jayjg wrote:
> I'm not interested in generalities and slippery slope arguments,
> though, I'm looking for specifics. When would it be beneficial to
> Wikipedia to link to WR?
This statement is an interesting example of the rhetorical technique
known as "framing." Jayjg is defending a policy that enables BADSITES
supporters to impose a censorship rule on every other Wikipedian. The
proper question to ask here is, "why would it be beneficial to adopt
this sort of censorship?" Instead, however, jayjg has framed it as,
"when would it be beneficial to engage in the type of speech that I
wish to censor?"
This is exactly equivalent to having someone like Jerry Falwell argue
that Hustler Magazine should be banned because, "When would it be
beneficial for someone to read Hustler Magazine?" Framing the
argument this way turns the discussion into a debate about the merits
of Hustler Magazine instead of a debate about censorship. Any
discussion about the hated speech then draws howls from the censors
about how the speech that they want censored is horrible, horrible,
horrible. No decent, right-minded person could ever think otherwise.
Anyone who disagrees with the censor is therefore by definitiion
indecent and wrong-minded. And the censorship expands from there.
We've already seen Slim Virgin put forward the following argument:
> The problem with that, Joe, is that some members of the "community"
> who've been particularly vocal on the linking issue are regular
> posters to Wikipedia Review.
Note the assumptions here:
(1) Someone who merely posts comments on the censored website is
automatically presumed to be behaving inappropriately. Following my
analogy, that's the equivalent of "You shouldn't vote for Jimmy
Carter because he gave an interview to Playboy magazine."
(2) Such individuals are not true members of the Wikipedia community.
They're members of the "community" in quote marks, meaning they're
only PRETENDING to be part of the community, as opposed to genuine
members like Slim Virgin. Again following my analogy, this is like a
fundamentalist minister saying, "Jimmy Carter isn't a true Christian
because he gave an interview to Playboy."
By trapping people in this loop of hate speech, you divide the world
up into decent versus indecent people, and subsequent debate focuses
on how to purge the indecents so that they no longer pollute the
"true community." The real debate, however, should begin by
discussing the problems with censorship itself.
I'm sure that Daniel Brandt and Wikipedia Review have done some
unpleasant things, but the reality is that they're not quite the
absolute demons that certain thin-skinned individuals pretend they
are. Brandt was also the person who identified the guy who
anonymously libeled John Siegenthaler on Wikipedia (for which he was
praised by Siegenthaler, a respected journalist). Some people here
have claimed that Brandt was also the person who called Essjay's
faked credentials to the attention of The New Yorker. I haven't done
any checking to confirm whether Brandt actually did that, but even if
he did, the truth turned out to be on his side in that instance as
well. The polarizing hysteria with which people here have responded
to Brandt (calling him a "sociopath" or a "terrorist") is absurd and
merely makes it more difficult to deal with him effectively and
rationally. The BADSITES policy is an example of that hysteria. It
harms Wikipedia by making it harder to discuss Brandt and WR with any
precision. Instead of pointing to a specific thread or comment on WR
and discussing it specifically, everyone who adheres to BADSITES is
forced instead to resort to generalities and loose characterizations
of what has been said on the Site Whose URL Must Never Be Mentioned.
In another post, jayjg wrote:
> WR is a site that contains "criticism of Wikipedia" in the same way
> that Jew Watch is a site that contains "Scholarly Collection of
> Articles on Jewish History" and "Focuses on Professionalism". In the
> real world these things aren't so gray, though I understand your
> interest in obfuscating them.
In the interest of clarifying rather than obfuscating, let's note
that Wikipedia has a detailed article about Jew Watch, with a link to
its home page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_Watch
Personally I find Jew Watch much more offensive than Wikipedia
Review, but I would never suggest that all mention of it should be
censored from Wikipedia.
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
| Banana Republicans
| The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
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On 30 May 2007 at 05:38:19 -0700, William Pietri
<william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
> And here we have a fine example of the problem caused by refusing to
> link to pages on or say the name of sites where people do things we
> don't like. When I went and took a brief look at Wikipedia Review, what
> I saw was yet another internet forum, somewhat more negative in tone and
> with a higher proportion of kooks, but otherwise not very different than
> what I'd expect in the comments section of one of Nicholas Carr's
> columns about Wikipedia. Undermedicated people with an internet forum?
> Or gibbering demons with sinister plans to destroy Wikipedia? Beats me.
Seem to be a few of each... though mostly it seems like they're just
fantasizing about how somebody else is going to destroy Wikipedia
soon... maybe by lawsuit, or by getting Congress to ban it, or by
convincing Important People in High Places to "Do Something" about
it... but none seem to actually have the ability or inclination to
actually put anything in action to accomplish such a thing, beyond
hinting at some petty vandalism campaign that will cause much less
damage than the ones orchestrated on national TV by Stephen Colbert
(which we are getting quite good at quickly squelching).
> There's another example in Gracenotes' RFA. I saw someone concerned that
> he had posted on Wikipedia Review. And I saw another person suggesting
> we shouldn't even mention the name Wikipedia Review. Was Gracenotes'
> alleged post a reasonable attempt to reach out to and engage our
> critics, something I routinely encourage? Or was he leading a conspiracy
> to eat babies with grapefruit spoons? Did he post at there all? Who knows.
"Reach out and engage our critics"... a very good point, and I've
added it to the bullet points of reasons why some might want to link
to such sites in my essay.
> Pretty much any other time people make an accusation of nefarious
> behavior on Wikipedia, we investigate it to death, with links galore, so
> that any reasonable person can find the truth of things. We, as a
> community, are *amazing* at that. I think that commitment to
> collaborative, reasoned judgment is one of our deepest strengths, and
> one of the things that has allowed us to scale so massively.
