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Sanger's Tucker Carlson appearance

Disappointing. Instead of discussing Wikipedia's American current-events bias, which does have its easily debated weak points as discussed above, Sanger impugned the entire site, its editors, and actually said he was embarrassed to have been associated with it. What a maroon, at least in this appearance. Maybe you can consider going on Tucker Carlson to at least balance what now seems to be misinformation from Sanger (or other shows, the airwaves should probably be seeing more of you as the public face of Wikipedia). They should allow you access to counter the appearance, although on the other hand it would keep his statements in front of the audience. But the damage he attempted to inflict upon every article and editor with his words today maybe should find rebuttal on the same media platform. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:08, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

After a think or two, Sanger's sweeping criticism seemed so over the top that maybe it is best to let him stew in his own juices. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:33, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
Indeed often a good idea to not give more attention than deserved, —PaleoNeonate – 15:08, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
Tucker Carlson is a carnival barker, not an honest interviewer. Not that he couldn't handle it, but anyone like Mr. Wales going onto that show would be heading into a trap, it would just be a waste of time. Now if a reputable outlet wanted to send an invite to give an opportunity to rebut Mr. Sanger, that would be great. I'd love to see you and Lawrence O'Donnell have a sitdown. ValarianB (talk) 12:49, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, Tucker Carlson is about the last person I'd want to interview me; he's far more opinion columnist than honest journalist. Though Sanger's criticisms are hardly criticisms at all...he claims that we are pushing establishment views, and darn right we are. As my favorite part of WP:FLAT goes: If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century BC, it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact without qualification. It would have also reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined the Earth's circumference in 240 BC) either as controversial or a fringe view. Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that the Sun goes round the Earth as a fact, and if Galileo had been a Vicipaedia editor, his view would have been rejected as "originale investigationis". Of course, if there is a popularly held or notable view that the Earth is flat, Wikipedia reports this view. But it does not report it as true. It reports only on what its adherents believe, the history of the view, and its notable or prominent adherents. Wikipedia is inherently a non-innovative reference work: it stifles creativity and free thought, which is a Good Thing. We publish a mainstream view because how could we possibly choose what nuts, off-road versions of reality to report. We no more adhere to Tucker Carlson's version of the universe than Joe Rogan's. Sanger's concerns about us being edited by governments and companies is warranted I'd say, but his implied solution that we remove anonymity and force contributors to reveal who they are is untenable. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 16:45, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
Encyclopedias are supposed to primarily be for pushing facts, not views. One problem with today's media is that they have a way of converting opinions into news reports where someone's opinion is stated as a fact. Really, Wikipedia would be better off if it just avoided covering such "news". Why does media do this? I think it's because opinions are cheap, but real news-gathering costs money. One would hope Wikipedia would also report the views of Eratosthenes as controversial or fringe rather than refusing to report those views at all. Wikipedia is balanced when it includes minority (a less-derogatory term than "fringe") views, it's not balanced when it rejects reasonable minority views by transforming them to "fringe". See "lab leak". – wbm1058 (talk) 18:42, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
Wbm1058, what do you mean about the lab leak? We do cover it, we explain what it is, the different formulations of it, we talk about its proponents and the origin of the theory. And we also talk about the mainstream view re: whether or not it is "likely" (the scholarly view is that it is not very likely). What would you change about this?
There seems to be this enduring rumor that Wikipedia is "silencing" the lab leak. Which could not be further from the truth. Is this just an outdated thing that was true 6 or 12 months ago? We now cover it in proportion to its coverage in secondary sources (or attempt to), and in context of what those sources say.
I think it is our duty to cover these things, not only because they are DUE, but because our readers are already thinking about it. Anyone who thinks the lab leak is not very likely should be on board with this. Because it is better to "inoculate" the reader with all the facts of the situation, no matter where they will lead. Any attempt to obfuscate just blows back in your face, exactly as we can all see with how China's obstructionist view (as a totalitarian government) has blown up in its face. Regardless of whether or not the CCP actually have something to hide. (The international relations experts think they don't, not necessarily anyway [1])
I'm a virologist who earned a PhD studying BSL3 and 4 viruses. I have performed these experiments (creating new viruses from scratch, developing vaccines/drugs against them, etc), I have worked in these "high security labs" (although I have never been to the WIV, I did meet Drs. Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak at a conference in Hong Kong once (in 2018), they weren't famous then and I didn't pay much attention, lol.) Personally, I think the lab leak (in all its various proposed forms) probably isn't what happened. But I also recognize that on Wikipedia, we have to talk about it, and we have to put it in context. As they say, "inquiring minds want to know."
I don't understand where everybody got this idea that there are lots of editors who "don't want to talk about it." That just sounds like more conspiratorial thinking in my opinion... "they don't want you to know" etc. I know that's not what you're saying here Wbm1058, it's just what I've heard others say again and again. I truly think that, at this point, this narrative of Wikipedian obstructionism has entered "folklore" status. It doesn't matter what we actually do in these articles, or how NPOV we try to be, because it will be forever an accepted fact in the collective consciousness of Wikipedia that we "didn't get the lab leak right" in some unspecified way. This saddens me.
As for Jimbo Wales, from one Jim to another...I don't think it would serve him or the project to comment on this in a venue like Tucker Carlson... It only legitimizes the complaints of partisans, and puts them on equal footing. As they say, the best revenge is success. I think if we make our coverage in this area as excellent as it can be, include all relevant viewpoints as covered in RSes, then our NPOV and consistent coverage will be its own reward.--Shibbolethink (♔ ♕) 19:23, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
The goal of the RfC at Wikipedia talk:Biomedical information#RFC: Disease / pandemic origins. was to deprecate all general mainstream sources as "reliable sources" for "medical information" and declare medical journals as the only reliable source for this information – with the origin of COVID-19 declared to be "medical information". And while Wikipedia is "conservative" about jumping to conclusions, these reliable medical journals were anything but when they with all due haste quickly declared a lab leak to be virtually impossible (i.e. "fringe"). Like the Catholic Church declaring they are the only reliable source for the shape of the Earth. Never mind that the medical insiders have an obvious conflict-of-interest in that findings of accidents would likely dry up their funding (see nuclear power industry). What is the medical explanation for the Chinese government's taking Wuhan lab databases offline and sealing all records of the research conducted in Wuhan circa December 2019? – wbm1058 (talk) 20:23, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
Censorship crying is indeed usually part of conspiratorial discourse. Moreover, a textbook propaganda tactic is to attempt to foment controversy over it just so that the idea gets echoed again and again. As for MEDRS, one of its goals is also the avoidance of primary papers, favoring more credible reviews, so the above portrayal is not completely true. Comparing to Catholic imprimatur is also a false equivalence, this is the scientific community, not a fundamentalist religious organization that resisted the collapse of the view that humans are at the center of the universe... Most of the time, people who complain about peer review or "dogmatic" science, tend to push for views that are also wrong. —PaleoNeonate – 20:43, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

Larry Sanger complained on an establishment conservative news outlet that Wikipedia pushes an establishment point of view. Ironic. X-Editor (talk) 21:44, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

Just musing about how different Larry's attitude, and Wikipedia, might be today if, rather than lay Larry off because of financial pressures, Jimbo had realized a bit earlier how easy it was to raise funds to support this project, and had raised more than enough money that he could afford to keep Larry on the payroll. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:36, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

Aggrepedia

I am in complete agreement with Randy Kryn that the Sanger interview was disappointing. I am creating a different subsection because the discussion above is primarily about some aspects of the interview and other issues, but I'd like to explore a proposal that came up in the interview but not discussed above. I fully understand that the fact that Sanger proposed it will create some knee-jerk opposition, but I hope readers can move past the messenger and evaluate the idea on its merits.

An encyclopedia (if one can believe Wiktionary) is supposed to be "a comprehensive reference work..." That sounds very broad, but, by definition, the contents of an encyclopedia reflect the consensus views of the contributors. That's hardly surprising, and one's reaction might be "how could it be otherwise?", but despite having hundreds of thousands of contributors, the content in many articles reflects the consensus view of a relatively small handful of individuals, often times driven by those who are passionate and persevering. This seems inevitable, and I'll emphasize that I am impressed at how well it works. When I'm talking to friends about Wikipedia, I often tell them about an article I ran across where I started by reading the talk page before reading the article. As I read the infighting and name-calling and arguing, I despaired that this process could produce a decent article, but when I read the article it was surprisingly good. We all know the adage about not wanting to see how the sausages are made, but it is somewhat surprising how good the product is given the ugliness of the process at times.

I've occasionally tried to think about how to improve the process, but other than minor suggestions at the margins, I haven't come up with anything earth-shattering. Then I watched the steaming pile of crap that was the Carlson - Sanger interview, and think I saw a nugget of gold. He suggested creating a work that would include multiple encyclopedias. Readers would be able to pick a subject, whether it be something relatively noncontroversial like Jupiter or highly controversial like Israeli–Palestinian conflict and see how the subject is covered by several encyclopedias including Wikipedia. Some will be sure to point out that there is nothing preventing people from doing that now so what value does this initiative deliver? My response is that one could equally say why should we write a crowd sourced article about Jupiter, when anyone can do a casual Google search and find all of that information? Wikipedia succeeds partly because it makes that exercise easier, pulling together a wide array of facts from various sources into one coherent location. While anyone could look up "Jupiter" in Wikipedia then in Encyclopaedia Britannica, then in some other encyclopedia and see how they compare, I suggest that almost no one does this on a regular basis. What if we could deliver a site that would pull the various options together side-by-side so that they could be easily compared?

I fully understand this is not a trivial initiative. While a subject like Jupiter has close to a one-to-one correspondence between various encyclopedias, subjects such as "Israeli – Palestinian conflict" probably don't map so nicely. But if the initiative were trivial it would probably already be done. The value added is sorting through the issues of how to map the articles in a way that readers can compare similar subjects.

I wanted to call this initiative Polypedia or Multipredia, but both of those terms seem to be taken so my placeholder for a name at the moment is Aggrepedia, connoting that the product is an aggregation of encyclopedias.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:44, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Censorship of Wikipedia editor Guy Macon

"please don't escalate this. That is not what I want. Just let it go." -- Guy Macon— Preceding unsigned comment added by JayBeeEll (talk • contribs)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Sir, I was sad to see the respected user Guy Macon has retired. It is a shame to see such a valuable editor depart but we must respect his decision. Guy Macon says that he was "ordered" not to talk about why he has retired from contributing to Wikipedia. Admins have no right to order users not to talk about such things. This is shameful treatment of a colleague. Pack My Box (talk) 17:00, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

@Pack My Box: I believe Guy Macon has asked people not to continue posting about this on Jimbo's talk page. If you wish to respect that request and remove this, feel free to remove my response as well. But as long as this is posted on one of the most watched pages on WP, I want to point out that this is the second time that this editor has mischaracterized GM's situation on Jimbo's talk page, and the second time I feel compelled to point it out, so it doesn't just sit here uncontested. It is simply not true that GM was ordered not to talk about why he has retired, and overly credulous to just assume this is accurate. Once I can chalk up to a mistake; twice, and it now seems very likely this is trolling by a throwaway account. --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:58, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
Guy Macon said I have been ordered to not discuss the reasons why I stopped contributing to Wikipedia.. Just today he said I have been ordered to not discuss the reasons why I stopped contributing to Wikipedia .... Why would Guy Macon say that if he did not believe it to be true? Pack My Box (talk) 18:10, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
OK, so I guess you aren't going to respect his wishes. I will, at least; apart from my comment above, I won't discuss GM further in this thread. I'll shift my focus to why we allow obvious throwaway socks to concern troll and shit stir on Jimbo's talk page, usually with no consequence. In fact, based on the wording of the response above, I wonder if you aren't actually doing this to intentionally annoy GM. @Johnuniq: I see from PMB's talk page that you've warned this user about that previously, does starting this thread against GM's wishes look like intentionally annoying GM to you? --Floquenbeam (talk) 18:30, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Just for the record.

Have some pancakes while we wait for enlightenment

I would take a bullet for you in a heartbeat. We need you like the world needs a sun. But I wasn't in for a suicide pact wrt the Commons porn thing. I'll play on side with the sites integrity even against you. But my abiding faith is in you remembering what got you into this in the first place. Do not despair. Help is always nearer than you believe. -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. (talk) 14:35, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

This post has no links to other Wikimedia pages. Please help improve this post by adding links that are relevant to the context within the existing text. (July 2021) Usedtobecool ☎️ 14:52, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
Y'know, there are critics of WP who claim it is a cult. Gunk like this is not helping. Carrite (talk) 17:01, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

A note about an edit I made to your userpage…

On 3:04 PM AEST, August 6, 2021, I made an edit with the summary:

(→‎You can edit this page!: Corrected as this userpage is currently not semi-protected from editing. Sorry if you don’t like it, Jimbo.)

I put this just to tell you that it’s OK to revert the edit I made if you probably want to actually write your own way or if you simply don’t like it…

Thanks, Rng0286 (talk) conts (extended confirmed, yay!) Homer Simpson: (check user rights) D'oh! 05:16, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

@Rng0286: I've reverted your edit as it is indeed semi-protected through edit filter 803. Graham87 08:01, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Happy Birthday!

Wishing Jimbo Wales a very happy birthday on behalf of the Birthday Committee! CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 06:02, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation broke Russian Wikinews again

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T287362
Resolved
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T287380
Open
This is the current news now

The Wikimedia Foundation engineers have turned off the news feed on Russian Wikinews again. This is a key feature of any news project. And now it doesn't work again.

For example, the latest news list on the title page looks like the picture on the right. Latest news page about you looked like this and now so. All the recent news looked like this, now look so. There is one and a half million news in alphabetical order. But no one can find the latest news anythere.

The problem is that no one at the Wikimedia Foundation bothers nor solves it (see phab:T287380).

I have no idea what would have happened if the BBC or CNN had lost their news feed. I'm sure management and technical services would do just that. However, nobody at the Wikimedia Foundation does this. There is no news feed for three days. No one worries.

Moreover, the engineers openly stated that they would never return the news feed to Russian Wikinews. It is not right. Even if someone said or did something wrong, emotions should not harm our projects.

I don't want to blame anyone. Time will judge. I just want the Wikimedia project to work and develop again. This is not my project. This is a Wikimedia project. But it seems that I am the only one concerned about his fate.

Our very small team came to Russian Wikinews about ten years ago. Then it was a microscopic project that was between life and death every day. Now Russian Wikinews is one of the largest Wikimedia projects, ranking 16th in terms of the number of pages in the main space and fifth in terms of the total number of pages. Now Russian Wikinews is one of the largest open and free news archives. There is a continuous chronology of all events for each day since 2000. Now Russian Wikinews is one of the largest providers of current news. We publish about 600 news items a day. Now Russian Wikinews is a great place to publish original reports, exclusive interviews and photo reports. Our citizen journalists publish exclusive stories almost every day. Most of us live in countries where journalists are massively repressed right now and our work is very important for everyone. We know how to develop. We can become one of the best Wikimedia projects and one of the largest news agencies in the world. We are proud of our work.

But we cannot develop if we do not have basic support from the Wikimedia Foundation. When the servers are down, when the software is broken. When the management of the Wikimedia Foundation does nothing for wikis. We cannot develop when we are bullied and mocked by Foundation employees and contactors. When T&S openly threatens us with violence.

I have no one else to turn to. Therefore, I am writing to you. And I have one single question. Does the Wikimedia movement need wiki projects and does it need Russian Wikinews? If not, I thank you and everyone for the years here and I am ready to leave the Wikimedia movement at any time. If Russian Wikinews are needed, then please create for us at least minimal working conditions and protect us at least from harassment by employees and contractors.

Russian Wikinews is a very large project and it should be located on a dedicated infrastructure like other equally large projects. I don't understand why this has not been done until now. Even this alone would have helped to avoid many problems. This needs to be done urgently.

But most importantly and very urgent, please help launch a news feed on Russian Wikinews. If the engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation are unwilling to do this, you can announce a contest. I am sure that there are talented programmers in the world who can quickly solve this problem, and you can find and interest them. --sasha (krassotkin) 06:46, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't know anything about the details but this has been discussed on-wiki—see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Overflow error (permalink) which leads to phab:T287362. It appears that developers responded to severe slow-downs of a large number of projects by disabling an extension called DPL (DynamicPageList). That was because DPL is not supported and was not designed to cope with large numbers of new pages (see July 2021 Signpost). DPL was previously temporarily disabled in September 2020 (archive) but has now been switched off indefinitely after this second incident. Johnuniq (talk) 07:24, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
  • As you wrote above the developers have been knew of the DPL's problems throughout the year. They understood for sure that it would lead to collapse and they did absolutely nothing for a whole year. Now they just turned off this functionality, despite the fact that news projects cannot exist without it. But the reasons are not important. It is important now to urgently create the same extension that will not overload the servers. --sasha (krassotkin) 07:55, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Jc37, you added a link to the allegedly resolved task. I understand that this is not for you. But I have one rhetorical question. If the developers had disabled in the English Wikipedia search functionality and said that then everything worked. Would this also be a well-resolved task? --sasha (krassotkin) 08:10, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
    Hi krassotkin, as you seem to be aware, I am not one of the developers. So all I can do is read the threads that they were discussing this. From what I can tell, several people have tried to let you know that they will not be re-activating DPL on Russia Wikinews. And are currently in a discussion in a separate thread about whether it should be disabled wikimedia-wide.
    I understand that this is a functionality that you want. But they have apparently said no, because it potentially impacts all the other wikimedia wikis globally. It appears to be a simple risk vs. reward equation (see also Risk management).
    I am not one of the developers, but just to offer a suggestion - instead of proclaiming to the sky that you are being denied what you want, perhaps try engaging with the devs to see what is available and in what ways they might be willing to help.
    I hope everything works out for you. - jc37 08:32, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
  • With all due respect to User:krassotkin, I want to present the pure facts as I see them, putting emotions aside. The newsfeed functionality is very important for wikinews projects. DPL extension is a piece of software, that implements it. Unfortunately it neirther scales well nor actually works on projects with categories containing more than 10⁵ pages. I believe it has to be rewritten from scratch and there are some ideas on phabricator of how it can be done. Unfortunately, deployment of rewritten DPL will require thorough performance testing and, probably, altering elasticsearch indexes. I do not believe that can be effectively done by community, WMF devs have to be involved here (probably User:GLederrey (WMF) team). I know their roadmap is booked for years ahead (particularly they are working on scalability of wd/wdqs that greatly interest me), but maybe we can shift priorities here or come up with more creative solution? Ghuron (talk) 10:02, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
  • While seconding Sasha's message, as a person who essentially made headlines writing on this very page about Internet censorship in Russia eight years ago, I must note that Wikinews used to have a unique status of unblockable media due to basing on the same servers as Wikipedia, but a recent successful implementation of Full DPI block on Alexey Navalny's websites has shown that it's no more. Ain92 (talk) 13:02, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Sasha, you've been told numerous times now that the ones being harassed here are the volunteers trying to deal with the mess cause by the Russian Wikinews project. I'd suggest you stop spreading misinformation and casting aspersions, and instead work together with the devs to find a solution to your problem. Isabelle 🔔 13:34, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
    • You're right. But what can I or, for example, you do in this particular situation? System administrators of Wikimedia Foundation should migrate big Wikimedia project to dedicated infrastructure. Programmers of Wikimedia Foundation should develop quality software (quality implementation news feeds extension). Managers of Wikimedia Foundation should organize and finance this work. What can you and I do about this? Nothing. But if you can do any of the above I will support you. I will certainly support anyone who does this. --sasha (krassotkin) 06:03, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
    • "The mess" was not "caused by the Russian Wikinews project". Russian Wikinews act consistently according to Wikimedia rules. The problem was well known and Russian Wikinews made everyone aware of it long ago. It's Wikimedia Foundation who spends resources on "renaming Wikimedia" instead of solving known problems with servers. --ssr (talk) 09:37, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
      • If you knew about the mess, but nonetheless proceeded recklessly, then you share at least some of the responsibility. Bawolff (talk) 09:30, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
        • Sometimes the situation looked very close to collapse, but then it was corrected. That's why we thought the Wikimedia Foundation was watching this and will warn us if something goes wrong. Now I understand that no one was watching this. And it looks terrible. --sasha (krassotkin) 06:21, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
        • On the other side. We have absolutely no feedback. For example, look now. No Wikimedia Foundation manager has posted here. Nobody named the time when the problem will be solved. I asked directly: Should we continue to develop Russian Wikinews or should we diverge? If the first when will the problem be solved? No answer. But now Russian Wikinews looks like a half-dead project (n:ru:). --sasha (krassotkin) 06:21, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
          • I don't work for WMF and cannot speak for it, but i think the timeline is pretty clear: There is no intention to ever re-enable DPL on ruwikinews. Improvements to DPL might be made, but they would be targeting smaller wikis which are using that extension. Even if the technical issues weren't present (which they very much are), I imagine the general attitude of pushing boundaries and then attempting to shift blame to everyone else when something goes wrong, makes ruwikinews seem very high risk. Of course, this is just my personal opinion, and I do not speak for WMF or any other developers. Bawolff (talk) 07:50, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
            • I understand. But all living and active Wikinews editions develop in a similar way. This is our independent cross-project consensus. Very soon they will all be as big as Russian Wikinews. It doesn't matter what the name of the program that will implement the news feed. But a news agency cannot exist without a news feed. If we are unable to implement news feed all news projects must be closed by WIkimedia Foundation. --sasha (krassotkin) 08:37, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
        • We do share responsibility and we've always been in touch with Meta people and Phabricator people, as you are aware. We tried to obey everything that is needed, as was directed during year-ago incident with first DPL crash. As I see now at phabricator, an anonymous edit, sadly, triggered the current incident, not actions of Sasha. Yes I agree Sasha's behaviour is rude and I don' like it either. But simultaneously he doesn't break any rules as he has proper knowledge and even is an OTRS member. In the meantime, he made an appeal to Board of Trustees candidates to share their opinions on Wikinews. --ssr (talk) 08:19, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
          • Ultimately, the biggest issue is the performance concerns, not behaviour on ruwikinews. The end result would probably have been the same either way, just without some of the behaviour back on forth, the devs would have felt a lot more bad about permanently disabling DPL on ruwikinews. Nonetheless they probably still would have done it. The edit is the triggering event, but not the root cause. After all, a wiki that can be taken down by a single edit, is not an acceptable state for any wiki to be in. The actual cause of this specific issue seems to be a confluence of several factors (i.e. Unideal query plan by MariaDB, The concurrency patch discussed from last time around having bugs and not being enabled, size of categorylinks table at ruwikinews, job queue only throttling on replica lag and not general replica performance issues, among other things). The most root cause is size of wiki, because the bigger the wiki, the less headroom there is for when things go wrong. WMF hosts a lot of wikis. There will be performance bumps from time to time. They have a responsibility to make sure that none of the wikis are pushing up so close against performance limits that any bumps will take down other wikis. Bawolff (talk) 09:13, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

wikitech:Incident documentation/2021-07-26 ruwikinews DynamicPageList has been posted. The opening sentence is "Following the bot import of 200,000 pages to the Russian Wikinews in the span of 3 days, slow queries originating from ruwikinews's usage of the DynamicPageList extension (also known as "intersection") overloaded the s3 cluster of databases, causing php-fpm processes to hang/stall, eventually taking down all wikis with it." I don't see any formal documentation of the similar incident from last September, which resulted in disabling DynamicPageList before a general outage.

