word "adversaries" instead of "enemies".

There is nothing -- nothing -- funny about baldness!



Hey, let's really make some WikiLove and you unblock User:Thekohser, whaddaya say?

Greg

What are you doing here, Greg?

I thought you had a rootkit... er... root canal to attend to.

I tried, but I was trampled by an inbound throng of puzzle-craving engineers!

Did you know that puzzle-crazed engineers clench their teeth while solving puzzles?

The persistent pressure strengthens the gums, obviating the kind of problems leading to root canal.

It's a favorite tactic of those everywhere who would do nothing. Practical incremental steps are the way forward. Most defenses are like that.

In the long run, A Good Thing for him, I suspect.

Tsk tsk Greg, you know I can't format things well in this forum and my Wikicode doesn't work here, so:


Unblock request: Declined
Reason: Sockpuppeting, ticking off Jimbo, violating arbcom unblock, paid editing, violating most of these Wikipedia:List_of_policies
Decliner: User:MBisanz


For those following here, my RL identity is clearly listed on my userpage. Now get my town right on hivemind!

Wrong. You didn't mention an opt-out policy, which would effectively fix the entire problem, at least of unwarranted defamation.

All other "solutions" are merely band-aid compromises proposed by Wikipedians who live in abject fear of losing total control over biographies, and by extension, Wikipedia's usefulness as a revenge platform.

The only issue is who gets to opt out - that's what the "Dead Tree" proposal (and the "NOB" in "OO/NOB") is for. Combine the two, and you've solved it, completely.

Transylvania?

That would work just fine once a subject noticed that he/she had a biography. It's quite possible that the biography in question will already have included defamatory information for a month or longer by the time that happens, with said content having been picked up by a bunch of mirrors and lingering in Google search results for some unspecified amount of time. Some complete solution.

Aww, it's okay. I just made an edit a few minutes ago with one of my sockpuppets. Works fine.

Greg

Hmm...I would sign this pledge but for being underage (yeah yeah, I know what's going to be said in response to that ) and not particularly wanting my family to cop shit as a result of outing myself. Even if it's not endorsed, you know it happens sometimes.

But I am happy to put my username to a pledge for responsible pseudonymous of BLPs. I think I already do that though.

[edit] - double posted... fixed...

Well, I was thinking of a modification, which is a bit like the T.H. White "EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY!" rule (from The Once and Future King, rules for the ant colony). This will save a lot of work. The problem is that there are non-dead-tree notable people who will think of WP as some kind of Who's Who, and will want a bio even if it's not dead-tree non-optional. If you give people options they're going to screw up. When they get their Bio, they'll discover it's not in their total control and is mutable, and then we'll have Dwama, which we don't need. We tend to think it will serve the noobs right for being such naifs, but there's always the Doc Glascow type who wakes up (Oliver Sachs Awakenings-style) after three years of COMA* and says "My God, I'm actually in a horrible place!" So then we all have to deal with thousands of these Rip Van Googles.

It's a lot easier if we just say: Dead-Tree-Famous?--- you can't opt out, so don't ask. Not that famous, but still breathing? You can't even opt IN-- WP is WP:NOT Who's Who. If you like, Bio yourself on your Blog if you're that much of a narcissist, but don't bother US on WP. We have an encyclopedia to write, and you can't watch your bio all the time (sleep is needed) and we can't watch if for you (ditto), and if you've done something interesting, it's probably going to be in WP on its own account, and we don't care about where you grew up and who your parents were. Save that for your OBIT. On the other hand, if you're the President of the United States, or something, you're immune to satire anyway, by now. If Lil' Bush didn't get you, nothing on WP will. That's the whole point of the dead-tree rule: it we make it a general encyclopedia dead-tree rule, it selects out people who are SO famous, they really are satire bullet-proof. And there you are.

-- Milt

* And, inquiring minds want to know, what the hell was Doc's own Glascow Score ( http://rnbob.tripod.com/glascow.htm ) most of the time, all those years? I'm guessing about... three.

So I see they no longer boot you out of the "coffee" houses at 11pm, but you should at least switch to decaff way before that.

Jon

That sort of thing is going to happen anyway, though. The problem we're trying to solve isn't the fact that defamation occurs in WP articles - that's a given. Defamation will always occur in WP articles, until the last byte of the last copy of mainspace data is finally degaussed for the last time.

Having said that, the flagged revisions feature should take care of well over 90 percent of what are now clear cases of drive-by anons and SPA's posting defamatory content without proper justification...

The point of the opt-out policy would be to give people who are being targeted, by clearly biased and well-established WP attack editors and admins, a means of taking back control. It isn't to allow WP'ers to abdicate responsibility for sanctioning those editors, or fixing the articles if the subject chooses not to opt out.

I'll certainly admit that a few of the world's genuine evildoers are likely to take advantage of this to get themselves out of Wikipedia - but only if Wikipedians show themselves unwilling to follow their own rules with respect to those people. And to be honest, I doubt that most of those people will really want to draw that kind of attention to themselves.


Decaf is for wussies!

Those of you who are old enough to have participated in UseNet NewsGroups, long before we got to the age of slick GUIs and Web 1.0, might remember that the most highly trafficked newsgroup was net.flame. It was mostly a write-only newsgroup, used for venting one's spleen. They eventually discontinued it, since it was a costly waste of bandwidth.

But the flamers are still very much a presence, and are happy to vent their spleen on any available opportunity, not the least of which is on Wikipedia.