Yes... the spirit of open inquiry that's always been something I've
liked about Wikipedia (and the Internet in general... and in fact the
"geek ethic" in general, with the "Information wants to be free"
mindset), and which I regard this whole "attack sites policy" thing
to be a temporary but ugly aberration from.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
Slim Virgin wrote:
> I doubt that anyone with a modern manufacturing job would do it
> without pay, William.
You'd be surprised. There are people who will do this sort of thing
for very little money:
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
And then of course there's Clickworkers, where people did exactly
this sort of thing for no pay whatsoever:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickworkers
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
| Banana Republicans
| The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
| Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting:
| http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html
|
| Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
|
https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/cmd/shop/
custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=1107
--------------------------------
Folks,
For those of you who may not be familiar with it, I would like to share this
excellent research site with you:
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/lhg/genea.html
I have found it extremely helpful.
Marc Riddell
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Ken Arromdee [mailto:arromdee@rahul.net]
>Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 08:19 AM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A BADSITES RfA piling-on
>
>On Mon, 28 May 2007, Matthew Brown wrote:
>> > I seriously am not seeing what the difference in positions is here,
>> > despite a lot of head-scratching.
>>
>> Myself neither.
>>
>> So what is the disagreement about, in practice? Is it that one side
>> wants a hard-line rule that can be imposed selectively?
>
>I'll tell you what I've seen, since I've been arguing this for a while. One
>side thinks that attack site links may be removed 100% of the time, a zero
>tolerance policy. Another site thinks that attack site links are usually
>bad, but there may be rare circumstances where they are needed, and that they
>should be decided case by case.
>
>The first side, however, has now moderated their rhetoric and sounds exactly
>like the second.
>
>My impression is that the zero-tolerance side actually wants zero tolerance
>for certain particular web sites, and the Teresa Nielsen Hayden situation
>caught them by surprise. Thus, they now claim "we don't support zero
>tolerance" when the truth is that they don't care about TNH but still want
>zero tolerance for WR and ED.
That's correct.
Fred
On 5/30/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> Michael Noda wrote:
> > As someone who has done large numbers of minor edits in the past,
> > completely unaided by scripting*, I'm disappointed that you feel this
> > way. These edits are often the formatting and style edits that make
> > Wikipedia look and feel like an encyclopedia. And yet you implied
> > that anyone who does mass-editing is either using a script or is
> > "mindlessly hitting a button". Was that necessary?
>
> Same here. I've racked up something like 50,000 article edits over the
> years and I've never touched AWB. The most automation I've ever used is
> Cyde's reference converter from time to time, and that requires copying
> and pasting from an external text field so it's not very automated
Yup, these are things that make Wikipedia look and function like an
encyclopedia.
Thank you both for taking the time to realize how important the details are
in an encyclopedia or anything worth doing, and for doing all the work that
makes my edits and contributions and research for Wikipedia worthwhile. I
can't believe that people like you actually stick around and do this,
considering the dismissive way some people treat your work. But, rest
assured, there are a lot of editors out there who realize the whole
endeavour would be a piece of webcrap without you. I can't believe how much
work writing an article for Wikipedia is, and I never would have had the
time or inclination to say except for the fact that the first article I
wrote someone I didn't even know came in and spit shined it. Spit-shined my
work--for free. Thanks.
KP
On 29 May 2007 at 10:55:54 +0200, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm"
<macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > There's no examples of why attack sites should not be linked. Suppose
> > you're discussing a forum post from Wikipedia Review in some
> > Wikipedia-relevant discussion.
> > How can you reasonably do that without linking to it?
> >
> At least part of that site can be considered attack site (I have no idea if
> the Brandt's Hivemind page is still gone), but there's plenty of simple
> crititcs there whose posts are worth discussing. I don't see why we should
> ban an entire site just for part of its content.
Brandt's Hivemind is (or was) in Wikipedia Watch, not Wikipedia
Review. Some people in this "BADSITES debate" seem to sometimes
confuse the two sites (and it's hard to show them otherwise without
committing the venal sin of linking to the sites).
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
G'day SV,
> There's also the issue of sockpuppet admin accounts being used in
> support of that person's other accounts by blocking opponents,
> protecting on the right version, and so on. The problem for us is that
> we have no idea of the scale of it. Does it happen at all? Rarely? A
Cabalism becomes much more worrisome when we face a "Cabal" with
only one real person!
> lot? We have no information. What I've noticed is that vandalism
> fighting is becoming an increasing issue at RfAs, and it has
> seemed to
> me (based only on my sporadic visits to RfA) that more and more people
> are being promoted on the basis of lots of minor edits, which is
> not a
> good thing for a number of reasons, the sock admin issue being one of
> them.
My greatest concern for vandal-fighter admins is that they can't be
judged by the usual (flawed, but once relatively accurate) metrics used
by the RfA Groupies. This is really two problems. First, we get admins
who look, walk, and quack like a duck but are in fact turkeys (the CVU
issue), and are nowhere near as mature as number of edits, name
recognition, etc. would imply. Accordingly, they're promoted to
adminship even though they aren't even close to Clueful enough to
succeed in the post. This is a problem I've banged on about for a while,
so I won't blame anybody if their eyes glazed over for this paragraph.
The second problem with the vandal-fighter admin thing is that the
metrics get artificially inflated. "Okay, it's trivial to get 1500 edits
quickly, so we'll force you to get 3000 edits". Users with Clue but only
1000 edits may be passed over for lack of experience, but some
superdick newbie biter gets a free pass.
Cheers,
--
[[User:MarkGallagher]]