I remember seeing the bot's operator saying that he had previously estimated that if he had his bot import more than 15,000–25,000 pages per day, it could compromise the servers (it's not the importing per se, but the indexing of every page in the system used for news feeds that has the potential to strain the servers), but I can't find the link to his comment right now. However, it appears that his estimate was correct. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:39, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

  • Thanks for your research. You are referring to my comment where I talked about the API. Using a bot I monitor the responsiveness of the server so as not to overload it. I have experienced slow response speed before and slowed down the upload speed. During the discussed upload my bot hasn't captured this. Upload API worked perfectly and there were no problems. As you correctly write, the problems arose not at the stage of adding pages through the API, but on the web side when we form responses to user requests to the database. For non-specialists: these are completely different parts of our server software that do not affect each other directly. It should be borne in mind that from the side of bots, we cannot identify and prevent problem of client logic. And I agree with you that the overall size of the project was the reason for the crash. More specifically, the existing database structure and queries to it cannot solve the tasks necessary for such a large project. In short: DPL led to collapse and needs to be rewritten. And so sorry, but we all knew about it a year ago. Maybe it's time to do it? --sasha (krassotkin) 06:21, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
  • I'm sorry but I would like to discuss another dangerous issue for our Wikimedia movement. We all knew about the DPL technical problem. We all knew that everything would collapse. I have questions to the Wikimedia Foundation why the problem has not been resolved within a year. But I have no questions for system administrators, who quickly identified the cause of the fall and eliminated it. They are great. And I would do the same. Therefore I was emotionless and tried to be ethical. But you write: "Harassment of sysadmins who were involved in incident response aftewards". And I know why this is happening. There is no universal ethics. We all have very different cultures on the big planet Earth. Words that sound ethical in one language and in one culture can be perceived as an insult in another. This is why there can be no Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). This is why we must eliminate the universal bureaucratic repression machine - Trust and Safety (T&S). Otherwise UCoC and T&S will necessarily lead our Wikimedia movement to collapse like the DPL. We are a multicultural movement and we have always been proud of it. And we have mechanisms to solve all problems in each separate project and language project groups (cultural environment). Our communities have talked about this many times. But the Wikimedia Foundation completely ignore the opinion of the communities. This is an offtopic that does not need to be discussed here. But this is extremely important. --sasha (krassotkin) 07:24, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
    Ignoring the fact that you're misleading everyone on how your bot works (intentionally disabling Pywikibot's rate limiting and concurrency controls, violating API:Etiquette, etc.), the harassment in question is explicitly NOT a case of people having different standards/cultures/ethics.
    In the years I've been a developer and sysadmin, both as a volunteer and paid staff, I've broken things accidentally, sometimes purposefully, fixed them immediately, maybe years later, or not at all. I'm sure I've unintentionally upset people in the process. Never did I ever imagine that an upset Wikimedian would write an "article" that's obviously POV-pushing with blatant falsehoods under the guise that it was "news", stick my photo on it, and put it on the homepage of their wiki. Your article conveniently forgot to mention that the author of said article is the person who's been doing all these mass imports. How does that meet basic journalistic conflict of interest guidelines? Or even more basic BLP policies of treating people with respect and dignity. So it's impossible to see that as anything but intimidation and harassment: "If you mess with Russian Wikinews, we're going to put you on blast".
    No sysadmin blames you or Russian Wikinews on taking down the sites, that's squarely our responsibility to keep the sites up and for 20 minutes we failed at that and are actively working to ensure it doesn't happen again. But it's becoming clear that ruwikinews leaders do not intend to follow sysadmin recommendations, nor work with us in a collegial manner, hence the current state of DPL being disabled with no obvious path forward. You're obviously technically competent, so I don't get the point in forum shopping and playing the blame game instead of well, working together to fix the problems. Legoktm (talk) 09:22, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

It seems a lot of people here are hung up on the rate of import here - Its my belief that the total size of the wiki, not the rate of import, is what is relevant here. We've always known that DPL had scaling limitations. We've known since 2005. We didn't think any of the wikinews projects would grow to the size of ruwikinews. Certainly it wasn't expected that any of the DPL enabled projects would grow so suddenly. Sure it would be nice if DPL was better, but it is what it is, and its too risky to run on a wiki with 13 million pages. Bawolff (talk) 09:17, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

I am (among other wiki aktivitities) admin an at the moment rather inactive author in the German Wikinews version. I think we have three different issues here.

  1. The DPL extension was written especially for Wikinews for creating a newsfeed with the latest articles on each news sector. Many if not all Wikinews language versions rely on the extension. Removing it would damage all of them, not the RUWN alone. As a Wikinewsian I cannot agree with the proposal to remove the externsion, I should write this in bold.
  2. The mass upload of "free" articles (aka import) as such wasn't foreseen when Wikinews startet. We believed that a critical mass would producce enough material to call WN a news source but that never materialized. All WN language versions have this problem including the ENWN. 2014 at the Cologne WikiCon I said to then-board-member Florence Dontrememberhisname that there is no concept how to do Wikinews and therefore the Wikinews communities are on their own witt developping ideas to resolve the bad performance. For example then ENWN introduced a formal review process, ITWN at one point put all on sports articles. The SRWN came up with bot uploasing of CC-BY articles firstly, at the time obviously with the intention to make SRWN the largest WN language version. The RUWN seems to have followed similar intentions initially. But then, as I understood, things changed when Putin's fight against NewsRU accelerated. I don't know the details but it was agreed to change NesRU's licence an to ave their archive bei uploading all the articles to RUWN. Is this within der scope o Wikinews? Hell, yes. What otherwise would be the scope if not importing free news? (The community must still resolve an issue: patrol or those articles for neutrality, wikification, and so on, but such problems are no reason to suppress them, even not in Wikipedia.
  3. And then we have a tech flaw wich never was expected because nobody expected hundred of thousands of articles within days. Actually none of the WN language versions is expected to have am million of artiles before the end of the century. We're all dead before the Russian issue becomes a problem in other language versions. Therefore is no reason to remove the extension per se.

So the solution has to be found ad hoc in or with the RUWN but we must not complicate Wikinewsians life by removing DPL in other language versions by default. What would be a backset to 2005 or so. --Matthiasb (talk) 18:28, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

  • ✔Support DPL for GWN, Russian Wikinews are now seem to be "showing the way" for other Wikinews, what English Wikinews failed to do. We at RWN recently received requests from Vietnamese and Portuguese WN asking for advice. Remember, it was Serbian Wikinews who began to mass-upload free-licensed news stories from outside, and Russian Wikinews just followed their experience. The original model of "amateur news agency" where volunteer people make massive qualified work for no cost, turned out to be unreachable, as most of commentators conclude (and I agree). What is more reachable, is a model of so-called "wiki-magazine", not exaclty a "news-agency", but "news" can normally exist within a "magazine", and the overall resulting product can easily be called "Wikinews". Aside news, there may be (and are) "reports" of other kinds of (amateur/citizen) journalism—for example in English, open n:ru:en. I am a preofessional journalist, I know what I am talking about. It was not me who coined "wiki-magazine", it was user:Asaf (WMF). Literally, he said: "What does indeed work in Russian Wikinews is really a *magazine* rather than what would be considered "hard" news. I think it's *great* to have a wiki-magazine, and I think wiki-magazines *can* work. So to amend my comment above: Wikinews *as originally conceived, as it purports to be*, doesn't and cannot work anywhere. Wiki-magazines are a neat idea and can totally work everywhere! Whether WMF would be interested in hosting them is a separate question, but the answer may well be yes, so it's worth exploring, by those interested in creating wiki-magazines". And he was answering an opinion by user:Sillyfolkboy, who said earlier: "From what I can see from the Russian list you share, the focus is mainly on local stories. Among them I see public activism in coverage of resident's rights in Yekaterinburg, and culture coverage of small scale music festivals etc. I can definitely see the value of coverage like this and how it doesn't fit into another project's scope. This kind of work is contrary to much modern news in that it is very location-specific and its period of timeliness is quite long - i.e. publishing it a week after its occurrence has little impact on the article's value. These articles can stimulate the public to action in the local area, can cover stories that develop over long periods of time, and can act as a store of local history. How can the project encourage more work in that vein? en.Wikinews is the opposite, in that it is trying to cover major national or international stories with a limited window of time relevance. The Russians are very illuminating!" (source for both). --ssr (talk) 12:22, 6 August 2021 (UTC)
I only can reiterate what I said in my presentation on Wikinews at IIRC the Dresden WikiCon and perhaps also in the discussion on Gestumblindi's close-em-all request on Meta: In a world of growing news censorship and pay per article models Wikinews is one the most important if not the most important WMF project but the WMF just don't get it. Instead it spends money and other resources on things like the UCoC, rebranding and so on. And, sadly, it's for longer than a decade. OTOH I never got a response on meta:TV5Monde cyberattack and consequences for Wikimedia projects what is related to Wikinews and even Wikipedia. --Matthiasb (talk) 10:43, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
Totally and ultimately agree with "Wikinews is one the most important if not the most important WMF project but the WMF just don't get it. Instead it spends money and other resources on things like the UCoC, rebranding and so on". --ssr (talk) 17:51, 7 August 2021 (UTC)
  • One of the largest Wikimedia projects has been deprived of its core functionality for two weeks. Every day we are losing a community that we have collected with great difficulty. But so far the Wikimedia Foundation has not appointed a manager who is responsible for resolving this issue. So far the Wikimedia Foundation has not set a deadline for resolving this problem. Maybe they don't know about the problem? Where and to whom can we report this? But if they know they should understand that this is not a technical but a managerial fail. I have worked as a director, member and chairman of the board of directors all my life. I have never seen such irresponsible work anywhere else. If the governance structure of the Wikimedia Foundation is so disrupted that it is unable to fulfill its primary function the Board of Trustees should urgently hire a crisis manager.
    Nataliia (NTymkiv (WMF), Antanana) you are acting chair of Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Appointment of top management and control over him is one of your main functions. We chose you for this. We have chosen you to represent the interests of the Wikimedia projects community. We believe that you can solve this problem. --sasha (krassotkin) 07:13, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
    They know, they aren't going to fix it. They have been saying that from the start. So if YOU want to write code to fix it, go right ahead it is open source after all. Alternatively, restructure ru Wikinews to not depend on this functionality. I appreciate you want to get heard, but solutions to problems don't just magically appear. Even in the best of cases, this would take weeks to solve, assuming it is solvable at all. But considering that there is no specific resourcing for Wikinews, and that all other resourcing is booked for years in the future you are making petitions here that simply are not realistically going to be answered. And you are of course always welcome to fork the project and run it entirely as you want it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:27, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Blocking Wikimedia projects in Iran

Hi, the Iranian parliament has passed a law according to which the general management of the Internet will be handed over to the armed forces and the situation of the Iranian Internet will become something between North Korea and China.[2] According to the plan, foreign platforms must either be officially active in Iran and comply with the requests of Iran's security agencies or will be blocked. I have no doubt that they will block Wikipedia and all other projects in order to get rid of all its political and sexual content and establish their own controlled encyclopedia. Transparency is needed, what is the foundation's plan for this? --IamMM (talk) 07:41, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I am still waiting for your reaction to this serious issue. @Ladsgroup: Did you try to inform the Foundation about this? I need to talk to Wikimedia officials about some important points about this restriction. IamMM (talk) 06:03, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

I'd say.. what do you want the foundation to do ? Because as pointed out, North Korea and China are already clear precedents and you know that the Foundation has done and does wrt those. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:51, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
My goal at first was to raise awareness, but now I expect the WMF to take a clear stand. This is a big thing, about one million pages and thousands of volunteers will be affected by this limitation. I do not mean that the Foundation necessarily has the ability to take any effective action in this regard, but prior knowledge of this limitation can be useful in considering technical (possible) coping options. Adapting to unrestricted communication methods such as Starlink satellite internet can be somewhat helpful, as can changing the way we deal with open proxies. Even if there is no way to circumvent the restriction, the issue of protecting current content from censorship and securing the accounts of users who are disconnected is of particular importance. --IamMM (talk) 15:17, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
I am also in agreement. This is a serious issue that should be attended by the WMF. I don't expect corporations to take a stand against Internet freedom, but I do expect the repository of human knowledge with non-paid editors around the world should at least, have a say on this matter. For instance, the policy for public proxies, especially for people from restricted countries, could be publicized more so editors from restricted countries could still edit anonymously. As most editors will only edit things that interests them or close to them, losing Iranian editors will be a serious blow to the project that WMF should take notice.SunDawntalk 05:10, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia isn't WikiLeaks. What has Wikipedia to gain? Some edits. What would Iranian Wikipedians get if caught? Torture and prison. Not worth the risk. That would be a cynical game WMF plays with the lives and liberty of other people. tgeorgescu (talk) 16:47, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
The dual and immoral standard of the Wikimedia Foundation is not acceptable to Iranian volunteers. I vividly remember at one of the fawiki anniversaries how Katherine (WMF), who made a video call on behalf of the Foundation even praised the Safavid dynasty, which is notorious for its heinous crimes but did not show the slightest sympathy for the volunteers under censorship! I'm really curious to know if Saudi Arabia made such a decision, would WMF still be silent like this? Maybe Mr. Wales forgot how he advised Iranian users to consider the government's sensitivities about homosexuality? (Legitimacy to the censors) When you give a piece of bread to a hungry totalitarian monster, he does not thank you, only his appetite for eating your own meat. WMF behavior is shameful. --IamMM (talk) 12:48, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
"Maybe Mr. Wales forgot how he advised Iranian users to consider the government's sensitivities about homosexuality?" - this is false. I don't even know what you think I said that would even suggest that. I do think that all editors in all places around the world should be thoughtful about their *readers* even though Wikipedia is not censored simply because in order to educate - on any topic - you must start with the context of the learner. I have never said or suggested that we should in any way cooperate with censorship.
My standards are not "dual" in any way. I would say the same thing about censorship in Saudi Arabia as I would about censorship in Iran or in the UK or the United States.
Having said all that, I think it would be unwise and unhelpful for the WMF to engage proactively in cases where doing so is likely to be counterproductive. There are a great many places around the world where laws are in place which would permit governments to shut off access to Wikipedia - those laws are wrong - but in most of those places, the governments have made the pragmatic decision that Wikipedia is too useful and too popular to block. It is very hard to know the exact right move to make at specific moments in time - but principles are timeless. We stand against censorship and we try to fight it with wisdom and thoughtfulness rather than pointless bombast that may not actually work.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:28, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
Jimbo Wales eat good food? "Hell yes" Jimbo Wales eat so good food. Iran people and Russia people eat bad food and Jimbo Wales in USA eat good food! While we eat bad food. Good taste Jimmy? Like? ssr (talk) 01:34, 10 August 2021 (UTC)
Glad to hear. I would like to draw your attention to a few issues. The government of Iran is not Iranian and it does not care about the interests of the people of this country. They blamed a telegram channel for the 2017-18 protests, so the journalist in charge (Roohollah Zam) was tricked into dragging him from France to Iraq, then kidnapped him and executed him in Iran. All this did not change their decision to shut down the telegram, which they admitted was the source of income for 3 million poor and marginalized citizens. Do not expect a government that destroys the jobs of its three million citizens with one click to pay attention to your encyclopedia. They did not have the necessary technical infrastructure before so they tolerated Western platforms, but in recent years thanks to their Chinese communist friends, they have sought to build a native version of anything controlled from within Iran. Given the experience of the homosexuality debate (here), I expect you to no longer be lenient with the demands of authoritarian regimes, you may not have intended to censor, but this is exactly what happened after you said that.
I want to ask a question: how is it possible that the WMF considers itself an enemy of censorship and has kept among its stewards the staff of the institution that is providing the infrastructure to cut off the Internet in Iran? An employee of ArvandCloud (the company is currently building a local network that will replace the global Internet) is in the same position. It is painful that Iranian users loudly shouted their concerns, but the foundation refused to listen. Look at (Redacted), wearing a Wikipedia t-shirt while it is disconnecting 85 million ppl from the internet! Or (Redacted) next to the person in charge of the regime's soft (cyber) war. IMO, this is a scandal for the foundation, and if you listened to the cries of Iranian users, you would have noticed sooner. I would like to point out that the company cut off the global Internet for all Iranians for 5 days during the Bloody November 2019 massacres. Iran’s Hidden Slaughter: a video investigation by the France 24 Observers. It is time to stop obeying the demands of authoritarianism and take a pragmatic stance to have a real internet freedom. --IamMM (talk) 07:33, 10 August 2021 (UTC)
I am also glad to hear, thanks! Aside Iran, there is Ukraine (let me talk on my local themes, that bother me). WMF has totally "cut out" money from Russia. Russian Wikipedians work and receive no single cent from WMF. Simultaneously, WMF assigns "hundreds of thousand dollars" to Ukrainian WM, and Ukrainian WP is widely known for violations of BLP and NPOV. WMF has Ukrainian board member (abovementioned NTymkiv), and WMF sends thousands of dollars to UWM and no single cent to RWM and allows no donations within Russia for Russians. And Jimbo eats good food![citation needed] Like? --ssr (talk) 08:08, 10 August 2021 (UTC)
I don't understand what you are saying with "Jimbo eats good food" - it sounds like a humorous reference to something but I don't know what it means. In terms of the Russian government's policies which prevent the WMF from directly supporting the Russian chapter, I am disappointed in those policies and hope they will someday be changed. Trying to turn this into a criticism of the WMF as if we are biased against the Russian community is not correct.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:31, 10 August 2021 (UTC)
Do you like the food that you eat, Jimbo? I like the food that I eat, generally. Hospital food, not so much. Most of the time when I see things between quotes I simply take that to mean an inference by the individual making the statement unless I know they are specifically quoting someone else. I, like Jimbo, wish any government policy that would limit exposure of people to articles on Wikipedia would be changed. But I don't feel it is Wikipedia's place to free the world. If you want freedom then do you. We want everyone to be able to edit here and we want to expand and improve the encyclopedia. On a side note: I do wish that people making claims would include some sources for what they claim. It's like, what food does Jimmy eat? How do we know its good? We need credible independent sources here to confirm this. --ARoseWolf 20:19, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Happy Birthday Jimbo!

For a moment I was worried that we had somehow spawned two rival birthday committees. None of us would be surprised, right? WaggersTALK 14:25, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
With competing messages all vying for the attention of the subject and fellow editors? I can see that being the next (edit) war campaign (lol). Don't mind me, I'm over here chewing on my tongue and sitting on my hands. --ARoseWolf 16:30, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Oath

I don't think it is any secret, but I would have, and will in times to come take and jump on a grenade to save you. We need you. Consider yourself hard to replace. -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. (talk) 19:16, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

You should probably scale back the cultist rhetoric. Did you not see the replies to your previous post? Posting things like that isn't helping. Philbert2.71828 03:46, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Global media policy etc.

Hello! I know Jimbo may not have time to ask but since many users monitor this page I will give it a try. I have been checking images on wikis around the world for many years and some are very strict about copyright and some are not. Some wikis host files that are free abroad but not in the U. S. Some wikis host files of buildings and statues even if that is not covered by freedom of panorama. The challenge is that it can be hard to persuade local admins to delete files if there is no clear and official rule saying something is forbidden. More than a year ago I asked if we could have a FAQ or something like that on media rules/policies (recent follow up). Recently I asked if we could make global restrictions on for example use of GFDL (usually each wiki make their own policies but I wonder if there can be exceptions since). I have probably been asking at the wrong place so if anyone know the place to ask I would be happy for a hint. --MGA73 (talk) 14:49, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't be the decider on something like that, but I can give a few potentially helpful thoughts.
First, laws vary around the world and I trust that local communities do what they can to follow both US law (we have to, because the WMF is based there) *and* local law. There may be errors, of course, such is the nature of a very large number of people doing a very large number of things. My point is just that we shouldn't expect or hope for perfect global consistency since laws do vary around the world.
Second, having said that - clear global principles are definitely possible and need to be communicated globally. Doing so is a challenge but this is part of the purpose of wikimania, various working groups, etc. I'm not sure exactly what the right place is for your question, but I'm sure someone can hop in here and give some suggestions.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:22, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Wikimedia up for deletion

Wikimedia movement is nominated for deletion. I'm curious, is there any officially recognized terminology used for things? Note that Wikimedia redirects to Wikipedia movement. Dream Focus 02:28, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 August 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:43, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Here's some green tea!

Enjoy this cup of green tea. Seems appropriate since you made the whole thing.

Also happy really belated birthday.

~WashyLieshy

WashyLieshy (talk) 17:22, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Facebook accusations of fraud for posting my own Wikimedia images

I have a problem with Facebook accusing me of fraud for posting my own Wikimedia Commons images. I am stopping all further uploads to Wikimedia until this is sorted out. My donations should not cost me my online reputation or being ridiculed for those donations. This appears to be automated. I am very sorry but...I see no other answer. I'd rather stop donations than be a source of ridicule for an organization only a few miles from your own offices [edit -struck out as I know enough now to determine uploads to the project are not the issue].--Mark Miller (talk) 12:01, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

What do you mean by fraud? Do they think that you are violating copyright with these images?--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 12:42, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
I only mean that is the message I received which called the use of the images "fraud" and accused me of posting images for "likes". It started a few months ago when someone had a thread on the California History Community asking if anyone else had pictures of the band; "Queen" in concert. I posted this (a lousy pic actually). It was deleted and the next day I received the message with the accusation of "fraud".--Mark Miller (talk) 00:24, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
If these false accusations are coming from Facebook, why are you yelling at Jimbo and the WMF???? --Orange Mike | Talk 12:45, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
Not yelling at anyone here.--Mark Miller (talk) 00:17, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
Generally Facebook dont take actions for themselves. They act on behalf of others who file copyright claims. Anyone who has had to deal with facebook (or other social media, google/youtube etc), unless its an obvious mistake, ends up in being sent to whoever is claiming copyright and told to sort it out with them. As far as I know however, the WMF isnt actively sending out copyright claims against media released through it under a free license. So its decidedly odd. Mark, can you provide in detail whats going on? Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:48, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
I will add that there are instances where companies are claiming copyright on material they dont own, but there's usually a monetary reward/motive for that. There certainly isnt any benefit in a third party claiming copyright on an image (to facebook) which can trivially be identified as being released under a CC license. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:54, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
I believe I have it somewhat figured out and there really isn't anything on this end Jimbo or WMF can do other than requesting FB look into their automated functions. It apears to be an algorithm issue. I won't need any pause in donations/image uploads. It would serve no purpose. I was a tad nervous that my own work here was adding red flags over there. It doesn't seem to be the case. But I will leave this thread up and respond to User:Only in death with details a little later today. But thank you for responding.--Mark Miller (talk) 00:17, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

Template:Wikimedia Foundation

According to this template, Wikimedia Foundation has 5 current "people." Is that good/clear enough? If you (talkpage reader) have an opinion, please join Template_talk:Wikimedia_Foundation#Who's_in_and_who's_not. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:23, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:56, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Archiving

I notice that this page isn't archiving like it used to. I wonder if someone can help me remember how it used to be and help me figure out why it stopped?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:18, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Looks like Lowercase sigmabot III last archived your talk page on the 27th - what seems different? (and I'm sure it's nothing to do with the 247-odd archive pages!) ~TNT (she/her • talk) 13:45, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Well look at the top of the page - a friendly "Here's some green tea" message from 8 September, quite old!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:09, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Perhaps because the bot is configured to archive minimum 5 threads at once. There are only 5 threads (excluding this one), and the most recent is 11 days old. Clog Wolf Howl 14:17, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Which means now that this is #6, that should get archived on the next pass :D — xaosflux Talk 14:27, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Thanks, Clog Wolf! That's almost certainly the solution. We'll see soon. :)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:52, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
Jimbo Wales and all, seems like I misunderstood. Looking at the configuration code again, I can confirm that the bot is not configured to archive minimum 5 threads, but to make sure at least 5 threads are left in the page before archiving. As I already mentioned, there aren't enough threads for the bot to archive. Should the minthreadsleft parameter be changed? Clog Wolf Howl 09:15, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
Yes, the bot would archive the top thread under the current configuration (as there are now six threads) but it's down at the moment. Graham87 08:00, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
The configuration code has been changed by Wales himself, so the bot should archive the top 3 threads once it is back. Clog Wolf Howl 08:08, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Facebook accusations of fraud over posting my own Wikimedia images on Facebook

I messaged Facebook over this issue that I brought up here some weeks ago. I had wanted to try and screen cap what was happening but did not get to it before it stopped. The following day, Facebook was accused by a whistle blower of holding profit above it's own member's safety and well being. Having Facebook outright accuse me of fraud over images I donated to Wikimedia was pretty bad, but what I didn't mention was, they left these accusations and messages in a manner that popped up and then went away with no trace. I am not kidding. Look, I think Facebook has issues and I have long said that if they simply looked at the open source manner of Wikipedia they could do far better. Facebook has little to no moderation or administration beyond their own algorithm. There is no person behind any plea for assistance or moderation I have EVER experienced on Facebook. No wonder everything lands on the lap of Mark Zuckerberg or other top FB owners/operators and current "administrators" (whatever that may be).

But right after the whistle blower came forward......I was able to post the images that got me accused of fraud with no further issue. I never got a message from Facebook. Faceless social media. I know who the admin are here. They are real people and we have worked hard for what Wikipedia is now. Yes....I made mistakes. But I do learn. :)--Mark Miller (talk) 09:54, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Gosh, sorry to hear about all that. I basically agree with you of course: Facebook is not very good at even the basics of what they should be good at. I think they are in decline and will struggle to survive in the future.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:57, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

General Public License Flashcard Program to use on Wikipedia's glossaries.

Hi Jimmy. What do you think of this idea?

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#GNU General Public License Flashcard Program to use on Wikipedia's glossaries.

