Sunir Shah wrote:
>A cheaper solution would have been to wait a while,
>say a day or two, and then delete the problematic
>text after the user had forgotten about the page.
>Time is a more powerful weapon than banlists, and
>it's free for everyone to use.
Very good advice!
-- mav
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Geoff Burling wrote:
> > Just to give everybody else a heads-up, mediations
> > thus brought before the committee include:
> > *UtherSRG and Lizard King -- cancelled due to Uther
> > not responding
> > *JackLynch and Lord Kenneth -- no agreement to mediate
> > *Mr. Natural Heath and somebody -- presumably still
> > ongoing???
> >
> TUF-KAT is slightly mistaken. I restarted arbitration between
> UtherSRG and Lizard King because Uther did send me his side of
> the dispute (& Lizard King did not say he wouldn't continue).
> I'm not at liberty to say how it's going.
I think Geoff meant to write "restarted mediation" not arbitration.
I want to refer the case of Mr. Natural Health to the temporary
session of the Arbitration committee. Who is doing the mediation
there? Can someone on the mediation committee certify to me that the
mediation process is over?
--Jimbo
Daniel has been gone for almost two months. :-(. His redirect project has helped a number of us to improve our results and the Wikipedia in general. Since I can't talk it over with Daniel, I've described a proposed change to the project's guidelines on the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Daniel_Quinlan/redirects> page. Although happy hear from the mailing list, I'd prefer it if we discussed the proposal on the above talk page.
Thanks and respects,
Lou Imholt , LouI at Wiki.
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How about a simple formula, based on what percentage of a user's edits
are reverted by other users? (We might tweak this by discounting reverts
from a certain class of user.)
For example, if new user Blatheration is reverted 30% of the time, he
keeps newbie status. But if new user Jim Dandy has no reverts (except
from newbies), promote him to preferred status.
My only worry is that some highly motivated user will figure out a way
to hack this system, in order to subvert or destroy it. So at first
anyway we should not make it automatic but we could use the statistics
when considering the granting of sysop rights.
But the good thing is that tracking each user's "revert count" would
enable us to identify edit wars in progress or to identify Edit
Warriors. (Yes, of course we'd have to find a way to account for
reversions of 'simple vandalism' so this wouldn't "count against"
someone.)
Uncle Ed
Fred Bauder asked,
> Do you think it might be useful to unprotect [[alternative
> medicine]] to see if we still have a live issue?
I think a mediation regarding an article is successful when it's
possible to 'unprotect' the article, and it can stay unprotected for a
long time without another edit war erupting over it.
The folks at [[Silesia]] have done an admirable job. Let's give them a
hand.
<clap, clap, clap>
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
>Do you think it might be useful to unprotect [[alternative medicine]]
>to see if we still have a live issue?
>Fred
I don't know. I certainly wouldn't object to the page being unprotected. It can always be protected again if need be.
Theresa
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen is the mediator between myself and Mr NH. The process has stalled for the time being. Mr. NH has not agreed mediation of his behavior anyway, he wants to go directly to arbitration over that as (presumably) he feels he didn't do anything wrong.
I am still willing to continue with mediation for the time being as long as we can get it started again. But that's not really down to me. I feel I should say that Mr. NH is behaving himself at the moment - not being rude or abusive to anyone as far as I am aware, but of the course [[Alternative medicine]] is still protected at the moment o there is little to fight over.
Theresa
From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales@bomis.com]
Sent: 06 February 2004 13:59
To: Geoff Burling; English Wikipedia
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Status of mediation
I want to refer the case of Mr. Natural Health to the temporary
session of the Arbitration committee. Who is doing the mediation
there? Can someone on the mediation committee certify to me that the
mediation process is over?
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > If it was at least an edit war about something that reasonable
> > people can disagree on -- but his edits were pure vandalism, plain
> > and simple.
>
> I think that's the key here.
>
> We have to be cautious, of course, that we not silently expand our
> understanding of "pure vandalism" too far.
