[Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

Sun Dec 30 23:16:04 UTC 2007

You should have warned people to get a *big* bag of popcorn before looking
at that anguished discussion. Every single vote to close the wiki is either
questioned, the poster told their criticism equally applies to some other
language like Esperanto, or that fact that a few percent of another Wiki's
articles being bot generated is used to try and dismiss the vote.

It must be pretty bad when people are suggesting vo:* be added to the spam
blacklist on other projects. Consensus? Meet Window... We're on the 27th
floor.

Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of David Gerard
Sent: 30 December 2007 23:26
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

On 30/12/2007, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I guess I'm not understanding the difference you are using here. The
> bot is translating text from one wikipedia for use in another
> wikipedia, so are you saying that wikipedia content itself is "spam"?
> Or are you asserting (as I assume you are) that this user was trying
> to artificially increase the vo.wikipedia article count to try and
> lend undue credence to the Volapuk language?

That is precisely what he said he was doing.

> A simple assumption of good faith here should prevent us from assuming
> that any of these actions are nefarious, especially if they are
> producing acceptable articles. Assuming good faith would also breed
> tolerance, because we would assume that the articles were being
> created in furtherance of our goals, not as some sort of underhanded
> marketing scheme for a dead conlang.

Except that he said that was what he was doing. I'm not going to
"assume good faith" in the face of a direct statement from the person
about what they're doing.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Vol
ap%C3%BCk_Wikipedia

- d.

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