I think it would be a big hit. Take care. LearnMore (talk) 20:57, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

cat :>

meow :)

Ravenflight0 (talk) 15:49, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

So cute. Heythereimaguy (talk) 18:31, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Absolutely adorable and I am glad this is here. Durkacs 314 (talk) 21:03, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

You made a mistake

I very disagree with your recent actions on Chinese Wikipedia.Even if those who are removed should be, have you ever thought about who will clean up this mess?

Many editors in Taiwan Province tried to use this incident to wipe out chinese editorials, and Chinese Wikipedia is in unprecedented turmoil. Is this what you want to see?

May God be with Chinese Wikipedia. Assifbus (talk) 10:20, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Explanation regarding above is at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)#m:Office actions/September 2021 statement. Johnuniq (talk) 10:42, 17 September 2021 (UTC)
And some articles about it at Wikipedia:Press_coverage_2021#September. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:48, 17 September 2021 (UTC)
For me, one of the most important pillars of Wikipedia is neutrality. Editors from mainland China are welcomed, as are editors from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and all around the world. What is not welcomed is organized efforts to push an agenda and silence others - from any side.
I can understand that the removal of a group of editors for misbehavior and agenda pushing can cause turmoil - of course it does. But it is the first step to ensuring that fair, open, and neutral discussions and debates can be had to ensure that Wikipedia speaks the truth, adheres to reliable sources, and lives up to the values that have nourished and sustained us for all these years.
It is also important to understand my role here - I don't directly make or get involved with such decisions. I am not the CEO, I am only me. I view my responsibility as mainly to remind everyone - staff, editors, readers, everyone - of our values and to speak plainly about what we are all trying to achieve.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:01, 17 September 2021 (UTC)
  • (I was passing by and saw this conversation. Sorry, I couldn't help but spread the wiki-love.) To echo Jimbo but also add in my touch of flavor, all of the pillars are important but it starts with civility and ends with civility. Most people associate incivility with aspersions and personal attacks but civility covers a wide range of things and touches on every pillar of our community, one of which is neutrality. If we can not have honest, neutral and civil discussions then what hope do we have of collaborating and improving/expanding the encyclopedia in a neutral way? Maintaining civil discourse is critical to fostering positive creativity within the community. We arent going to always agree but we can disagree respectfully and do so without trying to silence the other side of the discussion. --ARoseWolf 20:16, 17 September 2021 (UTC)
(Another passing by) I humbly thank for your reply for being just normal. Yes, normality barely existed in Chinese Wikipedia before the Office Action., and some in Chinese Wikipedia even consider "push(ing) an agenda (or should I say 'agendas' instead) and silence others" as the "real normality", and totally ignore civility. I can't wish that something may be immediately changed to the best status, but I still hope that everything in Chinese Wikipedia will be well soon. Please allow me to apologise for his comment which has some facts ignored and have innocent people implicated. Sanmosa Outdia 12:11, 18 September 2021 (UTC)
Editors from mainland China are welcomed—disagree. What is Wikipedia in mainland China? Jail bait. As soon as any editor from mainland China write something remotely offensive to the authorities, they risk ending in jail for many years.
So, it's like telling them: you may have fun editing Wikipedia, but if you land in jail because of that we will look the other way.
I'm speaking very seriously: with such slogans you are pushing people towards jail and torture. tgeorgescu (talk) 05:00, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
ICYDK, even the first comment violates neutrality through directly calling Taiwan editors names that they don't like with a malign intention. Much like Chinese Editors don't like being called Chinese Commies, Taiwan editors also don't like being called as being from "Taiwan Province". As with Jimbo's comment, may I ask if this can be translated to Chinese?--1233 ( T / C） 06:39, 18 September 2021 (UTC)
wp:Appeal to Jimbo Pavlov2 (talk) 15:13, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

I hope editors in Chinese mainland and Taiwan can coexist peacefully. Instead, some editors in Taiwan regard the Wikimedia Foundation's action as an opportunity to eliminate dissidents, and their methods of eliminating dissidents include trying to dissolve WMC.Does this deviate from the original intention of this activity? I like Wikipedia, and I have devoted myself to Wikipedia for two years.I can't stand Chinese Wikipedia falling into chaos. Assifbus (talk) 17:23, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

I also want to ask the founder a question. When Wikipedia's values of freedom, objectivity and democracy conflict with national laws or international common sense (for example, Taiwan is a part of China, but many editors in Taiwan Province don't like the name "Taiwan "). Is it appropriate to challenge a country's laws and subvert international common sense in order to safeguard Wikipedia's values? Assifbus (talk) 17:40, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

To be precise, many editors in Taiwan don't like the name "Taiwan Province".Cbls1911 (talk) 01:40, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

The environment of Chinese Wikipedia is very complicated, and Taiwan editors don't like this statement of “Taiwan Province” , which I understand. But this is not the reason why some editors in Taiwan used this action to suppress dissidents. My ideal Chinese Wikipedia is that both chinese editorials editors and Taiwan editors can express their views on it. I think the foundation needs to intervene to prevent things from getting worse.

If Wikimedia Foundation wants to retain excellent mainland editors, it must make a statement: it does not support anyone's dictatorship (including Taiwan editors), and everyone must respect different views. I think this is the reliable way to solve the current problem. (It is very important for Chinese wikis to think that the Wikimedia Foundation has not connived at the behavior of some editors in Taiwan . ) Assifbus (talk) 02:33, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

You may make this statement if and only if you really respect others and their views, but unfortunately I do not see that happens. Sanmosa Outdia 09:30, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

I just don't want some editors in Taiwan to take advantage of this action to destroy Chinese Wikipedia. Their current actions to suppress dissidents have proved that some of them may be more dictatorial than those in China when they are elected administrators. The foundation should intervene to prevent the action from becoming a tool for some people to suppress dissidents.

Everything I do is to make Chinese Wikipedia stable. Assifbus (talk) 15:11, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

What I mean for "you may make this statement if and only if you really respect others and their views" including not assuming anybody trying to "destroy Chinese Wikipedia", and I must point out that your comments above are in fact destructive to community co-operations and the stability of the site. Sanmosa Outdia 05:27, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Please understand that this is because I am afraid of being implicated by this action mistake, and that some editors in Taiwan will expel me from Wikipedia by this activity, so I made improper remarks on my user page. A Taiwan editor has made a kind move to me today. He stressed that he has never targeted anyone who has targeted chinese editorials with this incident. I hope he is not lying to me.

I don't think I can communicate with user:Sanmosa in a friendly way, so let's end this topic. Things are still going on, and time will test everything. I hope my idea is wrong.

May God be with Chinese Wikipedia. Assifbus (talk) 15:06, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

You are still abusing bad faith. It is totally weird to explicitly express anything implicit, and I think that the Taiwan editor had felt terror (or vexed, maybe) and thus can do nothing but explicitly express those things you mentioned above. It would only happen in places with abnormal norms, where some implicit concepts (like patriotism) need to be explicitly expressed but can still be doubted. I can't see the need to explicitly express anything if I have done nothing related to that before (presumption of innocence), although some Chinese mainland users may still consider it (presumption of guilt) essential. Sanmosa Outdia 15:18, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
Anyone can abuse the policies and guidelines because Wikipedia is open for public editing with few exceptions. I am not on the Chinese Wikipedia but on the English Wikipedia WP:AGF is non-negotiable, as is WP:CIV as it is one of the pillars of the community and encyclopedia. I believe it is just good practice to live like this. We all have more in common than we have differences. One day I hope we can realize this as the human species and move past our minor differences. I can respect the cultural differences of others without having to force my own beliefs on them. It's okay to be different. But don't let those differences outweigh the overall commonalities shared between us. --ARoseWolf 16:57, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
@Sanmosa: We urgently need editors from Taiwan to help build the English encyclopedia by (for example) adding material from biomedical journal articles published there. The viewpoints of Taiwan's pandemic experts may not be getting represented proportionately on English Wikipedia. –Dervorguilla (talk) 21:12, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

I must point it out. The biggest consequence of this incident for Wikipedia is not only the withdrawal of outstanding mainland editors, but also the possibility that the Chinese government will block Wikipedia in Hong Kong and Macao. Assifbus (talk) 04:27, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

I hope God will save the souls of those who made this action decision.

I will not attend the hearing of Wikimedia Foundation on this action, because I predict that the hearing will be dominated by some editors who oppose the Communist Party, and it is impossible to hear different voices on it.I can predict what wikipedia foundation will say. They will reiterate the justice and necessity of their actions, and some editors who oppose the Chinese government and the Communist Party of China（CPC） will express their support at the hearing (live broadcast on the Internet).

I hope you can spend an hour to understand that the actions of Wikimedia Foundation have been abused by some people, who think that they can use this action to fight against dissidents, and they actively create an atmosphere of "being close to China is guilty" or "being close to the Chinese Communist Party is guilty" in Chinese Wikipedia.

The practice of Wikimedia Foundation favoring Taiwan independence forces and Hong Kong independence forces has caused irreparable cracks in Chinese Wikipedia.In the past, I thought it was wrong for the Chinese government to block Wikipedia, but now I think the Chinese government's approach is very correct. The free encyclopedia should not be an encyclopedia that violates the laws of a country.Wikipedia should abide by the laws of other countries as well as the laws of the United States.

Perhaps in the eyes of some staff of Wikimedia Foundation, "Chinese Wikipedia" should be "Taiwan Wikipedia". Assifbus (talk) 03:56, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Chinese language version of Wikipedia, not a Wikipedia owned by China or Taiwan or anywhere else. It serves people all around the world. China blocks it and I don't want Wikipedia to become any country's mouthpiece. NadVolum (talk) 23:08, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

I have no objection to the action of the Foundation itself, I am a liberal.

Many people can't see the editors who oppose the Chinese government trying to use this incident to destroy chinese editorials. (In the eyes of those who oppose the Chinese government, as long as some people do not oppose the Chinese government, they are their enemies.) Some managers only see some brave people's necessary reactions to these saboteurs, and slander these reactions as acts of destroying the community. There is a very apt word in Chinese (驰名双标). Assifbus (talk) 01:28, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

"The free encyclopedia should not be an encyclopedia that violates the laws of a country." Do you not see the inherent contradictions in this statement? Many laws of many countries are foolish and oppressive (including some in my own country). To be a free encyclopedia is to ignore and circumvent such laws as much as necessary in order to allow all our participants full freedom to edit without fear or inhibition. That is why Wikipedia is not censored. --Orange Mike | Talk 14:07, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

According to what you said, I hope Wikipedia can make a good demonstration and try to violate the laws of the United States first. Are American laws destined to be superior? Why does Wikipedia only need to abide by the laws of the United States and not the laws of other countries? Assifbus (talk) 03:03, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Because that's where the servers are located. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:59, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I was banned by the administrator of Chinese Wikipedia ("Good Democracy").

Because I only questioned that a user abused the puppet, I was blocked by an administrator for 14 days. The user I questioned is against the Chinese government and the Communist Party of China（CPC）."How democratic!".

As long as you oppose the Chinese government and the Communist Party of China（CPC）, everything you do is right.As long as you support the Chinese government and the Communist Party of China（CPC）, everything you do is wrong. This is the atmosphere created by some editors in Taiwan Province and Hong Kong in Chinese Wikipedia.

Now I finally know what Western democracy is like. As long as the election result is not in my mind, he is undemocratic, so I have to report him to the Wikimedia Foundation and put him to death.

It is a good thing that Wikipedia has not entered China, and I hope the Chinese government will block Wikipedia in Hong Kong and Macao. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Assifbus (talk • contribs) 23:16, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

With all due respect, those editors who report to the Wikimedia Foundation about the Wiki User Group in Chinese mainland are more dictatorial and can't listen to different opinions. Assifbus (talk) 23:25, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

It is good news that Wikimedia Foundation was rejected by the Chinese government to join the World Intellectual Property Organization, because you are "pseudo-freedom" and "pseudo-democracy". Assifbus (talk) 23:38, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Your point? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 00:00, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
Assifbus has been indefinitely blocked as not here to build an encyclopedia. The comments above justify the block. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 00:21, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
I admire someone for standing for what they believe but the reality is that anything, including specific national laws, that reduce or in any other way inhibit the "libre mission" of Wikipedia and the WMF should be ignored or even contested where it is possible. That is regardless of where it comes from, the U.S. or China or even Belgium (just cause I love their waffles so I'm throwing a little love their way), and whomever is trying to limit it. I am anti-anyone that tries to limit or remove that mission of the encyclopedia but I still love ya, Assifbus (if you can still see this). Sunflowers, roses, hearts and all that stuff. ♒ 💞 ♻ --ARoseWolf 18:31, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Oil companies' funding for Scibaby may be revealed soon

See here: "House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney announced at the end of Thursday's hearing with top executives from the fossil fuel industry that she plans to subpoena the oil companies and trade groups for key documents related to their conduct around the climate crisis. .... Specifically, Maloney said the oil companies have not produced "detailed funding information" the lawmakers requested to understand their "payments to shadow groups," public relations firms and others."

So, we may soon learn if Scibaby was a paid editor. Count Iblis (talk) 10:02, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

A goat for you!

That's who you are, sir - a goat!

Tom-Epsilon (talk) 14:24, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 October 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:14, 31 October 2021 (UTC)


"A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life"

Has Jimbo said anything about this yet? Because it's something I'd like to see him opine on. It looks like Wikipedia's processes seriously harmed a BLP subject and nothing in them is going to change. We're not even going to delete all similar pictures until they can be verified. Major changes were made after the Seigenthaler incident. Ken Arromdee (talk) 02:46, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Maybe you and / or your page watchers can help?

Greetings Jimbo and pagewatchers. I'm told I have submitted too many drafts to the Articles for Creation program I am required to use. Many of these submissions are on African American leaders and related subjects. I would be very glad to have help getting them approved so I can work to include more of these subjects long ommitted from Wikipedia.

FloridaArmy (talk) 01:03, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I am unable to submit Draft:Frank B. Butler due to these restrictions. Do you think we're going too fast including African American history and subjects or too slow Jimbo? FloridaArmy (talk) 16:19, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I haven't yet reviewed any of your links, but in general I would argue that we are going too slow including African American history and subjects. I hope that people will look at your backlog here and process through them with some haste, while of course preserving our notability standards. I don't think it does any positive service to African American history if we try to have pages where there clearly isn't enough information - but when there is (and we should be generous and optimistic where possible!) then we should dig in and start working.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:12, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
Tuskegee airmen are having their articles deleted now. Some are saved, most are deleted. Active discussion now is at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herbert V. Clark. Since racist news media of the day didn't write too much about them, including Herbert V. Clark who was one of the first of them to complete enough fighter pilot missions to be able to return from active duty, is it fair to simply delete their articles? Can they be considered notable based on what they accomplished, and not based on what news media might be found about them? Dream Focus 20:23, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
Let's agree that this is actually a hard problem. We want to have enough verified information to actually write a *biography* rather than a very simple database entry. I don't know the Tuskegee airmen case in enough detail to comment there, but I can talk about my struggle yesterday with George P. Quigley - one of the articles listed above.
I am strongly supportive of doing what we can to appropriately increase our coverage of African American history, as well as other aspects of neglected history. So I thought I'd roll up my sleeves and help out. I picked Mr. Quigley randomly from the list and started researching yesterday. I have (paid) access to a big newspaper archive site, I'm good enough at googling, etc. and I thought I could find some more information. I found virtually nothing. We don't know his date of birth, date of death, where he lived, etc. I thought I could find his obituary or some mention in a local newspaper. I found nothing. This doesn't mean it isn't out there - it turns out that George Quigley is a more common name that I would have imagined and so there was a fair amount to sift through. I may give it another run tomorrow. But it's a challenge. If I could find something, I could start searching for family members who might know of some press coverage or some obituary or something.
Now, there is an argument that we should have the article exactly as it is written so far, and tag it as a stub. It seems incredibly unlikely to attract vandalism or controversy. But of course it would be even better to have enough information to have it be at least a basic biography.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:51, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
UPDATE: Harald Hoyer is in Wikipedia, uncontroversially. In my view it doesn't constitute much more than a database entry - it certainly can't be considered a full "biography". I think we should keep this page and WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is not a valid argument of course. But the point is - let's think about this in a big picture way. Are we lenient on Linux developers in a way that we aren't on African American filmmakers?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:55, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
Its all decided by the random people that show up at an AFD and the personal bias opinions of the closing administrators. And if something doesn't get deleted, they can keep trying until fewer people notice and show up to argue with them. The entire system has always been thoroughly screwed up like that. Leads to years of constant never ending arguments in deletion discussions across Wikipedia. Dream Focus 14:03, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
User:Dream Focus you are complaining here about deletion of a few poorly-sourced Tuskegee Airman pages when we have 172 pages of other Tuskegee Airmen who do satisfy WP:BASIC. We don't decide who is notable, the sources show who is and isn't notable. Just being a Tuskegee Airman doesn't make one notable, reliable sourcing of the individual does. Mztourist (talk) 14:23, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
Kindly read the rest of the discussion. Reliable sources found back then of a black man aren't likely to be found. Does that make them less notable than someone from recent time when reliable sources are more numerous and constantly tossing out as many articles as possible about everyone imaginable? Dream Focus 14:28, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
Of course I read the rest of the discussion. You are saying that sources don't exist due to racism and so we should just ignore sourcing and have each of them "considered notable based on what they accomplished". It is not our place to judge what they accomplished, the sourcing does that, we just record it. We have 170+ Tuskegee Airmen pages (out of a total 992 Tuskegee Airmen) for whom sourcing exists despite your assumption of racist media. If we reject sourcing as the standard then Wikipedia becomes a blog. Mztourist (talk) 03:27, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
Can we utilize a little tact, please? I know DF came here to complain but it just seems like they are being followed and their comments, which I believe they genuinely believe, are attacked everywhere they go. I haven't weighed in anywhere else and I won't because I like and care for people on both sides of the discussion, including both of you here even though we have disagreed at different times, but part of civility, at least in my mind, is tone and knowing when to offer constructive comments and when it's best to just let it go. I highly doubt DF's comment here is going to sway anyone one direction or the other in the discussion as most have already formed opinions so maybe just let them say their peace and move on? --ARoseWolf 14:35, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
User:ARoseWolf DF has brought an issue in which I am deeply involved to this forum, so I don't see why I shouldn't be able to come here and comment also. What brought you here? Mztourist (talk) 03:42, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
I am a watcher of Jimbo's talk page like the title of this section mentions. That's easy enough to see if you scroll through the archives. The fact you are deeply involved is the exact reason why you shouldn't be following DF around and commenting everywhere they post. This is the tact I am speaking about. It's borderline hounding in my opinion. I have a lot of respect for you despite our differences in the past and I have said so. I don't agree that they have to be challenged every where they state an opinion and by the same people that always challenge them. I'd say the same thing if the roles were reversed and the actions were the same. --ARoseWolf 12:44, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
I am also a watcher of Jimbo's page. As I said previously I am deeply involved in the debate over the Tuskegee Airmen, so if DF thinks they can come here to discuss it (arguably forum-shopping) then so can I and without you criticizing me for doing so. Mztourist (talk) 04:59, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
There is the unfortunate problem that with the invention of the Internet that there are far more sources that publish, and a subset of those we deem reliable, that make people that would have been less commonly covered 50+ years ago more likely to be covered today. Atop which there is the added media bias against African-American pre-dated the Civil Rights era (among other minority groups like women, etc.). That's all part of the WP:BIAS that we do need to try to fight against. We can try to be more accommodating to earlier topics, but if we can only get them to stub database entries with bare sourcing, that's not really sufficient and goes against the work we've done over the last decade to make sourcing a strong requirement. The other side, which is going to cause a lot of consternation but would be a viable solution, is to start to demand a bit more from modern bios, more than the simple type of documentation that we can do and showing more in-depth sourcing. That is if NBIO was worked in the same fashion that NCORP was recently upgraded with strong sourcing requirements to try to eliminate promotional sources. (But this would have to be done to all other bio-related notability guidelines too like NSPORT and NPROF).
It should also be reminded that list articles are suitable replacements for grouping non-notable entries of a notable facet. Eg: A list of the known Tuskegee airmen would be suitable as long as each entry can be sourced (ideally to an independent source), with blue links for those that are still independently notable. As long as the high level topic itself is notable, the individual elements do not have to be, though WP:V still needs to be met. Redirects can be used so that searches still work for these names. --Masem (t) 14:09, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
Jimbo writes " I found nothing. This doesn't mean it isn't out there". I think it does mean it isn't out there, at least for the case of George Quigley. There are references in books and one journal article (which I've added to the draft). After over 100 years it is highly unlikely anything will turn up unless a PhD student decides to do some original research and turns up something from a dusty archive. And even then, would we accept it as passing the threshold of notability? In my opinion the only way to tackle the inclusion problem is to have a more nuanced standard that accounts for the passage of time, the lack of written records and historic low coverage in sources. QuiteUnusual (talk) 16:51, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
I think this last - 'have a more nuanced standard' - is the most productive suggestion I have seen so far. The issue is real, and by that I mean that racism in the media of the past means that people who should have been covered were not, while at the same time a great many people who weren't covered, weren't covered for perfectly good reasons. The solution to this problem can't be "throw all our standards out the window for underrepresented groups" but it also shouldn't be "Oh well, that's too bad, not our problem". A big point of my Linux developer example is to highlight how I believe we have a tendency towards "I've never heard of it" as an incorrect standard for inclusion. Short biographies - so short that they hardly even qualify as biographies rather than just listings - about people on topics that people know about and understand tend to be uncontroversial. I think there's plenty of room for nuance around the notion that NPOV demands that we really understand that our own biases and limitations and blindspots are something that we should work to overcome.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:01, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Our coverage of Swayne College and Booker T. Washington School (Montgomery, Alabama) provide more examples how we treat these subjects. FloridaArmy (talk) 10:48, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

