I don't know how common this is:
# 01:30, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Shout magazine (contribs)"
with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing company)
# 01:02, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Shi star entertainment
(contribs)" with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing
company)
# 21:04, June 18, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "ParsInternet (contribs)"
with an expiry time of indefinite (Username (name of existing
company))
# 00:59, June 19, 2006 RadioKirk blocked "Hammond Publishing
(contribs)" with an expiry time of indefinite (username, existing
company)
Given that we probably want people to identify who they work for,
especially when editing articles where this is relevant, is it a good
idea to block company accounts without any edits on sight? If so,
perhaps we should at least modify the talk plage template to indicate
to the user how they can put the company information on their user
page? See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Hammond_Publishing
for an example of the current template.
Erik
I have closed the deletion review of the "Conservative notice board"
under the so-called "Snowball" clause. This was a wikiproject created
in bad faith by a person who spammed the talk pages of 52 other
editors saying that they had identified themselves as conservatives
and inviting them to join.
How this ever got to the stage of deletion review I have no idea.
There was never a chance that this bad faith project could be
accepted. I have therefore closed the review, endorsing the deletion,
which was unquestionably correct. By discussing the *possibility*
that it could ever exist on Wikipedia, we were giving the wrong
impression about the purpose for which Wikipedia exists, and saying
that we don't care about our core policies.
Why AFD just does not work, or, what happens when zealots flood a
"discussion" with keep votes.
* "I can't find this anywhere else"
* "Keep and Cite as per Nscheffey. This page is extremely useful to my
Star Wars: Jedi Academy clan, it's no worse than some other sci-fi
entries, it just needs citations!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightsaber_combathttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Lightsabercomb…
Will any admin have the brass ones to do the correct thing and delete
an awful unsalvageable article, or will they count up the votes, wimp
out, declare "no consensus" or "keep" and let an unencylopedic
carbuncle survive?
"And yes, anything that can be deleted, probably should be deleted,
because we must have articles only on truly worthy topics so to continue
to be highly regarded by the reading public."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Resonance_%28M…
(I disagree, obviously. Other than that, I'll let the article and the
debate on it speak for themselves.)
--
Ilmari Karonen
So far, we only have one person proposed to be on the committee with any type of professional
fundraising experience (volunteering for Wikimedia does not count). I would therefore like to make
one last plea to anybody reading this that has any experience with fundraising for a non-profit.
We *really* need at least a few people with relevant knowledge about any major aspect of this
topic (seeking funds from individuals/companies/trusts, tax/reporting requirements, technical
aspects of online fundraising systems and donor/sponsor management).
Please sign up below (in the 'People interested in participating' section) and state what
experience/training you have along with your preferred level of participation in the committee
(full member, advisor, consultant or volunteer):
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_committee#People_interested_in_p…
NOTE: Signing up does not guarantee any role above volunteer.
-- mav
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>"Steve Bennett", Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:38:14 +0200, wrote:
>This all has the positive side effect of making it easier for people
>expert in one domain to contribute to discussions in their domain.
Making it easier for trekkies to vote on trekkie AFDs... I was
actually thinking more along the lines of ensuring that an
AFD is exposed to a wider selection of Wikipedians. One
criticism of AFDs is that after the second day, the only
people who still bother to vote/comment are those with
an interest in the article. A recent AFD of Star Trek material
had to resort to repeatedly relisting it in order to get
wider exposure... otherwise, it would have just been the
Trekkie voters still hammering away (OMG! Trek article!
Keep! Keep!) despite the subject being 100% original
research.
Well, the discussion about the "kind of categories" missed a very important
one:
Categories used to group wikipedians by poitical/religious beliefs
like
[[Category:Muslim Wikipedians]]
[[Category:Born-again Christian Wikipedians]]
[[Category:Flying Spaghetti Monsterist Wikipedians]]
[[Category:Roman Catholic Wikipedians]]
etc which are sometimes used to raise voting blocks.
The emphasis on "this user is/believes foo" is quite different from "this
user is interested in foo".
if I recall correctly, categories as the ones I mentiones above are not
welcome on wikipedia, but I may be wrong.
Can someone else please give me mroe feedback? Maybe previous discussions,
statements by jimbo or arbcom, etc...
Otherwise, I'm depopulating such categories (which over 95% of them are done
via userboxes) and removing them afterwards.
From: Mark Gallagher
> its only *current* problems can be
> cured if we're
> willing to put in the effort.