>
> But Erik has cogently and correctly made the point a few times
> recently that "Wikipedia is not about 'rights'. Wikipedia is about
> creating an encyclopedia. All this trolling distracts from that
> goal."
>
> I can imagine, and I would probably enjoy (for a little while) a wiki
> with no purpose, no rules, no bans, anything goes, freewheeling,
> random, chaotic, with that anarchic structure (or should I say
> 'anti-structure') being the primary value.
>
> But that's not wikipedia. Our open atmosphere is a means to an end,
> and it's the end that is our primary focus, our loving passion, the
> thing that brings us all together: the encyclopedia.
>
> So while I'm certainly on the cautious end of the scale, very near to
> Cunctator in fact, as to the merits of bans and rules and so on, I do
> think it's very important to keep our priorities straight.
>
> That's why I was supportive of Angela banning "UnbannableOne". That's
> why I banned "The Fellowship of the Troll" yesterday.
>
> There are people in the world with active mental pathologies. It's
> difficult for good and benevolent people to really grasp that someone
> could have the time and energy to come to a charitable humanitarian
> project that tries to be open and friendly and inclusive and neutral
> simply for the purpose of causing trouble. We tend to try to project
> our happy loving values on their actions, assuming that they are just
> trying to help us remain neutral or whatever.
>
> But sometimes, that's just not true. As difficult as it is to
> imagine, some people just are plain and simple assholes.
>
> An important concept here is "the sanction of the victim". Leonard
> Peikoff defined that term as "the willingness of the good to suffer at
> the hands of evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the
> 'sin' of creating values."
>
> We fall into that trap fairly often, I'm afraid. Our own good values
> are used against us. We are open, patient, inquiring after truth,
> intested in fairness, neutrality, community, harmony, justice. And so
> we put up with a fair amount of nonsense, more than we should.
>
> --Jimbo
And I doubt anyone will put it better.
Billy Mills
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Jimmy-
> I know nothing about what was going on with Anthony Del Pierro and
> Eloquence.
I banned Anthony after he repeatedly vandalized the same page, even though
I had told him to stop. I immediately unbanned him after the matter was
resolved. I am 100% positive that this was a perfectly appropriate action
to take, with arbitration committee or without, and is backed up by
precedent (BuddhaInside, RK etc.). Protection was not an option, because
the page in question, a list of sites using our MediaWiki software, is
supposed to be openly editable at any time so that sitemasters can add
their site to the list.
That being said, it would have been preferable to use a per-page ban in
this case, but that feature is not yet available.
As others have also pointed out, Anthony has a long history of trolling
behavior. E.g. Maximus Rex wrote: "Anthony has frequently engaged in
troll-like behavior (examples include inserting Bill Gates' social
security number in the opening sentence of his article (repeatedly),
nominating articles for deletion that he admits he does not believe should
be deleted (perhaps to prove some sort of point?), and making outrageous
claims about copyright (for example at Al Gore he removed a sentence he
wrote under the guise that he owned the copyright to that sentence...),
and others)." In conversations with me on IRC, Anthony has also defended
trolling on other websites like Kuro5hin and Slashdot.
One thing I have always been missing in the Wikipedia community is trust.
There's nothing wrong with some healthy paranoia regarding all forms of
authority. But I'd appreciate a little more awareness of the very real
threat that persistent and annoying trolls represent to the coherence and
productivity of our community. And no, these people do not have a "right"
to test our defenses.
Trolls sometimes pretend to be working against "groupthink", but in
reality their only goal is to disrupt things, to see how much damage they
can do. Trying to deliberately sabotage the construction of a free
encyclopedia takes a special, even more disgusting type of troll.
Trolling will often be very hard to prove in practice. My proposed
solution is to simply give admins some leeway in enforcing the rules -- we
have over 100 admins who can clean up after each other if necessary.
Trolls should be treated like normal users, only that I find it fair to be
especially watchful about whether they are breaking any rules, and more
swift in enforcing them.
Of course I'd love to see the arbitration committee be quick in making
decisions in such cases, but work by committee is rarely fast or
efficient.
Regards,
Erik