The thing is, we are a tertiary source. We can only cover what secondary sources have already covered. We can't make up sources out of thin air. If nobody decided to cover any of these things, it's not any of our faults, and times were different in the past. I'd like to add more about my ancestors, like Othere the Dreadful. Unfortunately, old King Alfred was the only person to write about him, and he didn't give us enough to make any kind of biography. What can you do? If it's not there it's simply not there, and the sad fact is that if you weren't Xerxes or Nero or Caesar you just weren't getting good press coverage back then.
The good news is that there is something you can do about it now; something that many Wikipedians often seem to overlook. Go out and do some thorough research on these topics, and get them published in secondary sources yourself. That is entirely possible, but takes a lot of work. But then we would be able to add it to Wikipedia. You cannot change the world from in here. You have to do it from out there. I hope that helps. Zaereth (talk) 00:37, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
While I think there is some merit in what you say - we can't correct all the bias of the past from in here, that's for sure. But in many cases, I think we can reflect on whether we are doing all that we can from in here in terms of making sure that we aren't ignoring topics that we aren't personally interested in - or worse, allowing them to be deleted just because we aren't personally interested.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:01, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
That's where I have been for a while. I do believe our personal interest in a subject plays heavily in whether we believe something is notable or not. Because a lot of articles are the borderline type, meaning a stub or slightly better with minimal sourcing, this becomes the area in which we see the most deletion discussions. The policies and guidelines are written in such a way as it allows for a lot of gray area to give and take. It's left up to, in a lot of cases, self interpretation and we tend to gravitate to subjects we like, are familiar with or can connect with. That's human nature. I think I see and agree with your approach to this. It doesn't ring true with everyone because we are not a "one-size-fits-all" but I maintain we all have a conflict of interests and we are all biased to some degree and we tend to push an agenda with which we agree passionately. We've made these things such a negative but, in reality, its just being human and, for the most part, it's healthy when kept in balance. --ARoseWolf 13:22, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
The problem with that idea, other than the time and effort to do it, is that there are almost certainly no primary sources with which to create a secondary source. In the example I gave of George Quigley there is already one strong secondary source which discusses in detail the lack of primary sources. If the author of that journal article found nothing, then it is unlikely anyone else will. Where would they find these primary sources? The individual in question is long dead, as are their children (if they had any) and probably even all of their grandchildren. Even if genealogical research turns up a living relative, or relative of a co-collaborator, unless they have a box of papers in an attic there are no more primary sources. The question I think we should be asking is more along the lines of should WP:PRODUCER allow notability to be established for - in this example - an African American filmmaker working in the 1940s, if it can be proven that they held a major role (producer, director, writer, etc.) in more than 1/2/3/10 films rather than insisting the same requirements to establish notability exist regardless of when the person was working and the historical context. This isn't about making WP a blog, or full of made-up stuff, but accepting that in order to more fully document some historical events and people requires a different filter to determine what to accept. QuiteUnusual (talk) 10:34, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
Not with that frame of mind. When it comes to fixing policy and creating filters, computer programming and things of that nature, or correcting cultural biases and other noble feats, I'm out of my element. When it comes to biographies of living persons at least, I think we need to have some very stringent standards, and I tend to fall into the camp that there's no point in having an article if there is no chance it will ever be anything more than a stub. But one thing I would always encourage a person to do is go out into the real world and follow their passion, do the digging and make some discoveries they didn't expect, and then get it published in reliable sources. So many people look at it with the mindset, "it can't be done", or "I could never do that". Reliable sources have to written by someone, and you never know until you try. (Not to mention, it pays a hell of a lot better.) Zaereth (talk) 00:27, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
Again, I think your nuanced approach points to a healthy way forward.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:01, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
The other way, though, is to keep in mind that WP is not a Who's Who; just because these are people of historical record doesn't mean we necessarily need to document them. But this also goes back to my previous commented that we'd have to reconcile that we perhaps are far too lenient on allowing far too many articles contemporary people today that happen to have a few bits of coverage in online sources. But that requires a sea change of thought.
I will still stress that lists are suitable midpoint solutions in a lot of cases, but we do have to get off this mindset that "every topic needs a standalone article" that seems to persist. As long as we can create redirects as search terms to list entries, this is a completely viable solution to document the people in roles that, today, would likely have been documented to have at least some type of WP article, but at best can only be verified via primary sources then. Just that a standalone article is probably not the best solution until more sources happen to be found. --Masem (t) 13:27, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
We had a discussion late last year about Native and Indigenous people in the Americas which quickly became about the sources or lack of sources. There are a lot of influential Native and Indigenous people in the Americas that you just aren't going to find very much written down about as a lot of their various tribal histories are still orally passed down. The sad thing is that most of what we have written about them is when they interacted with European colonial and early American ethnographers. A reality is that the majority of the descendants of these people don't live on a reservation and they may want to find what history records of their ancestors. Why not come to Wikipedia and why not find something about them.
While I agree that we can not make something up, I would never suggest abandoning our principled guidelines, we can realize the historical value of their contribution to society, even if it is only their society, and we can record what is known, even if we consider that primary because of the nature of the source.
That's the basis for how a stub article on a young Native American woman was saved at AfD. It was solely based on a picture by a notable and reliable late 19th and early 20th century photographer and the description they wrote that accompanied the photograph. This was deemed a primary source in that discussion but because the subject was obviously notable to the history of her people the article was kept. A few more mentions were located in sources but the primary source for the article is still the picture. In a lot of cases there will be no further sources that can be found yet we are doing a disservice to both the future and history, as an encyclopedia, if we disregard and fail to include what can be sourced. We can attribute the words to the author of them and let the readers be the judge. --ARoseWolf 14:12, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
Pretty Nose which you are referring to essentially relies on one photo with several conflicting sources as to her tribe, rank/status and involvement in the Battle of Little Bighorn, it is a classic example of retaining a page despite a lack of reliable sources. Mztourist (talk) 14:08, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
An issue though in a case like that, or where we are heavily compiling a lot of primary sources, is that this starts getting into the realm of original research. We should not ever be the first publication of material, and even though republishing material from widely dispersed sources is okay, that we are getting our hands dirty doing that much work to link up all those sources without any other published support can be a problem. And that's an issue for a lot of bios - both historical and contemporary - we're just connecting primary sources with very little secondary information compiled by others, and thus making this approaching an original research problem. (This is still solved by using lists under a notable topic to document rather than fighting on standalones, however). --Masem (t) 15:16, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
I would argue that, by what you are describing above, everything on Wikipedia is original research. --ARoseWolf 16:22, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
It depends, but to explain: if we had a source that covered 90% of a person's life and we used a few other sources for the missing 10% (those sources often overlapping with the existing 90%), that's clearly not 10%. If we instead had to seek out 20 different sources that each contributed a separate 5% to meet the 100%, with no overlap, we may have a problem with this amount of disparate coverage and leans heavily into original research to know how those all connected. Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle, the overlaps are the clues that tell us how those pieces connect and what the overall picture looks like. Without overlap in sources, we have no real sign of the big picture nor how those pieces connect, and that's why I think we can get into OR when we're building articles like that. There's a wide grey area between those extremes, of course but I think the more that we have sources that contribute towards the whole of information about a topic and that provide overlap and confirmation of material with other sources, the less we have to worry about the "original research" of being the first publisher of this type of information. --Masem (t) 23:12, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
I just want to be clear that the coverage, including individual entries in Eric Foner's book Freedom's Lawmakers which is itself based on earlier scholarship, should be enough to establish if someone was a state legislator. Wikipedia considers these individuals notable per longstanding policy. For Native American subjects like Draft:Stella Mason there is substantial contemporary coverage and substantial coverage years later. Yet it's difficult to get approval and inclusion. And it's also difficult to include authors like Draft:Matthew Sniffen who wrote about these subjects. Different standards are applied to the Cariol Hornes of the world. It's almost always a struggle. It should be easy to include these subjects. They meet our standards and they are more notable than your average athlete who appeared in a few games as a professional. That there is an argument over whether we should have entries for all of the films Oscar Micheaux made is embarassing. FloridaArmy (talk) 23:05, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
This is true, WP:NPOL says we presume notability for state-level representatives. But I will point to take your example of Matthew Sniffen, that you are showing no signs of why the person is notable; you're given info that doesn't help nor leads to showing they are likely notable - appearing in a photo or speaking to Congress is neither of these. Particularly for an historical topic like this, you likely need to make sure you have applied for the Wikimedia Library Card (free as you are logged in here) and search resources like JSTOR in this case for more hits. For example I see the paper "The Indian Rights Association, the Allotment Policy, and the Five Civilized Tribes, 1923-1936", Benay Blend, American Indian Quarterly Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 67-80 - explains that his testimony to Congress, in part, led to the development of the Indian Reorganization Act. (There's more steps to that). That's the type of information, even if at a bare level, would likely have your drafts accepted as articles, because that shows a why as a reason to keep. --Masem (t) 23:30, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
IMO the "did it for a living for one day" standard in the sports SNG is an aberration from Wikipedia's notability requirements, and should not be discussed as being representative of Wikipedia's notability standards. North8000 (talk) 19:39, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
  • It does not seem appropriate to "appeal to Jimbo" to try and achieve one's personal goals. Do you think we're going too fast including African American history and subjects or too slow Jimbo? is hardly a useful question. It would behoove FloridaArmy to consider why they have restrictions placed on their ability to create new articles, and if they have a problem with it, they should appeal to ANI or the community to have them altered. The problem is, they move too fast in creating drafts, creating things that aren't really demonstrating notability, factually incorrect in a desperate attempt to push a POV, beset with simple spelling and format errors, or simply, well, odd. At Draft:Louisburg High School (North Carolina), FA refers to the racial makeup of the school in the second sentence of the lede, which is a rather strange thing to focus on for a currently operational public high school. FA picks some very interesting subjects like black Reconstruction era politicians, many of which are no doubt deserving of being covered on Wikipedia. The problem is they ought to be more careful in the actual creation of these drafts, almost all of which are stubs. The best way to speed up draft approval is to make articles of such high quality that the reviewer will hardly have to think on if it needs approval. The problem is not an evil cabal of draft reviewers wanting to sabotage articles on African American topics, the problem is the the drafts are flawed. Where the source material is not abundantly available, you have to go digging for it, and yes, that can take days or weeks. John W. Winters took me several different database searches and a trip to the library, Calvin E. Lightner also required lots of scouring of old newspapers. There's not much for Jimbo to do about it. At least, not more than any of the rest of us can do. -Indy beetle (talk) 19:28, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
    • That also brings up a good point: unless we were talking about articles at AFD, there is no deadline for these articles to be created, and it is better to make sure they are created at a slow pace to make sure they are of reasonable quality so they can live in mainspace, rather than rushing to create stubs that have problems passing from drafts to mainspace. --Masem (t) 20:18, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Somethings that might help is Wikimedia actively finding out where databases of things like African-American newspapers exist and get us access (even contribute money to the identification and creation of databases). Also, identifying and getting access to long out of print books (and obscure books) of the late 19th early 20th century, which focused on African Americans. And contacting AA Studies experts at universities to identify the corpus of sources (On another matter mentioned above, whole books have been written on Tuskegee airmen, are those being accessed?) Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:24, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

So much talking, and so little researching...I suggest looking at the draft pages under (SO much) discussion -Pete Forsyth (talk) 19:19, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

I added page numbers for the sources on one of the drafts. Also, I know where there are some free online NC-based black newspaper archives. I think creating a central library page would be great, and I’d be happy to share the links there. -Indy beetle (talk) 23:43, 6 November 2021 (UTC)


The basic argument for stubs, which remains valid today, is that additional information is more likely to be found when an article is in mainspace, than when it is in draft or unwritten. When it has not yet been written, only the person interested in writing it is looking; when it's in draft, there's at least the reviewer as well (if the reviewer is doing their job properly and trying to fix submitted articles that could show notability with a little work). When it's in article space, it's the entire community of everyone who might be interested in the subject field who helps write WP, as well as those who just read, and might be inclined to contribute what they know. The method of communal editing is the basis of everything we do here, and I'm sure Jimbo will confirm that it has been since the beginning. We're not academics, individual researchers writing by themselves--and even there, people interested in a subject tend to work together. We're here, or at least should be here, in order to contribute our own efforts, in the expectation that others will do so also.
Florida is working in a field where much more work is needed, in and out of WP. But the work is being done at least to some extent: sources are being found, research and popular publications written, and reference works compiled. Everyone able to do so has the same responsibility to work on these articles --not exclusively, but to the degree they can fit it in their other interests (even Florida works on other topics as well). It does help a little when one editor here tells another to go do research; it helps much more when they suggest sources; but what is really needed is for them to go and do the work and add to the articles themselves. Even better, I look forward to our ability to resume joint editing sessions at appropriate libraries. DGG ( talk ) 05:40, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
    • @DGG: The basic problem with stubs is you can write a stub about almost anyone who has been mentioned once or twice on the internet, and a stub will go very little ways towards demonstrating notability. That's largely why FA's restrictions were put in place. WP:BURDEN needs to be satisfied. Also, while collaboration is definitely what we all want and talking with FA today at Talk:John W. Winters inspired me to write James Hamlin and now they're working on Draft:Ralph Campbell Sr. (an article I've wanted to write but never got around to), it's quite obvious that FA didn't come here to ask for help with improving the drafts. They simply wanted them pushed through the system. I've put in some minor improvements on a couple of them but if FA wanted help they should've asked at a talk page, the Teahouse, or a WikiProject. I think it's perfectly fair for us to discourage these kinds of POINTY appeals to Jimbo. -Indy beetle (talk) 00:10, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
You can also write a stub with one good reference, say that someone was a state senator, and that referenced stub by itself will demonstrate notability. FA came here, and a number of drafts got improved and people assisted him with sources & articles. You have, and I, and others. Sometimes visibility helps, and that's one of the purposes of this page. DGG ( talk ) 07:08, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Process

I wanted to ask you a question. When you set up Wikipedia did you envision a forum within the project where volunteers could be taken for 12 days emotional torture. The forum I am talking about is ANI - most editors on the project refer to it as "the community", and editors with grievances are allowed to basically trash any volunteer that they had a beef with, while the admins watch or even join in. And then an admin swoops in with a summary and issues punitive sanctions. As far as I can see there are few rules, other that whoever goes there may be also be tongue lashed or sanctioned. It is entirely based on who lurks around in that forum and has grievances. Is there anything fair about this process? Is there any other organization in the world which allows discipline to meted out by participants with grudges in an unfair process? I was recently the subject of an angry inquest on that board. I have drawn the attention of folks that literally hate the Article Rescue Squadron.

I do not have friends who watch or float around in that ANI forum; it seems apparent that an editor who has the numbers in that forum can propose that any other editor get sanctioned and it will be rubber stamped by an administrator. Right after this process at ANI I was referred to Arbcom. Perhaps a much more even handed corner of the project. I appreciate that it is orderly and I believe it is the right avenue to get to actual justice. But instead of listening to myself and one other ANI sanctioned editor who called out the unfairness, the Arbcom members all said, ANI worked and the community handled it. One Arbcom member even said they watched the process unfold with baited breath. It may be fun to watch, but is it right and just? So the question: Is this what you envisioned when you started this amazing project? Lightburst (talk) 14:30, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

WP:NOTSOLOMON. I have no stake in this dispute. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:12, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
I dont speak for Jimbo, obviously, but your answer to your contrived question is no, just as he probably didn't envision getting the founders seat. He probably didn't envision a group of editors ganging together to keep obviously rubbish articles either. -Roxy the sceptical dog. wooF 18:27, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
Obviously Jimbo Wales is no Hari Seldon, I don't even think he is a Kreskin. Regarding "can Jimbo give useful advice on how to improve ANI", I suspect not, but we will have to wait for him to know for sure. Jimbo and everyone else have known for years that ANI is unpleasant.
If this is an "appeal to Jimbo", then it should be clearer why you are appealing: A) the findings of fact at ANI were wrong; B) the findings of fact at ANI were right, but the punishment was wrong; C) the findings of fact and punishment were correct, but because of procedural unpleasantness it should be thrown out entirely. User:力 (powera, π, ν) 18:41, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
There were five serious proposals. (That a wiki project be dissolved, and that four editors be sanctioned.) Only two of those proposals were put into effect. It seems unfair to describe that as a "rubber stamp".
ApLundell (talk) 20:42, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
Only two serious proposals. One editor, 7+6 made a mistake - obviously not guilty but still generated considerable ANI heat and many editors called for sanctions, the other was DF, there was not ever any serious proposal or debate just meandering digging up an 8 years old diff and looking for something to get him on... and then it was cut short. I prefer not to re-litigate that destructive process across the project, but I am asking questions of Jimbo Wales. Is this how things should be done on the project? Is it fair? is it right? For instance Andrew's proposal, closed in one day. Or the proposal about me, left open to fester four full days until enough editors could break the no-consensus. Yes these are contrived questions. Can this organization can do better? in my opinion it is literally gaslighting to say anything that happens on ANI a community consensus. There does not seem to be any rules or fairness. Lightburst (talk) 21:35, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
The Law of Holes, how does it work? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:10, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for being snide on a thread that has nothing to do with you. But, also thanks for not ivoting for my Tban. Lightburst (talk) 22:14, 7 November 2021 (UTC)
At risk of relitigating, the '8-year-old diffs' line which keeps being repeated references my edit. I gave 8 diffs showing a pattern of behaviour at AfD/ARS from 2013-2021 taken from a random sample of ARS archive pages. Something happening consistently for 8 years should be more worrisome not less. At the AN/I and Arbcom there was a strong sense from editors and admins that the four principles in discussion should step back and work on other things. It seems that most of the four editors are struggling with this especially by airing grievances on this page. Vladimir.copic (talk) 03:31, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Why do you think that the founder of this website wants to hear you complain about some drama at ANI? Why are so self-important as to think that your personal disputes warrant the Immortal God Emperor of Wikipedia’s direct attention? Especially considering Jimbo isn’t actually some special figurehead-supersoldier-deity, he’s just some dude who made an encyclopedia on the internet that people can freely add to. Dronebogus (talk) 01:40, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
  • User:Lightburst the consensus among Users was that you and Andrew are a net negative in relation to deletion discussions. If you receive that many !votes against you perhaps you should reflect on your own behavior rather than blaming everyone else. Mztourist (talk) 03:20, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

My concern is that the concentrated effort to cancel many of the longtime and productive contributors to AfD has considerably weakened the inclusionist voice in discussions, to the detriment of the encyclopedia. I'm not at all as active as I could be in that sad place which, in way too many instances, attempts to delete well written and well sourced pages. Blocking good inclusionist editors from having a voice there hasn't, and will not, bode well for future discussions. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:31, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

On the contrary: banning editors who would divide us into "inclusionists" and "deletionists" is exactly what AFD needs. It's time to bury that old battleground hatchet. Levivich 14:33, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
Canceling the name for a thing doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I've seen deletionists gloat about their number of "kills" or similar language. Canceling those who try to fix and save doesn't need a name, common sense actions stand on their own merits. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:39, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
The thing doesn't exist. The problem is editors who think the thing exists. Their thinking is the problem because it's battleground thinking. It's divisive. Repeat after me: there are no inclusionists, there are no deletionists, there are just editors who have a variety of views when it comes to determining the exact outer boundaries of notability. Levivich 14:43, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
It's my experience that only inclusionists believe in some mythical inclusionist–deletionist dichotomy. EEng 14:53, 8 November 2021 (UTC) Note proper use of ndash. Note improper spelling of endash. Note improper spacing of en dash.
Noted. Noted. Noted. Noted. Levivich 15:10, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
...and many of those editors who identify as inclusionists face the local cancel culture, and not the opposite. An odd coincidence, no? Randy Kryn (talk) 14:47, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
It's not a coincidence. The reason they're "cancelled" -- by which you mean sanctioned -- is because of their battleground mentality (the same one you're displaying here). All of the editors who identify themselves as inclusionists or deletionists suffer from this battleground mentality, and if they don't put down the sword, they're all gonna get cancelled. Levivich 15:08, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
The whole framing of sanctions as "canceling" people is ridiculous. Especially in Lightburst's case since he can appeal the tban in three months. Which, all things considered, is extremely soft. A three month tban sure isn't worth all this nonsense. That's for sure. With Andrew plenty of people who are not "deletionists" voted for him to be tbanned. So it wasn't anywhere near the "deletionist witch hunt" it's being made out to be. --Adamant1 (talk) 15:19, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
To appeal, I would need to go to this same ANI. Seems like a non-starter. Regarding this battle of the deletionist, inclusionist. I am clearly neither based on my participation. calling me an inclusionist is assuming facts not in evidence. My main crime is being involved with an organization that Drmies has said is a decade old problem. You saw based on this am...at any moment an editor can be brought up on charges at ANI. This AM if there were editors with an appetite for more sanctions, I would have those sanctions. And therein is the crux of the matter. Lightburst (talk) 15:39, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
Nonsense. A bunch of editors, myself included, who supported the TBAN against you, opposed any sanctions against you in today's ANI. Speaking of facts not in evidence... Levivich 15:43, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
My apology, Lightburst, for implying that you have inclusionist tendencies. Your crime, as you say, lies elsewhere (being a member of a formerly reputable and apparently hard-working WikiProject). Randy Kryn (talk) 15:50, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
I take no offense. I can see many useful reductions. Lightburst (talk) 16:31, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
@Lightburst: There was also the proposal for sanctions against Dream Focus. Which were shot down by pretty much everyone because the evidence was poor, despite him being an ARS member and mostly keep voter. You must deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance due to examples like that. Poor guy. Personally, I wasn't that solid on voting for your tban in the first place and I appreciated that afterwards you where willing to take a step back and reflect on your behavior. It's to bad this tripe nonsense is what you took out of it though. If had of stuck to the reflection and followed through on it I probably would have been willing to support an unban in three months. At this point, not so much. It's fully the consequences of your behavior though. Not because your in ARS or vote keep most of the time. You obliviously have some battleground tendencies that should be dealt with before getting privileges back. I say that as someone who had some myself and was forced to do some reflecting to deal with them. --Adamant1 (talk) 01:00, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
As a sign of respect, please do not use the derogatory term deletionist when communicating with or about people who do not identify as such. Vexations (talk) 19:22, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
Coincidence? That there's a huge amount of overlap between people calling themselves inclusionist, and people who scream abuse at AfD nominators while attempting to deceive people with falsified sources, doesn't seem like coincidence to me. In any case it was the latter behaviour, not the former wikipolitical affiliation, that led to the bans. Reyk YO! 16:38, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
JW. This was think was my first and last post on your page. Last time we even came close to interacting was when you and I agreed on keepingYoast SEO. ARS plucked it from deletion and resurrected it. But alas I see that I have again been called to ANI to face the "community" largely based on this post. I wish you luck keeping good volunteers here with this culture of mean. I won't take it personal that you did not answer my contrived questions, I guess they were soliloquies anyway. Lightburst (talk) 14:35, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Be assured, the project you gave existence to? continues to ever grow & evolve. A Monolith couldn't have done better. GoodDay (talk) 14:42, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, Wikipedia, it's full of stars! A nice thought, don't know what it has to do with the treatment some good faith AfD editors have faced lately. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:53, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
And former stars, of course. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:01, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
I think that GoodDay mislinked Monolith. Deor (talk) 22:49, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
Life imitating art, see the discussion after the relist, that ole' imaginary cancel culture, she come my way. Randy Kryn (talk) 04:27, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
I think for it to be "cancel culture" you'd have to show that it is part of the social institutions of Wikipedia and not just a one off thing that happens sometimes when a person repeatedly abuses the system (or others think they do). For instance someone tried to have me blocked and my edits reverted a while back because some of my PRODs were removed. I wouldn't call that "cancel culture" because its not a normal thing, that happens all the time when PRODs are removed. Plus the person is blocked from removing PRODs now so.... --Adamant1 (talk) 05:14, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Yes, like I said, it's imaginary. Or so I've been told. Randy Kryn (talk) 05:23, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
  • I’m just going to ask what the point of this conversation is and why you’re all having it on Jimbo’s talk page. You all surely know what the productive outlets for this kind of dispute are, and that this isn’t one of them. Dronebogus (talk) 05:30, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Actually I think this can be a very productive place to discuss the broader ideas. Not every discussion has to have a specific aimed-at result - it can be good to have a well rounded and low pressure discourse in good faith, not aiming at particular solutions, but seeking to find the core of a problem and shared hints at potential productive paths forward.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:26, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Well, because Lightburst came by to vent and ask a question after a good raking over the coals, and it just went on from there until Monoliths somehow became entwined. Randy Kryn (talk) 05:35, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Okay, so in the spirit of ACClarke I'll keep the discussion going until we touch the Monolith itself and solve the dayglow. Yesterday I was good faith threatened by Vexations for, I think, iVoting "Keep" too many times or always, and V came up with a list which must have taken a good deal of energy to compile in order to do-me-in good. AfD is often such a good faith hellhole of destruction that I only venture in to try to keep a page, and then only now and then (mostly then), and only when running across a page from a WikiProject list or watchlist or randomly, never from looking at the depressing daily list. Since many AfD discussions turn into murkily-watered battlegrounds (I know, I know, Wikipedia is not a battleground, but sure does of often play one on tv), avoidance seems prudent. So my question, at long last, is since many AfD regulars play outside the no-battleground lines why not just let everyone playground in good faith and not attempt to cancel anyone else or point fingers? As a wise man once asked, "Can't we all just get along?" Randy Kryn (talk) 15:53, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
  • After 16+ years of being a Wikipedian & dipping (now & then) into AfDs. Just about every editor involved in such AfDs with me, know they can't intimidate me & bludgeon me to 'agree' with them. GoodDay (talk) 16:01, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
I disagree with that characterization and find speculating about my motives or the time it takes me to do something so trivial as generating a list of diffs distasteful and not in good faith. What I actually said is here. Vexations (talk) 21:15, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Please read my comment again, I experienced your actions as good faith and am glad to get the links. And to GoodDay, same here. My comments were in the hope that maybe Lightburst (who started this discussion) would have the topic ban reduced and that nobody else will ever be banned from AfD for expressing their good faith reasoning towards either saving or deleting an article. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:34, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Re "why not just let everyone playground in good faith and not attempt to cancel anyone else or point fingers?" How about no. There's rules and guidelines involved in playing in the playground that you consent to follow by "voting" and voicing your opinions. We have every right to take issue with your behavior if you don't act in an acceptable manor. That's just the trade off doing something that involves other people. In the meantime, the guidelines around notability are extremely laxed. You should improve your standards instead of expecting everyone else to cater to your non-existing ones, or just go play somewhere else if you can't handle being called out for your deficiencies. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:38, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for your advice, but no. Criticism is fine, but should only be focusely used when justified. I've seen many fine articles deleted, and editors good faith harangued for having an opinion(see Lightburst's opening post in this discussion for a good description of what that feels like to some editors). Happily, AfD is not an exclusive club. The serious ramifications of deleting editors works extends to the universal sharing of knowledge, and when a page is obviously a close call the tie should go to the runner. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:53, 9 November 2021 (UTC)
Sure, I agree that criticism should only be used when justified, but it was justified in Lightburst's case. Which is why he is currently topic banned and is what this discussion is about. Not people haranguing each other for having an opinion. Your moving the goal post by making it about that. No one, at least as far as this discussion is concerned, has been sent to ANI or sectioned over their opinions. In the meantime, we aren't here to pander to every over sensitive person that comes along. That's not what the guidelines exist for. That doesn't mean we shouldn't care about each others feelings, but that doesn't extend to allowing disruptive behavior in AfD discussions. We shouldn't allow repeated disruptions just because we don't want to hurt the persons feelings by asking them to do better.
Same goes for "deleting editors works." It sucks when someone's work is deleted. Again though, when someone contributes to Wikipedia they consent to possibly having their work deleted if it doesn't meet the sites guidelines. That's life. Wikipedia isn't about sharing "knowledge", it's about sharing "notable knowledge." Everyone should know that going into it. It's not on us if they don't. There's plenty of other websites they can share knowledge on if notability is to high of a standard, or hell, they can create a proposal to get the notability guidelines relaxed. No one wants to do that though. They rather complain about their feelings being hurt and being canceled instead. I don't like some of the notability guidelines that much myself, but I don't think my personal opinions about it should be pandered to in AfD discussions either. So I suck it up and follow them. Other people can to. --Adamant1 (talk) 04:22, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
Speaking truth to power right there. Dronebogus (talk) 11:50, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
Each of you have many opinions, and you both of you freely offer advice to content creators like myself, yet neither of you has ever created any content? Not one article? Both of you are, following, needling, haranguing, sanctioning, criticizing, etc. My suggestion is help the rest of us build the encyclopedia. I was banned because I am affiliated with the ARS. And because I do not have friends floating around in the ANI cesspool. If there was a question of incompetence on my part it did not extend to any of my delete ivotes or rationales. Nor to articles I created. The deleted articles I started are primarily G6. You can summarize the thread or my Tban however you like, but I was accused of crimes from ten years ago, such as canvassing. Now I am going to work on the encyclopedia, I suggest both of you do the same. Lightburst (talk) 15:12, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
Sorry, Lightburst. I didn't know only content creators (whatever that means) where allowed to have opinions. Next time I'll be sure to create a stub article before commenting about a subject that I'm involved with so I can have the privilege to. What happened to all that nonsense you and other people said about your right to have an opinion, not being canceled, etc. etc.? Anyway, your affiliation with ARS had nothing to do with why you where banned and none of the "crimes" that led to you to getting banned were from ten years ago. I doubt you'll get un-banned in three months if you can't even be honest about what the t-ban was for. Good luck with that though. In the congratulations for creating some G6 articles...slow clap...Users like me and Dronebogus who haven't created G6 articles clearly live in your shadow. --Adamant1 (talk) 17:35, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
oops, I meant WP:G7 (user requested deletion) - I requested they be deleted myself. I have started 100 articles and brought many many more up to encyclopedic standards. I enjoy the research. I do not start stubs. You seem kind of angry and you are displaying following behaviors and needling me. You should realize that It is hard for me to accept content advice from someone who has never created any content. I just wanted to start a conversation here with JW about ANI. Anyway, me repeating myself and you repeating yourself is unproductive. We are cluttering up this talk page with rubbish. We can do better. Lightburst (talk) 19:28, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
As far as I'm aware I never gave you any "content advice." One way to do better and not clutter up talk pages is to not say things that are false. So feel free to follow your own advice about doing better by sticking to the facts. --Adamant1 (talk) 19:34, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
AfD is for commenting on content. Just the facts... Lightburst (talk) 20:59, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
No "AfDs are a place for rational discussion of whether an article is able to meet Wikipedia's article guidelines and policies." That might involve discussing the content of an article sure, but AfDs aren't cleanup either and I don't consider saying something like a reference is trivial as being about "content." Since the reference isn't in the article at that point. Things like "X source is a PR piece" fundamentally can't be statements about content because it's a general comment, that has nothing to do with what is specifically said in the source itself or the article. Im more then willing to be proven wrong on that. Even if I am though, your conclusion that anyone who hasn't WP:G7ed articles shouldn't give opinions about your conduct at AfDs is not how this project works. Anyone can comment on whatever they want. I know your only making this about people's credentials because you clearly can't refute anything that's been said about your behavior on it's actual merits though. Just the facts. --Adamant1 (talk) 03:04, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
So funny. Have a look at "behavior" in this AfD. I am not even in there anymore (extricated myself) but the nominator is allowed to bludgeon anyone who disagrees. I did work on the article. I am glad to see the tenor has improved now that the badly behaved Lightburst is out. Anyway, I am sure you want the last word, so go ahead. Lightburst (talk) 14:14, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