Well, always one to be clever-clever, I thought I'd
put Mark to the test and spend 24 hours policing AfD.
And you know what? He's right. A little less moaning
on about AfD here and a bit more work on AfD itself
and you can start seeing a change.
1) Cut down the size of AfD by removing the malformed
ones as they appear.
2) Cut down the size of AfD by spotting the speedy
ones mistakenly nominated for the full process in good
faith and killing them off immediately.
3) Reverse those who would tag a disputed AfD for
speedy delete anyway and administer a slap for it so
they don't do it again.
4) Make those who shout "speedy delete!" state a
[[WP:CSD]] criterion for it. Don't listen to squirming
on the subject.
After doing those four steps - easy and satifying -
you're left with an AfD process that makes more sense.
Also, you immediately see a change in user behaviour.
Screams for out-of-process speedy deletions have
quietened a little since this morning. A day or so
more of sharp slaps to those advocating them and the
problem will be in abeyance.
The nominations left are, broadly:
1) Ones that have a snowball's chance of surviving but
deserve to go through the process
2) Ones that have a snowball's chance of being deleted
but deserve to go through the process
3) Those where people have completely grasped the
wrong end of the AfD and CSD stick
4) Those that are content disputes pretending to be
AfD cases
Of those, 1 and 2 can be left to get on with it. 4 can
be watched to see if the AfD process can produce a
better article or solve the dispute by proxy, with no
need to get involved other than to remove the speedy
notices also tagged to the article by the people
discussing the article.
That leave the sticky problem of 3, where the AfD
process is most broken. For instance,
[[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John-Hedley Desmond
Lucy McConnell]] deserved to be deleted under existing
AfD precident. But it didn't deserve speedy deleting
and certainly not under CSD-G4, having never come to
AfD before, having attracted robotic "G4 speedy and
edit protect" votes (and they were votes) from the
clueless, and having altered in format since the first
CSD deletion.
So that helps narrow down the problem with AfD
(although it gets us nowhere nearer a solution).
So, as I said, Mark is right and less complaining here
and more work on AfD is the best course of action.
If nothing else, an hour spent on "AfD Patrol" gets
more done and gets us closer to understanding what the
future for AfD is than an hour spent emailing this
list.
IMHO.
->REDVERS
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>
> Hello,
>
> I think it is time to inform the community about the Word2MediaWikiPlus
> converter I wrote:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Word2MediaWikiPlus
>
> Download macro and installer directly:
> http://www.beadsoft.de/files/Word2MediaWikiPlus.zip
>
> To improve the acceptance of the wiki software in our company I needed a
> user friendly converter.
>
> This converter comes with an installation routine, has comfortably
> dialog boxes and works with the english and german office versions.
>
> If you have MS Photo Editor installed, it will extract and upload images
> from the document, too.
>
> It converts most things found in normal documents, like
>
> - text formatting and colors
> - headings
> - lists
> - tables, also nested
> - images
> - footnotes
> - page headers and footers
> - text boxes
> - framed paragraphs
>
> By now I find it easier to write in Word and convert, especially tables.
> This macro can be used as an image extractor of the document, without
> any wiki usage.
>
> It has been extensivly tested and can be considered as a stable beta
> release.
>
> Since the macro can be localized, I would like contact to users, who use
> a non german and non english Microsoft office.
>
> Enjoy,
> Gunter
Hello Gunter,
Thanks for sharing this great tool with us. One note is that on Office 2003
(English), it seems necesary to allow access to VB projects in order for the
install to work.
I have e-mailed you screenshots from installation in the English version,
which you may distribute freely in future versions of the installer if you
would like.
Best,
Johntex
>Stephen Bain wrote:
>I agree. People have been saying it is broken for as long as I've been
>here and it seems to work ok.
Talk to people who don't want anything deleted from Wikipedia, and AFD
is marvellous because it is wide open to abuse by them, despite the empty
rhetoric about it not really being a vote.
The problem is, I think, that lots of people who comment here don't actually
take part in AFD.
They don't see the day-to-day crap... they just see a system that keeps
struggling along
despite being hopelessly broken and unscalable. AFD is such a demented
system that
it's very often less hassle to just ignore rubbish than even try to get it
deleted. No doubt
certain inclusionist factions on Wikipedia rather like things that way, and
claim it is a
self-regulating mechanism rather than a system that cannot cope and which
people
avoid.