Your t-ban expires in six months. But you'll be able to appeal, in three months. I believe such an appeal will be successful. Be cool & see it through. GoodDay (talk) 15:50, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks GoodDay! I am inclined to finish out the 6 mos. I am able to work without the friction of AfD. Also I have no desire to go into ANI for any reason. Lightburst (talk) 17:09, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
Glad you're thinking that way Lightburst. For an unusually honest editor like yourself who isn't the type to utter untruths just to be politically expedient, the risk of an appeal wouldnt just be a timewasting rejection. The result could be an extention or addtional sanctions. FeydHuxtable (talk) 19:13, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
You mean like him saying in Articles_for_deletion/RV_Public_School that SCHOOLOUTCOMES allows for a local consensus to determine notability? Yeah, such an unusually honest editor. Right. Sure. "Of all the honest users Lightburst is one of the most honest. Totally, totally honest. That I can tell you." --Adamant1 (talk) 03:18, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Sorry you were subjected to that ANI nightmare Lightburst. As Jimbo hasn't answered your query, I hope you don't mind one from me. The shift towards a less friendly community was predictable before the project's founding. As described in this classic source on the life cycle of subcultures, even back in 2000 many understood that every successful scene inevitably get co-opted by folk antithetical to its founding values (unless it erects high barriers to entry, which inclusionists would never sign up to ). And so it proved with Wikipedia. By 2010, WMF analyses showed the same pattern playing out across Wikis in each and every language. After a Wiki's launch, inclusionists would flock to the platform resulting in rapid growth, but then Deltionists would appear, causing cultural change & much slower article creation rates.
In fairness to Jimbo, it's perhaps impossible to launch something as stunningly successful as Wikipedia if you lack a certain innocence. Almost impossible to be creative if you're too aware of all the different ways things can go wrong . (Not to say Wikipedia isn't still a relatively healthy community despite the ANI debacle, just could have been so much better had inclusionist values been locked in from the start).
More history on the shift towards Deletionism specific to English Wikipedia

For the first few years Wikipedia was an easy going, fun and luminant place. Editors could create articles on whatever they liked, not even needing to cite a single source. But as it became more popular, this light world of collaboration and knowledge sharing began to attract those who would ravage its beauty. At first they were few in number and largely unnoticed. When they were encountered, there was sometimes no on wiki reaction. Inclusionists were sometimes paralysed with horror – it had been unthinkable any could wish to destroy their hard work and deprive readers of their creations. Most inclusionists are conflict adverse; many simply left, never to return.

Against the more resilient inclusionists, deletionists soon learnt the power of policy. Starting in 2003, and especially in 2004, dozens of policy proposals attempted to make deletion easier. Until about 2006, these efforts had little overall effect. But Deletionists are relentless. Even the more heroic inclusionists, who could easily be moved to defend actual articles, were rarely willing to get involved in the abstract & sometimes hostile debates needed to control policy. Deletionists camped out on those pages in glee. Discussions attended by well under 100 activist editors later resulted in Deletionist mentality being forced on hundreds of thousands of more inclusionist editors in the wider population. Inclusionist leaders like Anobody & Ikip became wise to Policy power too, but by then it was too late. Demoting WP:GNG to an essay was a near perennial proposal up to about 2010, but as inclusionists were too honourable to resort to canvassing, Deletionists were able to block every attempt. By 2009, folk like Aaron Swartz were stating in reliable sources that Deletionists had won. Ever since 2007, our rate of article creation has only been a fraction of what we enjoyed back in golden age, despite the near exponential growth in the rate of knowledge creation in the wider world. (In olden times it could take a century or more for the world's knowledge to double, now it's said knowledge is doubling in a single day.)

None of this is to say that deletionists are wholly negative. My own view is that while they take their ideas too far, they can be a much needed antidote to inclusionist excess, thus helping Wikipedia do a better job as a source of information. I mean more their quality control aspect and their willingness to trim within articles, not so much the destruction of entire pages. And Im certainly not meaning to imply Deletionists are evil – for various reasons I'm convinced that many or most are good natured people who genuinely think they're helping.

It's a shame that Deletionists cant always be as realistic in their views on inclusionists. Take the legendary ANobody for example. ~99% of his time was spend improving & rescuing articles, plus welcoming new editors. But he would sometimes deal with some of the most problematic deletionists, even helping to take down sock master admins at Arbcom As he discussed several times on wiki, his activity would sometimes so enrage the more extreme Deletionists that they would sometimes attack him in RL, as a few had discovered his real world identify. Such was Anobodys courage and compassion for others, he didn't let this stop his article rescue work, which he continued right up until being permabanned in 2010, after being stabbed in the back by a former squad member. (Lighthouse, if you are in email contact with the long term ARS regs, maybe ask them about a comms they received just this week from another inclusionist legend, who after being permabanned put himself at great personal risk fighting for good causes in parts of the world much more dangerous than US or UK. He paid a near ultimate price. There is video evidence and everything, its like something out of a spy movie, except of course spys are normally painted in shades of grey, not as noble and self sacrificing light figures fighting for a better world. Yet somehow Deletionists have the community so gassed up many see ARS members as some kind of villains. It's been like this for over a decade. Few achievements are as impressive as the Colonels decade and a half long run at AfD. Yet if one considers how early deletionists had locked in their mentality via policy, and how similar trends play out in virtually all communities across the planet, perhaps all that heroism from the few with the strength to stand against Delestionists was in vain. Even back in 2006, they were fighting a war they'd already lost.

FeydHuxtable (talk) 19:13, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

I look at this as "you can include things when there's things to include and you can't include things when there isn't." All the other stuff about deletionsists, inclusionsists, and blah blah is self aggrandizing, pseudo intellectual drivel. That is only tossed into discussions so certain people can pat themselves on the back about how virtuous and authentic they are while holding up the project. Personally I find it a deeply insulting way of framing disagreements and completely antithetical to Wikipedia's values. It does absolutely nothing to move these types of discussions and disagreements forward either. Which is what we should all be striving for. --Adamant1 (talk) 04:01, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
I'm sorry if you found my post insulting. Im just an old school inclusionist, weak & powerless on Wikipedia for more than a decade. It's editors like yourself who hold the whip hand now, and are more to be taken seriously. Being clear about the past can help plot a way forward, but I agree my post probably doesnt help much in that regard. I don't want to move forward, but to go back. Which is impossible. Yet there can be value in being clear about these things, maybe next time someone founds a great project, they'll be clearer about the need for guiding structure right from the start. FeydHuxtable (talk) 07:51, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
@FeydHuxtable: I can understand where your coming from. I rant to my cats all the time about how great and creative the internet was back in the old days. That's as far as I take it though. At the end of the day we are all just people behind screens that have zero effect on or say in the wider trends that occur. Yet we have to get along and make this new and different world work somehow. Given that, my main issue with post like yours is that they are always heavy on rhetoric but extremely light on solutions, if not openly hostile towards them. I still respect your opinion about it though and generally agree with it. I'd just like to see some things actual solutions in the interim. --Adamant1 (talk) 08:49, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
Ha! I guess my post was hostile to the dominant in house solution. But effective solutions are what Im all about (or try to be). It looks like the problem we want solved is how to nudge our editing environment towards more friendly collaboration, with less energy wasted on discussion that doesnt improve content, such as arguably the nightmare ANI recently experienced by Lightburst?
If that's the problem, Id say your post (& the 09:40 from Indy beetle) perfectly embodies the Solution. I.e. acknowledging the value in opposing perspectives without malice, while being open to common ground & potential for fruitful progress. Sustaining that sort of attitude is not easy. So this calls for another long post. As well as the headline issue, the below box digresses on how said open minded acknowledgement approach may also be part of solution to healing excessive left/right political polarisation, a big concern of Jimbo's. Also on a point of disagreement – there are several mechanisms by which the words & actions of even a newbie editor can influence the wider trends.
Acknowledgement of perspectives solution Vs Dismissal of Inc/Del & other dichotomies

Much of this box is an argument against the views expressed by EEng , Levivich , Zaereth & others. (Which mostly align with the dominant inhouse view on the problem, also echoed by several Arbs. ) So first to acknowledge they are very right on the Del & Inc labels being divisive if we're too serious about them. And as Zaereth eloquently puts it "…we need both just as much as the other…". But Zaereth is also correct when they say (in User:Zaereth#Little boxes ) "Categorization is very necessary".

So lets look at advantages of the Inc/Del labels. Firstly, they are verifiable descriptions of reality, according to policy. Hundreds of journalistic & scholarly reliable sources looking at wikipedia discuss the 'Inc v Del' issue . Some are pro INC, others emphasise how both perspectives are necessary, but to my knowledge not a single source argues that Inclusionists & Deletionists don't exist. Doing so is solely the domain of certain editors, and has zero support in WP:RS.

Acknowledging Inclusionists & Deletionists & their mutual dependency helps us value the full spectrum of editors. Including those who are too soft hearted to ever want to trim another editors work, or who like to focus wholly on deletion. Most could perhaps agree it's ideal if each individual editor integrates both Inc & Del tendencies. But reality is that people often chose to specialise, or are attracted by temperament to one end or the other. Sometimes it works best if different &/or opposing principles are embodied in different people & things. Like scrub nurse & surgeon. Or finger & thumb, which are opposed but also complementary.

While it may sometimes work to say there's just a "variety of views when it comes to determining the exact outer boundaries of notability" , the risk with such thinking is it can suggest theres just a single ideal golden mean. And thus that editors who stray too far from that don't have a place here.

The anti-perspectival / single truth view is IMO a huge problem in the political domain, both on & off wiki. Liberals have became so dominant in most mainstream media that many seem to forget some of their positions are matters of opinion & taste, rather than incontrovertible truths no moral person should question. While Jimbo agrees with firmly pushing back against certain fringe positions, he has also been warning against an overeaching 'single truth' outlook for years, saying "the best way for us to help the world heal is neutrality."

Sadly few editors seemed to listen, many politics & social articles are hugely slanted against the right. Which is relfected in many MSM presentations. Hows that working out? Rather than shaming right wingers into shifting towards the left, it's getting them so riled up that talk of civil war in the US has moved from the fringe into "polite society" Editors here often lean towards the technical, & none with any scientific or technical proficiency could deny Editor Dawkins is right that "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong." But most political & social issues involve valid perspectives on both sides, and it's the same with the Inc/ Del divide.

In practical terms, the 'acknowledge perspectives' solution wouldn't end all conflict at AfD. Folk with strongly opposing views are still going to clash and make each other angry. But it would facilitate folk sometimes stepping back & occasionally re-affirming mutal respect. Awareness of how different people need each other might also reduce the seemingly increasingly frequent blood baths on ANI & other venues, where many seem to go all out to get the 'enemy' indeffed.

Lastly, just to sketch out some mechanism on how even the words & actions of even a newbie editor can effect trends in the wider world. Theres the contagion effect. Emotions, attitudes & virtues like kindness & generosity are all socially contagious, as has been known for millennia & now confirmed by science. This includes a constructive attitude to debate as opposed to partisan point scoring. While rare, a positive or negative change could become amplified by other mechanisms like the butterfly effect & spread through a population. This is well studied in Network science. And while probably no regular editor is in a position of direct power, several will occasionally be advising government ministers & CEOs of large enterprises. So there could potentially be a short chains of cause & effects between something one says which shifts a fellow editor into a more upbeat & openminded frame of mind, to wide scale action. Another mechanism is on how our content effects journalists, for good & for ill. On hot topics, sometimes thousands of journalists will look at a single article on a given day, and be influenced accordingly, thus very much having an effect on the wider trends. And not always for the good– sometimes deletion is what is needed to prevent distracting or even harmful coverage.

FeydHuxtable (talk) 13:54, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

I've kept out of this until now, but Feyd's intriguing comment has me wondering, since when did inclusionist mean friendly and deletionist mean unfriendly? Also this light world of collaboration and knowledge sharing began to attract those who would ravage its beauty aside from sounding bonkers, equates people who have higher standards for inclusion as vandals. From another perspective, someone like myself might say including articles of negligible importance with garbage sources "ravages the beauty" of Wikipedia? Maybe it would help if you saw those who disagreed with you as not intent on maliciously destroying Wikipedia. I had issues with some of the ARS people and thought some of their work was counterproductive to our aims, but I didn't have the pompousness to accuse them of being mere vandals. The sense of self-righteousness of some editors...and the strangeness of the hills some of them chose to die on, it's enough to make you think they believed it was Calvary hill. -Indy beetle (talk) 06:32, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
I'm if it comes across that Im heavilly influenced by the Passion. With "the light world..." & similar language I was trying to communicate how wonderful it can feel to be part of a subculture while it remains true to its original values. Like Wordsworth said "Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." Or see Chpt. 8 of Homage to Catalonia for a less poetic description of the "strange and valuable" experience. IMO its almost impossible for a Deletionist to come across as friendly to someone who wants to preserve all non attack page knowledge, at least in the context of AfD. As per The New York Review "your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene." That said, my comment probably lacked balance, had I not been distressed about the events of the last two weeks, I might have better recognised the considerable value Deletionists add to the project. FeydHuxtable (talk) 07:51, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
    • Point taken on its almost impossible for a Deletionist to come across as friendly to someone who wants to preserve all non attack page knowledge and, though I'm sure we disagree on levels and severity, I bet we can at least both degree that AfD is a critical part of quality control. -Indy beetle (talk) 09:40, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
  • It's really too bad that Jimbo, Larry Sanger, or any editor didn't think of having civility and good faith clauses in the project's principals. Asking for and nudging editors towards consistent civility and good faith in AfD discussions would have solved so many problems. Perhaps in an alternate universe Wikipedia contains those principles, perhaps not. Randy Kryn (talk) 06:22, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
Indeed. Though it can require finesse to perform said nudging in a way that doesnt come across as "civility police", which sadly sometimes just intensifies ill feeling. FeydHuxtable (talk) 07:51, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
While the pillars call for civility and good faith it seems up to each individual to adhere to the concept for themselves and not push them on anyone else, which would be accepting that the other editor is writing in good faith. A simple explanation of the other editors erroneous opinion of ones motives would constitute a nudging (i.e., I've recently been accused on AfD of wanting to support a dictator, which I answered with a made up statement...or is it?...of the dictator and I being drinking buddies). But an outright accusation of a civility breech could be seen as uncivil, as you imply. A fine line is often a sturdy tightrope, demonstratably walkable in a high wind. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:21, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
It's really quite uncivil to discuss other editors without letting them know, and not providing a link to the discussion where you were "accused on AfD of wanting to support a dictator". Vexations (talk) 12:29, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
My drinking buddy may also not like being called a dictator, which he thinks of as uncivil. But then we drink some more and it is soon forgotten when his forced-labor concubines arrive and all is well. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:52, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
Ew, gross. Vexations (talk) 13:00, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
Mmm. A few good points, which makes it more unfortunate that most of the second paragraph doesn't really reflect reality. "Inclusionist leaders like A Nobody & Ikip became wise to Policy power" - yes, those inclusionist "legends" that are community banned for persistent sock-puppetry, often in attempts to sway deletion discussions. Although let's face it, if Okip/Ikip isn't still here it would be a surprise (A Nobody is easy to spot). "Ever since 2007, our rate of article creation has only been a fraction of what we enjoyed back in golden age, despite the near exponential growth in the rate of knowledge creation in the wider world." Well of course it is, because the vast majority of obviously notable topics had already been written about, and so the number was always going to slow down, that's just simple logic. Black Kite (talk) 09:49, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
  • The point is whichever group on this project has the numbers, wins. FeydHuxtable is correct in that regard. If you can comprehend this, every year I have been active, deletionists literally try to delete inclusionists. They have the numbers and therefore they can. The side with numbers can call any member of the other side into an unfair process and light them up. What organization operates like that? Example: hey Melody (volunteer), "I see that you had some clerical errors yesterday, and then you were curt with a customer - I think it was not the first time." Please come over here in this room so that other volunteers can debate your future with the organization and air their grievances." Other volunteer: "Yeah, last year she called me name." "Indef!" Proposal...usually from RM: Ban Melody indefinitely. Support, Support, Oppose, etc. Admin: "Well it seems the "community" has decided to indef you. Sorry Melody." Lightburst (talk) 15:44, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Perhaps when you stop thinking about deletion v inclusion as a numbers game, and start thinking about it as a policy-based issue, your views may change (though knowing the history of ARS, I doubt it). And frankly, your claim that people on the deletionist side are canvassed to discussions is frankly laughable when you consider the reasons why the majority of the community considers some elements of the ARS to be disruptive (here's a clue - it's canvassing to discussions, or even attempting to subvert the deletion process itself [3]). As FeydHuxtable said above "IMO its almost impossible for a Deletionist to come across as friendly to someone who wants to preserve all non attack page knowledge, at least in the context of AfD". Let's examine that - "someone who wants to preserve all non attack page knowledge" - i.e. someone who believes that nothing should be deleted unless it's a G10 speedy? That's frankly - to be polite - ludicrous. Black Kite (talk) 18:38, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
Today I closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lacey Banghard (2nd nomination) as "delete". I did so gladly and confident that I had averted a serious WP:BLP violation, a biography only citable to tabloid journalism including such delightful headlines as "Lacey and animal sex, Chanel hotties, a six-pack and more: Celebrity pictures of the day!" and "Lacey Banghard strips off in Celebrity Big Brother 2013 after just TWO hours and flirts with Sam Robertson", and which the main activity during the AfD was to remove a reference to the (presumably NSFW) website boobpedia.com, and question what on earth could be written about this in a genuinely encyclopaedic manner. That doesn't make me an evil deletionist. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 16:44, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
The Golden Virgin is probably not what you think. Anyway, good deletion. I am not sure how it fits this thread about meanies pummeling volunteers in the storage closet. Lightburst (talk) 17:17, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm neither an inclusionist or an exclusionist. I've voted both ways (keep and delete) & nobody's ever gonna bludgeon me to change any stance I take on any given AfD, MfD, etc. I'm content to let the 'closer' decide on whether my 'vote' is valid or not. GoodDay (talk) 20:07, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't watch this page, so this is just a drive-by statement. I tend to find Black Kite's comments to be the most sound. Personally, I've always found the whole concept of "deletionist vs inclusionist" to be utterly ridiculous. "Deletionist" implies someone who just goes around deleting everything for the hell of it, and "inclusionist" implies someone who includes for the mere sake of including. Ridiculous, as in, "worthy of ridicule". The problem with both of these stances is that they are totally unrealistic characterizations of opposing views with the purpose of turning it into two-dimensional discussion of stereotypes, thus distracting from the real issues at hand. It's a common defensive strategy that goes back to prehistoric times, but in reality the world just isn't that "black and white". For more info see User:Zaereth#Little boxes. There should really be less focus on the "me" and "what I want", and "us vs. them", and more on the goal of creating a real and valuable reference source that can truly call itself an encyclopedia.
While the terms "inclusionist" and "deletionist" are uniquely Wikipedia things, the problems are not by any means new. It's a fallacy that every generation goes through. Out in the real world, we call these people "writers" and "editors", and these same problems have been going on between the two since the invention of the printing press, if not since the invention of writing itself. I am a writer. People often think the writer is the one with all the talent --the valiant knight on their white horse-- and the editor as the evil dragon out to ravage their good work, but then again people once often thought the world was flat. The real problems occur when the writers themselves fall for it. It really doesn't take much talent to be a writer and researcher. They're just building stones out of sand. The real talent comes in the editing; deciding what to cut and what to keep, and carving those stones into beautifully-crafted articles. The writers bring us all the glorious detail and boring minutia and trivial crap, and the editors make it into something people will find useful, that flows nicely, and that they actually want to read. To make this work we need both just as much as the other, and in the end the one who benefits from all our blood, sweat, and tears is the reader. Zaereth (talk) 02:05, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

jimmy.cafe

Hi Jimbo.

I came across as a website that purports to be run by you: https://jimmy.cafe/ (cache)

Is this a joe-job? It's hard to believe you would have a bio that reads thus:

Leading technology futurist and Wikipedia and WT.Social Founder Jimmy Wales is one of the most sought after visionaries in business and technology.

Wikipedia is the 5th Most Popular Website in the WORLD, moving towards the goal of free access for all to the sum of human knowledge.

WT.Social is a groundbreaking, collaboratively editable social networking platform that will change the way we digest news.

When audiences meet Wales, outspoken and defiant in his protection of transformative ideas, they understand why he is compared to historic greats like Gutenberg.

Hailed as “thoughtful and visionary,” “inspiring,” and “absolutely WONDERFUL,” event planners cite Wales’ optimism for the future and masterful ability to speak on issues ranging from censorship, Artificial Intelligence, automation, the media, and disruption, as elements that make him a standout speaker.

These claims are simply ludicrous! It smells a lot like impersonation to me. Dark Clouds of Joy (talk) 20:35, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi - that's a (nonfunctioning at the moment) redesign of my personal website which I haven't put live. The text there was copied by the designer from various sources. The part you object to appears to be marketing text from my speaking agent, see: https://www.harrywalker.com/speakers/jimmy-wales . You are right in sensing that I wouldn't put that text on my personal website - it's only a placeholder for whenever I get around to editing it. The design of the page is what that's all about.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:11, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Ah, thank you for explaining, Jimmy. That makes sense! I did think comparing yourself to Gutenburg was a bit odd. Unless he sold adult glamour woodblock impressions on the sly. The site looks lovely by the way, very slick. Dark Clouds of Joy (talk) 10:11, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
Gutenberg made the "spread of knowledge" to the masses possible. Seems an apt historical comparison to the initial invention of computers, the creation of the internet, and eventually to Wikipedia itself. Humbleness may hold JW back from saying the comparison works on some levels, but without him innovating and allowing access and authority to many others, including early organizers like Larry Sanger and eventually to all Wikipedians including Dark Clouds of Joy. . .the world as-a-whole would not quickly know where the subway stops are to visit Montmartre (and some other things). Randy Kryn (talk) 13:54, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Separating roles

Hello @Jimbo Wales. Hope you're having a wonderful day. It is very nice to meet you.

I am Contributers2020 from the Commons Wikipedia. I wanted to raise a concern which I thought, is not suitable to write anywhere, and as you being the co-founder, may have the answer.

The administrators in commons have many privileges and work to do. From answering and closing deletion requests to blocking people to delete file to everything. And we have only 200 of them? This depicts the load on them and no decrease in the commons backlog. Deletion request old like 1 year which are obvious are not being closed. And if non-admins close them, they will immediately take action on us. I think this type of centralizing is wrong and want to propose you something- to bifurcate administrator role into some 2 or three. One role may focus on the deletion backlog, while the other focusing on solving disputes on dispute desk (nothing like this exists but we can add something like this) and blocking people. If we bifurcate like this, one role will focus on one particular topic and will heavily help reducing commons backlog. Please, please consider this issue and make it into action as soon as you can.

Warm Regards, -- Contributers2020Talk to me here 14:43, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Please excuse and apologize me if there is something wrong with the English. Contributers2020Talk to me here 14:44, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Fanfic deletion discussion that involves you

There is an… interesting miscellany for discussion involving a fanfic series starring you going on, was wondering if you’d like to comment:

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:JulieMinkai/Planning for seventh Wikipedia movie

Dronebogus (talk) 15:42, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Let's spend a month arguing whether this nonsense is worth keeping.
Johnuniq (talk) 22:46, 17 November 2021 (UTC)
The emerging consensus there seems thoughtful and likely requires no real input from me. :)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:09, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

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A cheeseburger for you!

After all you've done, you deserve a nice, juicy burger, you sussy baka! BubbaDaAmogus (talk) 00:35, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

So, how was the burger?BubbaDaAmogus (talk) 16:12, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

See here. Count Iblis (talk) 07:34, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

Hello!

I'm Dand music from Korean Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a lot to do, a lot of documentation, and above all, it is convenient and addictive because it has various facilities (by Korean standards):> I am a student now, but I want to become a great and respectable person like Jimmy Wales! Ummm.. I was just chatting and wasting precious time. I really appreciate and respect you for making Wikipedia! Have a nice day! ;) (PS: This article uses a translator.) Dand music (talk) 11:21, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Hello! You please have a nice day too!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:03, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
hello sir, i think you are in top 1000 users in all time. you are great. im leaving my mark here.. thank you for your contributions.. ----Modern primat ඞඞඞ TALK 20:34, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2021

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Section removed

As explained at the ANI thread, my comments in the now-removed section, and the edit summary when I removed it, I've removed the self-promotional thread that was here. Please do not restore it without a local en.wiki consensus. Someone at WMF telling you it's OK to violate our local guidelines doesn't count. The section immediately above, started by someone else, is less questionable; as long as there isn't blatant self-promotion there I'll leave it alone for now. The place to announce things that will financially benefit you is pretty much anywhere on the internet you can post, except Wikipedia. If WMF wants you to do this, they have their own mailing lists and web pages. And there's always Twitter. --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:04, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

As Jimbo explained, there is no actual self-promotion going on. The guideline that doesn't allow such postings is based on the assumption that all such postings do amount to self-promotion. This means that one can invoke WP:IAR. Count Iblis (talk) 17:12, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
And multiple editors over at ANI disagreed with that explanation. XOR'easter (talk) 17:15, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
I've restored it. I don't believe there was a consensus supporting removing it when Floq removed it, and there definitely isn't one now. Regards, The Land (talk) 17:35, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
For the sake of wiki, let's not edit war over this. I think it is frankly an absurd thing to imagine that I was trying to be self-promotional rather than transparent with the community, and to call that particular text self-promotional is just wrong. But, I have done what I was asked to do, and if people want to ask me about it further, they can just email me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:41, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
I think you ought to know better really, disclosure is one thing, but specifically running an Q and A about it as well as purposely linking Christie's page? Really could've done without that. Dark-World25 (talk) 17:48, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, well, I don't agree. I think an open conversation and a pointer so people can see what I'm talking about is the right way forward. I knew people would have questions and I wanted to answer those questions. I think the WMF - and others - would have been quite properly unhappy if my idea of transparency was just "Hey, I'm doing an auction." That makes no sense at all. Transparency means open communication, explaining what I'm doing and what I'm thinking. I'm not going to apologize for it, and I find this particular outcome to be quite ridiculous. But here we are.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:56, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll wait till Sunday - to see how this all shakes out - and then email a few more questions. I particularly want to ask about the "one room schoolhouse" that the NY Times mistakenly said you went to. (I believe the text said it was a 2 room schoolhouse). Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:53, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I think 2 rooms. But the notion of One-room school is a known old concept for a school, not a literal descriptions of how many rooms were in the building. The core meaningful concept is students of different ages mixed together because there aren't enough teachers to have one teacher per grade.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:59, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
Ha. Yes, my mother went to a “one room school” in rural Ireland in the 40s. It had 2 classes - they put a curtain across the middle of the room! Btw, i agree that the houha over your post is/was ridiculous. DeCausa (talk) 18:45, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
They still exist! We currently have a one room school in my sister-in-laws home. lol I am sure a lot of people think what started this discussion is ridiculous but we don't all see the same thing and that's why we collaborate, discuss and attempt to form a consensus. One thing I do applaud the community and Jimbo for is allowing the discussion to continue. I know Jimbo and others might not have expected this to happen but it did and others have legitimate concerns and their voice should matter even if, ultimately, it does not produce consensus one way or another. --ARoseWolf 18:57, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I reckon it's your talkpage & it's your choice to restore what was deleted. After that? Greater minds than mine, will have figure it all out. GoodDay (talk) 02:40, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia's first edit

I've heard you mention the "hello world" story before and couldn't reconcile it with what the history in the DB that Starling found showed: "This is the new WikiPedia!" I suspected perhaps you were speaking of a test server or something, but since this ephemera is being auctioned off via NFT-hype (more ephemera) I thought it was worthwhile asking for clarity. -Reagle (talk) 21:16, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles. Graham87 08:38, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Graham87, yes, I'm familiar with that page, but what are you asking me to see? We have the original database Starling found and the reconstruction of the first 10k edits. Jimbo is now saying that the NFT is of an "artistic recreation of the original," based on his recollection, which has now been changed given the update to the timestamps, but I wouldn't call it the first Wikipedia edit. Over on Facebook Starling noted that he was familiar with this NFT project and last he knew Jimbo was going with the first edit in the database, but Jimbo's chosen his recollection of "Hello, World!" instead. This recollection is interesting in context, but shouldn't confuse the history, which I think this is doing. Then, there's the whole NFT hype, and the interesting question of does Christie's do research on digital provenance? BTW: User:Hillbillyholiday Unfrozen has also pointed out the Bomis test wiki. -Reagle (talk) 13:58, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
@Reagle: I meant to point you to the first paragraph of the "Earliest surviving edits and other data" section of that page, which has a discussion of the hello world edit. I don't know anything about it beyond what's there. Graham87 14:12, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
@Graham87:, okay, thank you. -Reagle (talk) 14:43, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Yes - back then there was no way to delete pages through the UX, they had to be deleted on the server itself. This wasn't a *common* practice but I did it a few times. For years I thought that was all there was to it. But Tim was also able to salvage stuff from a log file of changes and it wasn't there either. So now I believe what I did was set it up that morning, use the flag logo, type Hello, World!, then wipe the files to start again. The Hello, World! was live on the homepage for a short period of time, and was probably only seen by me during the setup process.
I certainly wasn't thinking in such a grand way at the time - Hello, World! is a standard thing that programmers write when learning a new language, or - in this case - setting up new software. But it's poetic to think about this as Wikipedia's Hello to the world.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:19, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Jimbo Wales, thanks for the clarification. I think this context is important for understanding your recollection and intention, but neither should this obfuscate the recorded history for the sake of poetic whimsy. 🙂 -Reagle (talk) 14:03, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Indeed far from obfuscating I think it's nice to have the whole story. :-)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:47, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Re: that auction you mentioned

I think we can leave out the details of the section currently above this so that nobody considers *this section* promotional in any way. I'll just ask questions that interest me and don't mean to criticize you, but folks will probably think I'm criticizing NFTs.

  • 1st question - what do you think you are selling when you sell an NFT? For example if somebody (say me) sold an NFT of a story from The Signpost people could still see article in The Signpost - so I wouldn't be selling the Signpost article. What would I be selling? Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:37, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
In this particular case, it's a website which recreates Wikipedia as it looked at the moment I installed the software for the first time and typed my first edit, "Hello, World!" and it's an NFT which will control aspects of that website, i.e. the owner can turn editing on and off, and change the interval at which it automatically reverts to the "Hello, World!" state.
When I think about NFTs and free culture more generally, I think there's something really interesting. Consider for a moment a widespread meme image like the Disaster Girl meme. The girl in the meme sold an NFT of it for nearly $500,000. And yet, it's still just as freely available as it ever was. From our perspective, it isn't a perfect example because the original image was not (as far as I know) released under a free license, but the point is: she didn't sell the copyright, she isn't trying to restrict distribution at all, and yet managed to earn from her contribution. I think that's super interesting.
Another comparison might be to an original Andy Warhol versus a modern print - they sell for widely different prices even though it could be argued they are substantially the "same thing".
I don't pretend to understand all the motivations for people who are interested in collecting art, though, so I just note all this as an empirical observation about the world!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:47, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
  • (EC again!!) 2nd question - that's very interesting about the turning a website on and off, but that's not at all typical of an NFT (as I understand it). IIRC the only "thing" that is usually sold in an NFT is essentially a certificate of authenticity pointing to another, possibly real-world, work of art. Why would anybody pay real money (or even cryptocurrency) for a certificate of authenticity? Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:09, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
It's a very good question. But they do. I think the main reason is patronage, supporting something that they like. I think another reason has to do with a feeling from owning something rare. But those are just things that I have seen reported, and others may have better knowledge than me. We might ask a similar question: Wikipedia is completely free whether you donate or not. So why do people donate? The disaster girl image is all over the Internet to be looked at for free whether you buy an NFT or not, so why pay for a point to it? I think the answer is - and in most contexts we don't find this distressing but actually a good thing about people - it's because there are wider human motivations and aspirations than purely covered in normal transactions like "I buy lettuce, so that I can eat the lettuce."--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:45, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
  • 3rd question - NFTs are an outgrowth of cryptocurrencies. Both IMHO are kinda shady. Look at all the crypto exchanges that have gone bust taking all the "money" with them. Look at all the hackers who attack hospitals, major utilities, etc. and can only succeed in getting "money" out be using cryptocurrency. The ethics of NFTs have also been questioned, e.g. because people don't know what they are buying as well as, questions about self-dealing (the anonymous buyer might be the same person as the seller) or similar "wash-trades". Do you have any qualms about (however indirectly) contributing to the apparent legitimacy of these markets? Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:45, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
Like anyone, I'm unhappy to see all that kind of bad stuff. But criminals do things like steal credit card numbers, and that doesn't mean I feel bad about using credit cards. And the art market itself - the traditional art market - is awash in let's just say "interesting" transactions. But I don't feel bad or thing it's wrong for people to make and sell paintings. I definitely wouldn't get involved in some kinds of crypto things - a few years back when I was launching WikiTribune (will I get stick for even mentioning something I have worked on! It's a strange day so maybe so!) a lot of random people came to me and said I should do an ICO with a lot of handwaving about how it could empower community contributions - but they could never explain what that meant, so I was like, yeah, I don't think so and didn't do it.
As for crypto speculation in general, it reminds me a great deal of dot-com speculation back in the day. And a lot of people will lose money and that's bad. But again, I don't think that some bad things happening in the stock market should mean no one should participate in the stock market.
For me, one of the greatest potentials going forward is the notion of a digital wallet, which crypto is all about. But rather than imagining that in the future we'll all be using BTC and ETH routinely - I doubt it - I do think it very possible that we'll have crypto wallets filled with stable coins (USD, EUR, GBP equivalents) that we'll use to subscribe to newspapers, etc. Because I think that in the future (not yet for sure) it will be possible to get the cost of a decentralized crypto transaction down *lower* than the current 2-3% that Visa/Mastercard/Stripe/Paypal/etc charge. And if there's a way that merchants and customers can transact and cut out that middleman, and do it cheaper, I see that as a real potential.
In the meantime, I totally expect there to be a lot lot lot of bad noises in this space.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:53, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
Thanks Jimmy. I'll definitely send you an email by Sunday after I get some facts together and see some reactions. Maybe we can make this a full-blown Signpost interview for December 28, or January may be better. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:39, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
  • I'd like to ask a question as well, for I am curious. How can you exclusively own rights to an edit you've irrevocably agreed to release? I can understand the computer, it's your property and you certainly have rights to determine its disposition, but the edit belongs to me equally just as the ones I've made belong to you, and Smallbones. Seriously, in as much as freely released content can be reused by anyone, even for profit, what if I had been wise enough to imagine the profitability of reusing that content you so graciously released in saying "hello world" and had actually done all the things which I haven't the first clue that one would do, but somehow held the bonafide rights to the NFT of that first edit, the haters would be hating on me instead of you. You are clearly a visionary, not only for dreaming that Wikipedia could exist, but also for founding it into existence. And now you've imagined the reuse of valuable Wikipedia content ahead of a world of others who can only wish they'd thought of it first. So now I am going to suggest a nonprofit organization that could really use the financial support of your donations in the event this thing sells for an amount commensurate with its potential — the Wikipedia community herself, if you've got one more great and necessary vision which would be how to equitably share such a spoil. I just wonder what the malcontent haters would have to say in such a case where the discussion was about that. But I am curious about the things I've asked, and I ask them having great respect for you and your accomplishments to date. Sincerely.--John Cline (talk) 20:23, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
    • Just a bit of background on free licensing! I don't exclusively own rights to any edit that I've released under a free license, including this one. Note that free licenses very explicitly allow people to copy, modify, redistribute, and redistribute modified versions, commercially or non-commercially. You can print out a copy of the source code of Linux and put it in a book and offer it for sale. You can print out the text of any Wikipedia entry and put it in a book for sale. And yes, while the WMF asked me not to pledge to donate to Wikimedia, I have pledged to donate to free culture organizations.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:08, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
    I got dibs on the first vandalism edit. Called it ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 21:10, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
    • 2 technicalities here might help. Technically, each one of us have a copyright on each edit we've made; we only license it so that others can use it (as long as they attribute it to the writer). So Jimmy owns the copyright to that edit. He doesn't need to attribute it to himself. He doesn't even need to mention the license. I think he could even legally put "(c) Jimmy Wales. All rights reserved" on it - though I'd consider that unethical.
      2nd technicality -(added- Some) NFD issuers seem to claim that they can issue an NFD on anything - even if they don't own it. After all they are only selling a certificate of authenticity, not an actual object. So I could state "The painting known as "the Mona Lisa" aka "La Giaconda", currently housed in Paris, at the Louvre behind thick bulletproof glass, is a genuine Leonardo Da Vinci." If I could convince anybody to buy this certificate = for any price we agree to - (with certain conditions, eg they aren't drunk, insane, or minors) then the contract would be legal. The insanity clause might be the only thing stopping me. And @ScottishFinnishRadish: could sell an NFT on the first vandalism edit - even if he wasn't the 1st Wiki-vandal! Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:09, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
I'm not 100% sure it'd be accurate to characterize "NFT issuers" in any very broad way about claims like that. Certainly some people might say that. I think most of the people in the space who are actual digital artists exploring a new way to sell "originals" of their work would regard it as unethical to make a false claim. But of course, in a very technical sense, what you say is obviously true, in the NFT space or not. You could write that claim about the Mona Lisa on a piece of paper and try to sell it. That wouldn't be illegal, indeed it would just be a very short essay about the Mona Lisa. :)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:08, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Ok Jimmy, I just added "Some" in my previous comment above. That and the original "seems" should reassure everybody that I don't think everybody involved in NFTs is some kind of deceitful person. In fact, I believe that the majority of people involved in NFTs are *not* being deceitful, but I suspect in a big new and incomprehensible (to me) market like this that somebody is up to no good. The reason I'm asking so many questions here is that I want to learn what's up from a person who I know is in general knowledgeable and honorable.
I should note that I just ran into a fairly good source on NFTs at the Financial Times from 5 days ago (paywalled?). In it is an analogy using Leonardo and the Mona Lisa - somewhat similar to what I wrote yesterday here. No, I hadn't seen it before. In the FT article there are basically 2 types of statements: 1. those that cast a great deal of doubt about the legitimacy of the NFT market, and 2. those that say the NFT market has a great deal of risk and uncertainty, but it might turn out to be ok. I trust the number 1 type of statements. The number 2's strike me as quite weak, mere hope or trying to draw a false balance.
There may be 4 types of people involved in this market, in my basic view. I'd like you to tell me what's wrong with this viewThe folks I referred to as "issuers" above I'll call
  • "organizers" these are most of the folks who started the market, some "investment banker" types (not literally investment bankers though. These are the folks most responsible for the market's existence, the lack of clarity in what's going on, and the most likely to take big bucks out of it. Since I consider this to be a zero sum market, that means most of the other types will be losers.
  • Another type of participant I'll call "neophytes". They haven't got a good idea what's going on in the market, but they've heard that there's some money to be made - even if it might be a bit shady. In the old book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds they quote a popular song from the time of the South Sea bubble: "Every fool aspired to be a knave." These folks are almost sure losers.
  • Another type might be the folks, like artists and other "creative folks", including Jimmy. The organizers need these folks to create the market, so they might come out ok. But I'll suggest they make sure that they are always ahead of the game (cash positive) and don't stake their good names on the outcome.
  • "Suckers" - the ordinary folks who wander into the market with limited info and a limited amount to risk. They might say to themselves "How much can I lose?" Answer, everything you put in.
So Jimmy. Where do you think I'm wrong in this?
Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:46, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Jimmy, I'll withdraw the above question. It's just me pontificating and then saying "do you agree with me?" I hate that type of question! I should say that I sympathize with Jimmy in his current position. He's not doing anything illegal. He won't be doing anything deceitful - certainly not to the highest bidder who will likely be giving him $millions, which Jimmy says he will donate to open freely licensed projects. If I were in his position, I'd be sorely tempted to do the same thing - even though I really dislike NFTs.
There is at least one good thing that should be coming out of this. The community has made it very clear that anything that is considered to be promotional or an advertisement, even if it is for a charitable cause, on any page in Wikipedia, posted by any editor - even the most senior and most respected - may be removed by any editor at any time. Thank you Jimmy! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Smallbones (talk • contribs) 15:16, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Here's a source in case someone is considering creating an article about Jimmy Wales strawberry iMac: [4]. Or do we have that already? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:08, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Nope, but we have First Wikipedia edit, created by JPxG, which I tweaked. I generally feel a little weird about Wikipedia articles about itself like this one ... but it's there now. Graham87 16:32, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Close enough, thanks! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:47, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

"Hello, World!" edit from NFT sale seems to have occurred two minutes after "This is the new WikiPedia!" edit from current database

I notice that the page it's hosted on gives the timestamp as "7:29 PM" (which I assume is UTC, since the RecentChanges URL gives the current UTC time of "December 4, 2021 2:06 am"). But the first revision of HomePage is from two minutes earlier, at 19:27 UTC. Is there some kind of error here? jp×g 02:06, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't know if the time set for UseModWiki edits actually corresponded to UTC; they might have used a US time zone. I don't have a source to hand though. Graham87 08:38, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Are you saying that the timezone currently given at the imported "This is the new WikiPedia!" edit ("15 January 2001, at 19:27 (UTC)") might be wrong? Wouldn't that also affect lots of other early imported edits?
Note that the timestamps in the earliest UseMod dump - see in particular the file diff_log there - appear to be in Unix epoch time which according to our article always refers to UTC. The "This is the new WikiPedia!" edit has the epoch timestamp 979586833 there, corresponding to January 15, 2001 19:27:13 UTC. (See also the same edit in Joseph Reagle's reconstruction of the early Wikipedia history.) Regards, HaeB (talk) 09:09, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
If the time zone is incorrect, it would affect a very large number of Wikipedia edits, yes. I didn't read through the Unix time article before writing the above message. Graham87 09:39, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Hmmm, the contents of this edit to "World Trade Center/Plane crash", given the timestamp and delays in media getting a grasp on the situation, aren't *that* out-of-whack with the timeline for the day of the September 11 attacks, so maybe the times given on Wikipedia are correct. Graham87 09:46, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Ah I knew I'd read *something* implying that Wikipedia didn't always use UTC in the past: this announcement (the page was then at the title Wikipedia:Announcements). I don't know how much effect that had (if any) on the timestamps we see today though. Graham87 09:59, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
And then there are edits like this, from before the changeover. Graham87 10:07, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Good catch! Glitch on the live server, now fixed. This is an artistic recreation of the original, using as close to the original software as possible. I had to make a few interesting choices about modifications - for example, you can't see this unless you have the admin password, but it was impossible to actually log in as an admin, as that requires a cookie to be set, but the cookie header was set to expire in 2010, which must have seemed like forever away in 2001. :) So to even get the original software running required some changes. (There was some stuff about deprecated syntax and the CGI.pm library as well.) It was a fun project to recreate how it looked on that morning!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:12, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Okay, so the recollected edit is 58 minutes before the recorded one? Good to know! -Reagle (talk) 16:03, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Here are the first 10 edits of Wikipedia from the rclog. The first, epoch time, corresponds to Monday, January 15, 2001 7:27:13 PM. 

979586833³3HomePage³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979588226³3HomePage³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979588279³3HomePage³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979588352³3WikiPedia³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979602227³3PhilosophyAndLogic³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979602244³3PhilosophyAndLogic³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979602301³3HomePage³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979602451³3UnitedStates³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979670875³3UnitedStates³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111
979670922³3HomePage³3*³30³3office.bomis.com³30³3id³2111

From a historical point of view, Jimbo should not conflate the first recorded timestamp with his recollection. Also, in my reconstruction of the first 10k edits, I listed the timezone as +0000. What are we concluding the timezone should actually be? I'd like to update my pages. -Reagle (talk) 14:54, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Those timestamps are in UTC and that makes perfect sense. 7:30PM UTC is, in January, 11:30AM in California. That's right as I was setting up the server that morning!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:01, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
But wouldn't your recollected edit be a few minutes before the first recorded edit? There's no need to conflate the two. -Reagle (talk) 15:08, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I agree. As I said up above, the glitch is fixed now.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:25, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Still worth a bajillion dollars.
  • @Reagle: I don't know -- Jimbo said the exact same thing about the early edits in 2019 (to wit: For the record, these are the earliest edits that have been found, but not the earliest edits. In the early days of Usemod wiki, I did a lot of deleting things *on the hard drive* (as this was the only way to really do that). Those will never be found of course. The first words, soon deleted, were "Hello, World!).[1] For that matter, the "This is the new WikiPedia!" edit was made from office.bomis.com, which was probably Jimbo anyway. It just doesn't seem plausible to me that the co-founder of a website would make up a story about the first edit being "hello world", on the off-chance that several years later someone would invent a technology where people would pay him a million bucks for a text file containing a URL to it.
For comparison, it might be worth noting that the Golden Spikes, driven ceremonially to commemorate the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad on 10 May 1869, were engraved with proclamations that they had "joined the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans", whereas at the time said railroad only continuously connected Sacramento to Omaha — a rail bridge over the San Joaquin River would not be constructed until September, and the Omaha line wasn't connected to Council Bluffs until 1872. What really mattered, in this case, was that society had chosen a Schelling point around which to commemorate an historic event. They had champagne and they took photographs and they reported the news across the country — a few minutes later they took it out and replaced it with a normal iron spike so nobody stole it. The actual last spike driven in the transcontinental railroad was in all likelihood a completely non-notable piece of iron somewhere over the Missouri River. We don't have an article about it. So it goes. jp×g 03:08, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Bluerasberry; Pythoncoder; Smallbones (August 30, 2019). "Documenting Wikimania and our beginnings". The Signpost. Retrieved December 5, 2021.

Administrators will no longer be autopatrolled

A recently closed Request for Comment (RFC) reached consensus to remove Autopatrolled from the administrator user group. You may, similarly as with Edit Filter Manager, choose to self-assign this permission to yourself. This will be implemented the week of December 13th, but if you wish to self-assign you may do so now. To find out when the change has gone live or if you have any questions please visit the Administrator's Noticeboard. 20:06, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Was Sanger right that Barack Obama's Wikipedia page was biased?

The Barack Obama Wikipedia page was just demoted from featured article status at Wikipedia:Featured article review/Barack Obama/archive11. Was Sanger right? Therapyisgood (talk) 03:31, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

I have no opinion about that, as I haven't read the page in a long time. I am sure that there are many good people looking at the page and working hard to make it as good as it possibly can be, and I'm sure that there are many people on the right and the left who, being very fond of their own perspective, will find it to be biased. Much the same can be said of any text. Getting it right is hard work, and I think we mostly do.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:59, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
A sound FA review request by User:Therapyisgood (the OP here) followed by very fair and thorough review by trusted editors whose own page work is generally impressive. As I read it, primary critiques were the gradual bloat since 2012 review and unnaturally positive tone for a politician subject. Makes sense. FA status should be tough to maintain on such heavily viewed and edited pages. BusterD (talk) 21:40, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Sounds about right to me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:23, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Some of the articles about US Presidents are too long and have been allowed to break WP:SIZERULE by a considerable margin. Although they are important articles, they need to be within readable length.--♦IanMacM♦ (talk to me) 07:41, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Still doesn't mean Sanger was right. If anything, it proves he was wrong because the system works and does not make exceptions for certain subjects. Like Carrite, I think a good assumption is that the answer to any question that starts with "Was Sanger right..." is "no". Regards SoWhy 07:48, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Given that WP is dynamic and the state of an article can change tone drastically with a good single rewrite, its hard to claim if he was right or not. He would have been right if the article passed FA or FAR (processes that take a lot of eyes) with the included bias, but in fact, it was recently demoted from FA due to bias.
But that said, there is is something to be said broadly on implicit bias that WP editors tend to give to promoting liberal/left-leaning figures to conservative/right-leaning figures that goes beyond the systematic bias sourcing issue which also favor this. We tend to love to include every accolade, no matter how small, for those figures that are in our ideological side, and tend to include every negative point of criticism for those against that ideology. That's a small neutrality problem that gets magnified in various area. We have to be aware that this is how, as the collective group of editors, tend to write and just need to watch ourselves to not be overly praising or overly critical of figures in WP voice. This is not the full claim of bias from Sanger, but it is a route towards that if we don't watch ourselves. --Masem (t) 13:12, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Mr. Sanger is sadly never right about anything, I endorse the comment above to that respect. As for the Obama article, its problem seems to be largely about stagnation than any honest issue of "bias". I'd imagine that there are many articles on important topics that have entered a sort-of Maintenance Mode, where those who watch the page simply do vandalism fix or write a brief blurb if a new event happens. Reviewing and updating hundreds of citations in an article such as this is a hefty time commitment. ValarianB (talk) 14:15, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Re "is never right about anything": It's reasonably likely that there's something I don't understand here, that there's some complex purpose being served by claims like "X is always wrong", but in any case I must make the point that no, the direct meaning of the claim is false. "X is never right about anything" is the kind of rule that, if actually applied, would be unambiguously ridiculous. There are no people with the ability to reliably generate false statements on any area; the floor of judgement ability is noise, not inverted signal. The secondary implication in social signalling about the individual in question also seems silly, but that's complicated enough that I won't try to judge it. My apologies for the pedantry. --Yair rand (talk) 02:27, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Well but "is never right about anything" is not quite the same as "is always wrong about everything". If it was the latter, we could simply reverse his statements and have the perfect reliable source, which would be very useful. "is never right about anything" is vaguer and would allow for some neither-right-nor-wrong noise. Still useful on binary questions tho. So for instance say on the question of whether the Sun is white or not white (yellow, say), and Mr Sanger would be quoted as saying "the Sun is not white" then we can be assured that it is white. (This is assuming that Mr Sanger is, indeed, never right about anything, which I consider unproven and even dubious. When and if this ever is proven, we can use Mr Sanger as a ref, e.g. "The Sun is actually white<ref>Per Larry Sanger, [date and source], 'The Sun is not white'</ref>".)
As to the proximate question, it is important to get it just right, but it's hard, and IMO while important it is less important for Obama that for most people and entities. Because for those, we are usually the #1 public face. For Obama... nothing we do or say here can much harm his reputation or cause him distress, or really much affect the public perception of him. He's too big for that. Only probably a few hundred or so people are famous at that level. Herostratus (talk) 20:44, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Hunstville History

Greetings Jimbo. Did you know Alabama's first lieutenant governor was elected from Huntsville? Yes sir, Andrew J. Applegate. He also served at the state's 1867 Constitutional Convention with Columbus Jones and Lafayette Robinson (Draft:Columbus Jones and Draft:Lafayette Robinson), both African Americans from Hunstville who were elected with him as part of the same "Republican Union" ticket.

As for Jones and Robinson, I can't imagine what it was like for an African American, many of them formerly enslaved, to serve at constitutional conventions and in state legislatures in the years after the American Civil War. I find it fascinating. And the history of it, all misrepresented and smeared by the Dunning School and others for so many decades as a horrible mistake. In fact, public schools in the south and many public colleges and universities in the south were established during this period.

Speaking of which, it's still difficult to get institutions like Draft:Langston High School (Arkansas) included on Wilipedia. Hot Springs, Arkansas was a center of Ku Klux Klan activity and a high school for African Americans there is certianly worth including and expanding. I apologize I am not a better researcher and I'm sure there's much more about it in newspaper archives, but we have to start somewhere.

I try to picture what it was like for Columbus Jones to walk into and serve in the Alabama House of Representatives at that time. It boggles my mind. Happy Holidays and best wishes for the rest of 2021 on into 2022 and beyond. FloridaArmy (talk) 15:50, 12 December 2021 (UTC)

It's interesting that our coverage of Bartley Harris and the influential 200 year old Saint Bartley Primitive Baptist Church he led appears to be in the entry Portrait of Saint Bartley Harris about a painting of him by a white water color painter? I think these people and institutions are fascinating. FloridaArmy (talk) 01:58, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Be aware that notability is not inherited. Just because we have a standalone article about the painting doesn't give notability for the subjects to be notable, though there is a good chance that background information from the artist of the painting may lead to more sources about why the subject was worth painting. Remember that we do not judge importance as editors, we rely on sources to give that. And when sources do not exist to provide that, we can't write an standalone article, but in this case, there's no reason that some basic details of Harris cannot be included within the painting's article, as well as redirecting the search term "Bartley Harris" to that portrait. We don't need a standalone article about every searchable target, but we can make sure there is relevant information on searchable terms in articles that may give larger context. --Masem (t) 02:14, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Better questions User:Masem are why the historic site was paved over for a hospital parking lot and what happened to the graves? Were they relocated? What was the area like when the urban renewal plan was carried out and why wasn't its history respected? What other historic institutions, homes, and businesses were destroyed? FloridaArmy (talk) 02:39, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Unless sources discuss those factors, that's something we cannot propose or talk about on WP's mainspace. We cannot change how the past has given little respect to minority groups, nor is it our place to make this an issue (per WP:RGW). --Masem (t) 05:52, 13 December 2021 (UTC)
Here's an excellent article on the many historic buildings in Huntsville lost to redevelopment in the mid-1960s although it doesn't discuss the church. FloridaArmy (talk) 15:22, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

WP:ACE2021 results

The results of the 2021 Arbitration Committee Elections have been posted. Thank you to all of the candidates, voters, and the election team for your participation. — xaosflux Talk 23:35, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

2014 UAE award etc.

Hi all, I was notified about this thread https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/PKXEHWGOHOHZPYN7T2JBNJTTTHIFZJWW/ and I join the questioner. I'm interested in an explanation. Thank you. Vejvančický (talk / contribs) 10:19, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

  • Duder does NOT want anyone remembering any of this. And while forthrightly answering these questions would be the right thing to do, given where honest answers would lead, it's a smart pr strategy to ignore it all and expect it will all go away. Which it probably will. Until the next time.Dan Murphy (talk) 17:08, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
Promises are not cheap for a real man. And ignoring it all would not be a 'smart pr strategy' but cowardice. Vejvančický (talk / contribs) 06:47, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
Gee, what a load of nonsense. The question was asked in bad faith and each of you is commenting in bad faith. My ongoing support for human rights causes continues through a variety of avenues. I have an annual budget which I apply judiciously supporting individuals and causes when and as I see a way to make a difference. My planned expenditures in this area, according to my current plans, will resolve the original pledge in 2024 or 2025. (I have a target, but as I say, I make my judgments depending on circumstances.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:50, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
[citation needed]Dan Murphy (talk) 01:56, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Joyous Season

I wish that you may have a very Happy Holiday! Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Hogmanay, Festivus or your hemisphere's Solstice, this is a special time of year for almost everyone! May the New Year provide you joy and fulfillment! Thanks for everything you do here. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:05, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{subst:User:Coffee/Holidays}} to your fellow editors' talk pages.

$937,500

Hi Jimmy,

Following up on an earlier conversation. I understand that you are - at least nominally - almost a million dollars richer. This relates to an iMac that you sold for $187,500 and a "NFT" you sold for $750,000. Please see the source of these numbers. If you don't mind my asking (for public release), how much was that in "the original" ether, and how much do you expect to take home after fees and associated costs? If you do mind, I understand - feel free to say "that's none of your business now, is it!"

All the best. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, if I'n not in contact with you before then.

Sincerely, Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:29, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

The actual closing prices were $150,000 and $600,000. The figures you quote include the buyers premium. As to the rest, if you scroll up and see the insults I'm getting up above, you can surely imagine why I'm feeling No good deed goes unpunished and it makes me in a not very good mood.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:54, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

  • Thanks for the numbers, Jimmy. I see what you mean about some of the discussion above. Smallbones(smalltalk) 01:56, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Nice, congrats. I hope you keep the majority of that for yourself and not toss it into the foundation kitty (six employees in 2006, 555 now bumping into each other on the way to the virtual water cooler). I hope whoever has it takes good care of the computer, did you get an assurance that it will eventually go to a museum? Best of holidays to you and yours. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:11, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
That's a lot more than the price paid for the Merry Christmas SMS NFT. Count Iblis (talk) 16:39, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Who sells random stuff like iMacs for hundreds of thousands of bucks? I'm not saying don't do it but I want to know, why did you do it?BubbaDaAmogus (talk) 18:35, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

If it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, then it's not all that random. Count Iblis (talk) 19:04, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

Hello Jimbo Wales: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 19:37, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

The donations

Hello Jimbo! I'm contacting you here to get your opinion on something (don't worry I"m not requesting a third opinion from you). I've recently been made aware from (mostly) anonymous IPs about the fundraising banners. After seeing people on the Teahouse and Help Desk complain about them (and even the creation of a templated response by user Shushugah) I decided that I would leave a message at meta:Talk:Fundraising, however after I did so I received a response from JBrungs and what I gathered from their response that the WMF was only interested in having users hide from the issue, rather than fixing the issue. After that, a few days later I left another message on the same page, this time with a bit more aggressive wording (however in all of my responses I have refrained from making any kind of threat towards the WMF). About an hour later Ppena had stated that they would be pausing the Annual Fund banners and would plan on coming back with the Endowment banners on December 20 (today at the time I"m writing this). When I was logged out on the main page I saw one of the endowment banners, and was rather frustrated to learn that they had basically ignored all of the user's messages on the page as the Endowment banners were the exact same as the Annual fund banners, only with some different wording. I then left another message on the page saying that the WMF needs to just stop with the fundrasing campaign as user's have been able to prove that they've been able to raise more than enough money. IN the previous message I had quoted something Shushugah told me, saying what actually bothered them was what the fundraising was being used for, and that there was a "lack of tooling for certain tasks" especially considering how much money the WMF had. (I'm bolding this next part so you can simply skip straight to what I"m asking for your opinion on if you want to) So what I"m wanting your opinion on is the fundraising. Do you think it's gone too far, and if not why? I'm asking you since you are the founder of the WMF (and Wikipedia as a whole) and I would probably be able to better understand what's going on getting an opinion from you. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 20:27, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

We have a mission to give a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. We've done a pretty good job of that if you live in a wealthy Western country, as well as in a handful of non-Western countries. It is my personal view that we need to accelerate our work in the developing world and that we need to be willing to spend money to do it. I would personally like to see new pilot projects to support smaller communities in a really serious way, and I would like to see pilot projects to spend more money supporting our existing very successful communities. We should additionally take note that technological changes in the near future, political/legal challenges around the world, etc., may give rise to new obstacles and difficulties. I think it is extremely important that the WMF pursue a policy of continued financial strength, and that we continue to run a lean operation as good stewards of donor funds.
Against that backdrop, I think we have to be extremely careful and thoughtful about the fundraising campaign. It should be honest, it should be public and open, and it should be... loud. We have a good mission and people love that mission and are willing to support it. Whether any particular banner or text is "too far" is always always always a valid question, and I encourage the community to keep engaged with it. But I also think that it would be very easy for us to retreat into irrelevance by failing to fundraise effectively.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:52, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Update: as I'm doing chores around the house this morning I was reflecting more on this. This is, again, my personal opinion only. First, I think that the size and positioning of the fundraising message is a relatively minor issue, and one which should be guided by a thoughtful balance between performance and intrusiveness, seeking an optimum which both maximizes performance while minimizing intrusiveness. There will be difficult judgment calls to make here. Second, I think that clicking on 'x' to dismiss the banner needs to be very strongly respected for any given session. Third, I think that - if empirical data suggests that people who click on the 'x' are very poor prospects for actually donating, then even on subsequent sessions we might as well leave them alone. How poor is 'very poor'? This is a matter for judgment calls. Fourth, to the maximum extent possible we should try to link up "this person has already donated in this campaign" and "therefore don't ask them again". I note that this is somewhat difficult since unlike most large websites, we don't do a whole lot of tracking and joining up data. However, because this is a complaint I see sometimes on social media, we should do what we can.
On the whole, arguments that "WMF should not raise as much money because I find the banners too large" are not persuasive to me. As I said in my original answer, I think we should be very serious about fundraising and should absolutely avoid a strategy of being perpetually broke. A responsible WMF will have serious and healthy reserves, with the endowment on top of that. I want Wikipedia to be safe for 20 more years and then 120 years beyond that... and more.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:22, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Hey Jimbo! Thanks for providing me with your opinion on the banners. I do see a point in a lot of what you said. I agree that the WMF shouldn't stop raising money because the banner size. Just because there's a giant banner doesn't mean there's no need to stop raising money (in fact, some news sites have banners that cover the entire screen so you have to pay up in order to read the article, which Wikipedia hasn't gone to that point yet and hopefully never will). I also agree that we should try and find a balance between getting the message through and also not being too intrusive. I definitely agree that clicking the 'x' should be respected for that session, and if the 'x' continues to be clicked then that should just be taken as the user isn't interested in donating so leave them alone. I'm not saying the WMF should stop fundraising until they become poor. But I feel that if they continue to raise money they should start putting some of that money towards fixing some things that have remained broken for years (such as all the issues with the mobile version of Wikipedia, which may just end up needing to get deprecated at this point if there are too many issues to fix, and possibly just start it again fresh). They should also make it so that if you donate they should leave you alone for the rest of that year. I've noticed that since the start of these new "endowment" banners, the complaints about them at the help desk have started to come back, so something should definitely be done if user's are that annoyed by it. Again, thank you for your opinion on the fundraising banners. You've provided some very good points related to them that I previously had not thought of before. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 15:21, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Not a comment on the above, but The Daily Telegraph (Andrew Orlowski) had an opinion: [5]. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 22:07, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
"Andrew Orlowski had an opinion" - This same Andrew Orlowski I suppose: "Andrew Orlowski, an internet journalist, calls Wikipedia enthusiasts "the Khmer Rouge in diapers" - according to Times Higher Education [6]. So, the point is, he's been trolling about Wikipedia for 15+ years now. I'm not particularly concerned about his latest hand-wringing. My answer about the banners generally is up above. :-)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:46, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Here's a different opinion:[7] Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:15, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
But to read it I needed to get past their own fundraising banner. Thincat (talk) 10:18, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
One can quickly see the headline starts with "Wokepedia", before their pop-up hard-blocks the rest. Pointless to even try to read something from a troll masquerading as a journalist beyond that. ValarianB (talk) 17:58, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Lol yeah tried to read it myself, but its awfully rich complaining about banners when your website is pay to view and blocks you from even seeing headlines because of their massive Christmas fundraising banner. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 23:35, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
He's just a right-wing troll who labels anything remotely left-leaning as "woke", just like how there are people on the left who label anything remotely right-leaning as "fascist". Both throw pejoratives at their opponents rather than engaging with their actual arguments and ideas. The fact that a professional journalist would resort to such pejorative name-calling is even worse. X-Editor (talk) 02:39, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
For whatever reason, the headline in the print-version was different:[8] Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:59, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Happy Holidays!


Gilc (talk) is wishing you Happy Holidays! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user Happy Holidays, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Happy holidays}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

— Preceding undated comment added 03:49, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Hero of 2021 in Wikiquote

My 2021 hero in Wikiquote is the English user:Gilldragon, who writes articles with bishops' quotes in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. Contributions. Pay attention.--Сергій Липко (talk) 20:13, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Could you please help?

Dear Jimbo,

Thank you for Wikimedia. Can i ask for your help? You helped me previously to clarify the sum of all knowledge at https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_190#Please_your_meaning_of_%22the_sum_of_all_knowledge%22?.

I am a part-time unpaid Dutch Wikimedian in residence (WIR) at the African Studies Centre of Leiden University (https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/African_Studies_Centre_Leiden) and I have been blocked at nl.wikipedia now for many months because of my perhaps whistleblowing request for a sockpuppet check there in last April.

Admittedly, i should be less outspoken and more diplomatic in my dealings on nl.wiki. (I protested repeatedly the inappropriate deletions of text and images.) WMF Trust&Safety has been contacted some time ago, but my block persists. Local moderators and Arbitration Committee of nl.wikipedia did unfortunately not adhere to their Rules and Regulations.

This situation makes no sense and is unfair, but more importantly it is also unproductive: for instance, i cannot now work for Africa on Dutch-language wikipedia as a WIR, it complicated a Wikipedia workshop a public library in my home town asked me to deliver, and hampers further opportunities in my promoting Wikimedia. For instance, I cannot now propose a new Wikimedia project to a Dutch science museum. Other more personal projects, in history, literature, science and generally in making nl.wikipedia more easily understood by the Dutch and Flemish general reader - the vocabulary used now often proves to be too unnecessarily complicated - are of course halted as well.

I have been a happy Wikimedian since 2006 and was lucky enough to do Wikimedia-related work for 13 Dutch GLAM institutes, resulting in the donation of nearly 300,000 images to Wikimedia Commons and hundreds of Wikipedia articles in various languages. For further information you can contact Jos Damen, librarian and WIR-project manager at Leiden University. (He is Wikimedian User:Vysotski in his own right and allowed me to divulge this fact here.)

I thought Wikimedia is not about exclusion but about free knowledge, we want to be the encyclopedia everyone can edit. Good-faith editing and the trust that hard work will be treated fairly is essential. Therefore some decency and justice with a safety valve against errors of judgement is needed. You might be that safety valve in some cases.

  • Could you please help? (Of course i should exercise self-reflection and draw lessons from this affair myself.)

Thank you for considering the above, thanks also for Wikimedia, and a Merry Christmas to you! Hansmuller (talk) 14:04, 24 December 2021 (UTC) Hans Muller, Wikimedian in Residence at Leiden University, African Studies Centre https://nl.linkedin.com/in/hans-muller-conservator

Hansmuller Could you perhaps explain the situation that led to your block? I see that it stems from an ArbCom issue, but Google Translate is not very good and I do not speak Dutch, nor do I imagine most folks here can. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 16:39, 24 December 2021 (UTC)
Apologies for the accidental rv, Merry Festivities to all! . .dave souza, talk 18:28, 24 December 2021 (UTC)
Dear @CaptainEek, Thanks for your interest. Now we're in for a complicated story, sorry.
I was blocked in response to a possibly whistleblowing request for a sockpuppet check on nl.wikipedia in last April - see the link below. I thought it was important for articles on literary authors to include a citation of their work, just like we naturally add on the biography article of a painter a picture of a painting. We have done this on the Dutch wikipedia for many authors, although certainly not (yet) for all authors. For the Dutch-Swiss author Belle van Zuylen/Madame de Charrière a citation is now accepted on various Wikipedias: the English, German and French wikipedia. However, on the Dutch language article w:nl:Belle van Zuylen it was deleted many times, in the end on the basis on a seeming consensus on the talk page by a few wikipedians with the same very artificial arguments in comparable wording.
Because these same editors were involved in unreasonable deletion requests of my work elsewhere, and always edited at different non-overlapping times, i suggested to an ArbCom member that i request a sockpuppet check. This ArbCom member did not reply to that suggestion specifically, so clearly did not have problems with that request. So i asked for that check, mentioning that is was only a hypothesis to be verified or refuted. (I added that in case of a real sockpuppet, there had been an admirable production on nl.wikipedia by the sockpuppeteer.)
Then i was blocked by a few moderators in response, without being consulted by them as moderators should do according to their Rules. Some (ex-)moderators were already angry with me because i had protested their other inappropriate deletions of free texts and images on nl.wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. It is a long story, but i can write it up if you like. I explained it to the Dutch ArbCom. A fairly motivated sockpuppet check request should of course never trigger a block of the person who brings up the case.
So i think it is unfair and especially unproductive to prevent me from contributing to nl.wikipedia as a Wikipedian in Residence, and as a private editor like i have done since 2006, nearly always without problems. I wrote a new article every week or so, and I would like to continue giving uncomplicated and thorough Wikipedia workshops as i tried to do since 2013.
Thanks for reading. This is what you wanted to see explained, the origin of the block, by a few moderators? If you have any questions, perhaps about the ArbCom decision - a shorter story - please state them so i can reply. Thanks again, with kind regards, Hansmuller (talk) 10:04, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 December 2021

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:07, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Hello, i would like to inform you about Changing the Username?

Is there a way to change username without making a new account? - samiwikia 7:36 PM Samiwikia (talk) 18:36, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) @Samiwikia: short answer: go to Special:GlobalRenameRequest. Long answer: read Wikipedia:Changing username. — xaosflux Talk 18:46, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

Merchandise giveaway nomination

A t-shirt!
A token of thanks
Hi Jimbo Wales! I've nominated you (along with all other active admins) to receive a solstice season gift from the WMF. Talk page stalkers are invited to comment at the nomination. Enjoy! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk ~~~~~
A snowflake!

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:50, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

Jimbo Wales,
Thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia, and a Happy New Year to you and yours! Dunutubble (talk) 16:57, 1 January 2022 (UTC)
– Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year}} to user talk pages.
Dunutubble (talk) 16:57, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

Userboxes

Mr Wales, New Year's greetings to you and your family. I hope you will forgive me for what will probably be a long message. Like many people on the planet, I have used and relied on Wikipedia for years. I have corrected several typos and even rewritten a few sentences. I have donated money to Wikipedia to keep it going. I hadn't bothered to create an account until recently. I did so because one day while looking for information on the new iphone, I somehow ended up looking at a user's home page. On that page were the words "This user opposes the legalization of gay marriage, but does not necessarily oppose LGBT rights in general". I was shocked. Here is an American user openly stating that they wish to deprive fellow citizens of their legal right to marriage (affirmed by the Supreme Court) because they are gay.

I presumed that Wikipedia was welcoming to all and would not permit such a hateful and bigoted statement from its users. I naively assumed that if I just told someone about this, it would be swiftly dealt with. So I created an account and located the Wikipedia "help desk". But instead of getting help, I was told by a Wikipedia administrator that "People are allowed to be anti-LGBT as long as they treat all users with dignity and respect and(likely) also keep their political or social views to their user page". I was also told by that same Wikipedia administrator that I could not name the person who had proudly and voluntarily put those hateful words on their home page.

I was told that I could put userboxes on my own homepage in support of gay rights, like that would make a difference. I was told that the help desk wasn't the right place to try to change policy, even though the policy already says "statements attacking or vilifying groups of editors, persons, or other entities" are not allowed on home pages. I was told "English Wikipedia is generally considered LGBT-friendly", even though it allows users to be openly anti-LGBT+ and advocate denying rights to LGBT+ people. I was told I would be welcome here but I can not feel welcome if I know that users are able to give voice to their hateful thoughts without being called out as bigots.

I was going to drop this and give up on Wikipedia. After speaking with friends and family about it, I decided that I had to make an effort to draw attention to this hate and bigotry. I know that you are personally very concerned about human rights. Mr Wales, how can you allow your users to advocate that some people should be deprived their legal rights? How can hate speech like this be allowed on Wikipedia? Irene Croat (talk) 17:56, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

 Courtesy link: Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2021 December 27 § Opposition to gay marriage? ― Qwerfjkltalk 21:00, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Wishing you a happy 2022! Happy holidays

Happy New Year!
Jimbo Wales,
Have a great 2022 and thanks for your continued contributions to Wikipedia.

   – Background color is Very Peri (#6868ab), Pantone's 2022 Color of the year

Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year 2022}} to user talk pages.

– North America1000 16:27, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:12, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Barnstar

Jimmy Wales Barnstar
For being Jimmy Wales. Sahaib3005 (talk) 17:26, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
Well, that was easy! :-) --Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:53, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
Speak for yourself. Oh wait... Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:28, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Role of Jimmy Wales has an RFC

Wikipedia:Role of Jimmy Wales has an RFC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Colonestarrice (talk) 11:20, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

A little bit disappointed

Hi Jimmy. Hope this finds you well. This is long, so it's fine to skip it, but it has been on my mind a while... I don't have an action item here really, but just want to express that I'm somewhat disappointed in how much (or little) my colleagues are taking to heart to spirit of Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. I think that you and I been on the same side of this since the Brian Peppers thing (Peppers is dead and hopefully at peace now and has been for a while, so I suppose I can use his name). If I recall, the purpose of WP:BLP was twofold: one, to make sure we don't expose the project to scorn, loss of reputation, and even possible legal trouble by having any more John Seigenthaler situations, but also, "We are not here to make people sad" as I believe you said once. It's the second purpose that people seem not to be getting, and IMO that kind of sucks.

So, over the last couple of years or so -- I'm going to avoid specific information as much as possible and not give diffs, you all can trust me or not, this will allow me to speak more freely since it'd be a job to dig u who I'm talking about -- I've been involved with some problematic situations:

1) An athlete, never made the top level but is notable anyway because he was a #1 draft pick, and more notable because he didn't make it which is really rare for a #1 pick. He was injured in an off-field incident, that's why his career didn't pan out. The details of the incident I'd prefer to have elided, because it was a bar fight in his bohunk Southern town. It's different than a getting T-boned or something, it's not a good look. We don't say "This _____ _____ fool got drunk and stupid and ruined his life", but you can kind of infer it. I suppose that's useful info when getting a handle on the person, but I mean is that the only factor here. Do we have to blare this poor schmuck's foibles to the world? Is that what we are, now?

Well that went nowhere fast. The info's in the article and is going to stay.

2) A... person... we can't really describe what he is and consequently we can't come up with a proper article title and lede, but people like to write about him, so he meets WP:GNG based on coverage, a lot of it pearl-clutching and look-at-THIS-terrible-person cluckery, but legit coverage in legit publications. He's a terrible, awful, person. Mentally ill to some degree in my view, altho that's hard to prove.

At any rate, fine. You've got a legit source saying he's been charged with [horrific crime], we can publish it, even if it's not why he's notable and is really more piling-on of "look here's ANOTHER way this person is horrible" and even tho he hadn't been actually convicted of anything (and after all WP:BLP does say "A living person accused of a crime is presumed innocent until convicted by a court of law"). Nothing to be done about that -- have to inform the public! Fine, whatever, but my point with this guy was that saying he was a [horrific criminal] outside the article -- the talk page, a WP:AFD page, notice boards, etc -- if you say someone is a [horrific criminal] you have to provide a proximate reference right there proving it. Because these pages can get separated from the article. Yes its extra work, but "fuck this guy, I'm busy" isn't really that great an attitude I don't think.

Anyway I tried redacting this stuff, got dragged to ANI twice and (even tho WP:BLP says "Contentious material about living persons... that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion" [emphasis in original] I did not make my point, meeting an indifferent-to-hostile reaction from the admin corps, and the unref'd material is still there.

3) Another person, marginally notable in his own right -- a private citizen, but article-worthy I suppose -- who was accused of a horrific crime. Convicted too, IIRC. The sources were the Daily Mail and one other not-much-better gossip source (I f'get which). And there were zero other sources -- none. Nobody could dig up any, and we looked. So fine, the material was removed from the article, as is proper.

The problem is, the phrase "[Person] did [horrible thing]" is still floating around the Wikipedia, on the article talk page and the BLP board and maybe elsewere, with no usable refs whatsoever anywhere, and my point was that's not OK and needs to be fixed. I did not win my point, and had at least one administrator opposing me.

4) Singer, famous singer. She has a lot more resources than those others, but still. She liked to play cute with her birthdate, not a big deal (one year difference) but still, it's something she liked to do. Just a little game, something a magazine might comment on and try to pin her down and she could make cutesy little cryptic things and all. Harmless fun. Well anyway, an editor, in what would generally be a admirable demonstration of tenacity, tracked down with some effort the singer's real birthdate -- dug up some incontrovertible sources that People magazine etc had not bothered or been able to.

Excellent work, but do we have to ruin her game by publishing it and giving the sources? I said no, but did not win the point.

Losing streaks are no fun.

So the thing is, the arguments I make around these type of issues are of the nature

"We are one of the biggest websites in world, we are very powerful, and these guys are mostly hapless mooks. With power comes responsibility, and punching down is not a good look. We define these people's public face pretty much, for most of them -- the first result on a google search, and the source of much mirroring. And forever, or close enough. The Wikipedia won't last forever, but its database of material may last a long time. Can we not give these people a break."

It doesn't get thru. I feel like I'm staring into the void, sometimes. It's not so much that people don't care (they don't) as that they can't even get what I'm saying. Editors genuinely and truly seem to believe, most of them, that they are stepping outside the moral universe when they sit down at the keyboard. Our rules are everything, and everything else is nothing, and if the rules don't clearly prohibit grinding some random citizen into the dirt, well, it is what it is. If the admin corps was a little more supportive of us trying to be better about all this, that would help a lot. But they're not, and nobody can make them. And the Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard seems pretty much focused just on whether refs are good enough and not the other part.

And I mean Wikipedia is a hobby. It's not like you're a cog for North American Veeblefetzer and your livelihood depends on being heartless and amoral. Hobby. I like model trains, but if the rules of my model train club were causing actual grief to actual human strangers, I think I'd not follow them?

And you know, can even call on the text of WP:BLP to an extent, and I mean after all the first sentence is "Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page" [emphasis in original] and elsewhere says "Biographies of living persons ('BLPs') must be written conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy... the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment." (And further, this applies to "other pages, including talk pages".)

But it is true that that's just a few scattered sentences, and the main thrust of WP:BLP, the way it is written, is that your number one job is to make sure you have rock-solid sources and it's legit material (not original reasearch or POV etc). The stuff about "don't be a bully" is there, but more scattered around and dissipated, and not stated directly: "Don't publish this shit unless it's an absolute stone necessity to fulfill our core mission, which is very seldom. And that goes triple if the person is a private citizen or subject, defined broadly". Just because its not strongly and clearly stated in one place shouldn't matter. But it does. (FWIW we define "public figure" by the very inclusive definition used in American law to protect the 1st Amendment by limiting grounds for libel suits, rather than by actual common sense that most people would use, but that's not going to change.)

Oh well. I just wish the attitude was "can we find a way to justify not publishing this" rather than "can we interpret rules such that we can publish this". Nothing to be done I suppose. And, of course usually when it's you against the majority, you have to consider that it's you that's wrong. I do this often enough. I don't want to, here. I don't want to believe it. Herostratus (talk) 04:04, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

January 2022

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in post-1992 politics of the United States and closely related people. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 05:02, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 05:03, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Almost coinciding with the birthday...

...there are almost 10,000 editors with 10,000 edits on English Wikipedia. 18 to go within a few edits each (haven't checked how many of those 18 were active). Seems a number that 10-digit monkeys would enjoy (I've kept track of it once-in-awhile for a couple of years and nice to see it just about there). Randy Kryn (talk) 13:37, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia at 21

Wikipedia's old enough to drink in the US now! Seems like it deserves this one :) Here's to many more years of Wikipedia. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓

This is the 21 year old WikiPedia!

But seriously, Jimmy, how does it feel, being 21 years into this project?

They say that good things come to those who wait…

And that’s true! Wikipedia now has over 6,439,141 articles, over 42,884,645 users, and over 1,061,147,195 edits!

Give yourself a pat on the back, Jimmy! You took Wikipedia this far! — 3PPYB6 — TALK — CONTRIBS — 19:27, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

@CaptainEek — The wiki-liquor has been unlocked! Hopefully, Wikipedia will continue for the next 21 years, possibly more! — 3PPYB6 — TALK — CONTRIBS — 02:10, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Happy birthday to us! Anyone who is under 21 can literally not remember a world without Wikipedia, and many of them have never been limited by a lack of access to general reference works because Wikipedia has had the answer to almost every question they can ask from the moment they were literate enough to read it. — Bilorv (talk) 18:23, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Hey, Jimbo, any chance you could get the coders to fix Media Viewer so it isn't actively violating my copyright?

Okay, moral rights. But Media Viewer has had a bug for at least eight years:

If an image:

  • Has multiple authors

and

  • One of them has a Creator: template, the other(s) do not

...Then only the author with a Creator template will be shown as the author.

Here's the but report, where workable solutions are rejected for not being pretty enough:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T68606


...That was 2014. That solution was then rejected because it didn't look pretty enough.

Seriously, it's been seven years, and it's currently triaged as "future". And has been encouraging anyone who gets images from Wikipedia articles to leave me out of the credit for the images I restore that whole fucking time.

I don't want to do anything about this myself, because I care too much about access to information to ever restrict Wikipedia from using my images. But it's a fucking ridiculous situation, where a core part of Wikipedia's software can violate some copyrights, and the coders don't see this as a big deal. I'm willing to wait. But after seven years, I'm not sure I believe anyone's working on it anymore. I have to jump through hoops to prove copyright before I can upload to Commons, but Wikipedia itself is apparently much more lax about copyright law.

I live in Britain. I can't help but generate copyright in my works. Literally the only one I care about is the moral right of attribution, and even then, I'm not that fussed if random websites fail to attribute me. But it'd be damn nice if Wikipedia wasn't actively encouraging them not to attribute me, because it automatically strips out my information when showing the images in Media Viewer!

I'm just frustrated. I'm not sue-happy, you'll never get a lawsuit from me or a takedown notice or anything. I actively want Wikipedia to use my stuff. I just kinda want some buggy software that I pointed out had this bug as soon as it was implemented, and was assured it would be fixed, to actually get fixed. It's been eight years I've been waiting patiently and not raising a fuss, trusting that it would be fixed. Wikipedia is 21 years old. That means for a third of the time Wikipedia has existed, it's been denying credit to its users, saving it for famous people alone.

That the coders actively refuse to even try to fix this situation, and just promise that at "some time in the future" some Structured Data might magically fix it, even though it'd probably be populated by bots using the same code they do, but if I want to go to my 715 featured pictures and however many more didn't get featured over the years and hand put in my name for every single fucking one, then it'll be fixed. ...Okay, I'm really, really frustrated here. And after eight years, have literally no reason to think that anything will ever be fixed. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 06:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Adam Cuerden: it happens to be the once-a-year community tech wishlist survey proposal time, right now! I suggest you open this over at meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Multimedia and Commons. — xaosflux Talk 10:10, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
We shouldn't need enormous community momentum followed by a random lottery of which top wishlist items are actually worked on by the WMF (in a reasonable time period) to solve a legal issue, which this is. — Bilorv (talk) 17:59, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Given that the WMF is apparently too broke to spend money on fixing the software (they even run fundraisers asking people to donate money to defend Wikipedia's independence) it is probably easier to focus on workarounds. For example, you could ask Commons to disable MediaViewer to protect your copyright, or get someone to run a bot to remove all author templates from all images where there is additional content in the author field. —Kusma (talk) 11:17, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Oh, holy shit: I just discovered something: It only uses the first Creator template. So in any case where there's more than one Creator, IT WILL BREAK. Check out https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wilkinson_Call#/media/File:Wilkinson_Call_-_Brady-Handy.jpg Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 16:20, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Adam Cuerden, you should probably contact the WMF's legal department. They can tell the devs to work on this. —Kusma (talk) 17:23, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
@Kusma: I did. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 17:38, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
What did they say? your personal case may be more UK "moral rights" but violating the license of every cc-by file that has more than one creator should register as a potential problem in the US as well. —Kusma (talk) 17:58, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Adam, I looked at your user home page and it appears that you mainly "restore" older images. On this Matthew Brady photograph (File:John Lorimer Worden - Mathew Brady - right photograph.jpg) I see you have added yourself to the author field. Are you saying that you think you should be credited as an "author" because of the work you have done restoring Brady's photo and the viewer isn't showing that? Polycarpa aurata (talk) 17:00, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Polycarpa aurata: Fields are a blunt thing. It's not like there's a "restoration by" field, nor is there an "engraved by" field, or a "publisher" field, and, as such, author fields can get quite complex. Consider File:George_Romney_-_William_Shakespeare_-_The_Tempest_Act_I,_Scene_1.jpg which has five different authors (and Media Viewer shows the first only). Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 17:35, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

But publishers are not authors, so why are they in the author part of the description? There must be many cases where there are multiple authors of a work, so I agree that this is a problem, but you seem to have raised this concern specifically because you are not being credited as an "author". You are not the "author" of these works. You should not be credited as such. Add a note to the decription that you restored it, but do not try to claim authorship. Polycarpa aurata (talk) 17:48, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Polycarpa aurata: I don't think you quite understand image restoration or the depths it goes into (nor that practically everyone who does image restoration wouldn't work on Wikipedia if that was enforced). It's normal to credit anyone who has a major role in an image. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 17:52, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Adam, I have been to many museums and art galleries. I have seen many pieces of art that have been professionally. painstakingly, expertly restored. I did not see credits for those restorers next to the artworks, nor would I expect to. I think most people here contribute their time and energy working on this group project with the hope that it will be helpful to others, not with the expectation that they will be rewarded with praise or credits. I'm sorry, but I do not believe that you should be given credit as an "author" for restoring public domain images. I do not believe that is normal practice. Polycarpa aurata (talk) 18:03, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

@Polycarpa aurata: They also get paid for their work, and part of that pay reflects them not being credited. I live in Britain. With Britain's low, low low standards for gaining a new copyright - which Wikipedia have actually accepted before when it came to digitizations of Darwin material, which they banned from the project under UK law - I could mark every single thing I did with a Creative Commons license, and Wikipedia would have to accept that or delete my files. And if I did do that, I'd have the right to sue. But I don't want to disrupt Wikipedia, I just would rather get some credit for my work. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 18:06, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Also to Adam, I see you just filed a case with ArbCom. I will point what has been said above - there is nothing on en.wiki that can be done with this - this is 100% an issue with the developers at the Wikimedia Foundation to take action with. (And reading that bug report, they're worried about implement something that affects less than 1% of the pages that could break several magnitudes more, hence why it is a very low priority issue.) --Masem (t) 17:05, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
It's a copyright issue so 1% of pages is potentially a huge problem. —Kusma (talk) 17:24, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
@Masem: Is it less than 1%? As far as I can tell, that number is completely made up. Given that MediaViewer fails in such simple cases as Brady-Handy images where there's two creator templates - https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wilkinson_Call#/media/File:Wilkinson_Call_-_Brady-Handy.jpg - I'd suspect that 1% of cases is actually quite a bit higher. Also, I fail to see how including all text in the Author field is likely to break many images at all.
There are plenty of images without Creator: templates where MediaViewer includes all text in the Author field of the Information template. How would this cause any more issues than what's already being done? And how would it be a bigger problem to accidentally, say, include some explanatory text than it is to remove credit from Handy on a Brady-Handy image? Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 17:35, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
I have no idea what the numbers are. All I'm saying is what I'm getting as the read as for why WMF hasn't fixed or adjusted for this case, as the devs consider it an edge case that by fixing it could temporarily harm multiple other images that don't presently have this problem. That is the group of people you will need to convince this is a serious problem they need to fix, not us on en.wiki. --Masem (t) 17:43, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
I'd like to see a single example of an image that would be broken. And the point is, if it's not going to be fixed, we probably shouldn't be using MediaViewer. I just did a sample of eight images using the random file button on Commons. None of them used Creator: templates, but if they had, two would have been broken, as they had multiple authors. If we consider the percentage as "files that use the Creator template at all", then more research is needed. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 17:44, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
I think the point is that the code is written shoddily enough that a quick bash out of something that might fix this would probably introduce unexpected bugs, so they'd actually have to take this as a serious issue and spend significant time on it to fix and debug. — Bilorv (talk) 17:59, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Ah, yes, the "Let's push broken code to production" then insist any problems are other people's method. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 18:06, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Which i think many would agree, this is a big enough issue that it deserves to be fixed. Unintended consequences or not. I'm with Adam on this one. CC only works as a social construct if we actually acknowledge the people who contribute. And I think this is a massive issue that most contributors to the image are not acknowledged in most cases of viewing the image. — Shibbolethink (♔ ♕) 18:12, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
A thing to keep in mind: at least on en.wiki even with CC images, the attribution/credit for creation is always given on the File: page, and we regularly do not use attribution on the thumbnail/in-body images in our articles (see MOS:CREDITS). I do think its odd that for MediaViewer that one of the creator fields makes it to the page but not the other, and that I agree is odd and should be fixed, but its trying to convince the developers to fix it. --Masem (t) 18:17, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Absolutely, it's big enough that it should be fixed. But I would imagine this is not necessarily the fault of the programmer at the bottom who deals with these sorts of issues, but their manager or manager's manager (etc.) for not hiring enough people to solve the number of problems of this (high) criticality. — Bilorv (talk) 18:27, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
@Bilorv: Agreed. But it's still galling to have it repeatedly dismissed as being an issue over on Phabricator. A tiny bit of sympathy and I could have made my peace, but instead...
When solutions are being dismissed because they don't look attractive enough, it feels like you're bottom priority. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 18:39, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
@Polycarpa aurata: If I didn't care about attribution I'd put Template:CC0 Release on my userpage to disclaim any and all need for others to attribute what I do. I believe if you want to stand by your implication that it's wrong for us to demand attribution, perhaps you should put that template on your userpage yourself. It's quite easy, just copy {{CC0 Release}} onto your userpage at User:Polycarpa aurata and save. Then all of your contributions will be free to use by anyone else forever without any attribution or whatever else. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 02:48, 17 January 2022 (UTC)


Oh... Oh dear.

https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Battle_of_Spotsylvania_Court_House#/media/File:Battle_of_Spottsylvania_by_Thure_de_Thulstrup.jpg

I live in Britain, where the threshold for gaining a new copyright is exceedingly low, and here we see an example of actively violating my Creative Commons license with Media Viewer. Here we see Media Viewer creating a blatant CC-by violation. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 18:15, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

See my comment above: the file: page for that still shows all appropriate attribution, and that is where we (both en.wiki and WMF) considers where the copyright information may be found in full. I don't disagree that we should be putting restoration credits with the original author's credits on the MediaViewer page, but we're not violating copyright because we still have all the copyright information on the page we consider to be the authoritive location for that information. --Masem (t) 18:23, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
A point, but it's at the least encouraging copyright abuse in others, especially as it's also mislicensed by Media Viewer.
I'd probably be a lot more upset if I wasn't completely willing to relicense that to try and protect Wikipedia. But I can't imagine that's the only case, and not everyone is me. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.5% of all FPs 18:28, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
Okay, a suggestion: look at the Commons template C:Template:Credit line. It goes in the information section to provide a credit line that (as I see from past MediaViewer talk archives) should lets you create a customize attribute statement. (eg: [9]). PITA to redo all your images, but this would be a real easy fix around the MediaViewer issue. --Masem (t) 18:43, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
I seriously doubt that Adam's images are the only ones with more than one creator. "Let us edit a couple million image description pages so we don't have to change the software" isn't a "real easy fix" unless someone writes a bot. —Kusma (talk) 19:12, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

WikiTrivia

Pretty fun. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:24, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Criticism of Wikipedia by Steve Kirsch. Interested in your thoughts...

Good morning. Whilst trawling the internet this morning, I came across a scathing piece by a user who spoke out about vaccination against COVID, and claims that Wikipedia's "higher editors" pretty much destroyed his profile, removed his awards, donations, etc, and turned him "from a good guy into a menace to society" across the space of about 4 days.

I was interested in seeing what yourself as founder of Wikipedia, and other seniors thought of this. I'm sure the guy's probably just getting back at Wikipedia, but he's casting the site in a very bad light.

The article is here. Your thoughts on it would be most welcome. Thank you. Dane|Geld 10:38, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Looks like a good promotional piece on how Wikipedia requires good sourcing and, if no citation is provided, the content can be removed or changed. MarcGarver (talk) 10:47, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Not to pass judgment on what was done to this guy's BLP, but any author that invokes Sanger (who only recently called to kill those who disagree) in a positive way isn't doing his cause any favours. Granted, this article is a month old, almost a lifetime in the ever-spiralling vortex of Larry's descent into madness, but it'll complicate getting his point across and taken seriously just the same. AngryHarpy‍talk 11:03, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Per this article [10], an interesting man. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:06, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
He got the idea that vaccines are dangerous from a man he hired to clean his carpets is probably all we need to know about him.DeCausa (talk) 11:55, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Now now, clean carpets are a good thing. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:01, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
I think the best you could say is that at least, unlike Sanger (who has got as far as retweeting Neo-Nazis on Twitter now), he doesn't appear to have fallen so far down the nutcase rabbit hole that he's emerged in Mongolia. Black Kite (talk) 12:03, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
If anyone is interested in some part-time work, this offer for a $1,000 per hour wage to debate him may still be available. MrOllie (talk) 13:35, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
I didn't read the article, so I could look at our article with virgin eyes. First thing I notice is the huge connected contributor tag, although the article has already been pared down and rewritten, and is plenty well watched enough now that it doesn't need to remain tagged. Secondly, we have The following month, Kirsch appeared in a YouTube video posted with Bret Weinstein and Robert W. Malone to discuss COVID-19 vaccines. In the video, Kirsch makes several false claims, including that spike proteins used in COVID-19 vaccines are "very dangerous". cited to [11] and [12]. Neither source says "several false claims," or says he made any statements about spike proteins. The first source says The third person in the video is identified as "serial entrepreneur" Steve Kirsch, who said he is an engineer. He cited a claim by Canadian viral immunologist Byram Bridle that the vaccine doesn’t stay in the shoulder, where it’s injected, but "goes throughout your entire body, it goes to your brain to your heart." That isn't false, it's just dumb to point out, because obviously it spreads throughout your body, otherwise it wouldn't be an effective vaccine. The second source says One post (here) links to a YouTube video (here) with the caption: “Spike protein is very dangerous, it’s cytotoxic (Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Bret Weinstein).” which is about an instragram that isn't archived and no longer exists linking to a youtube video that isn't archived and no longer exists. Then it says The 15-minute video shows three individuals discussing the COVID-19 vaccine and the spike protein is repeatedly described as “very dangerous” and “cytotoxic.” It does not name who described it, just that it was repeatedly described. In fact, the first source says Bret Weinstein, who is identified in the video as an evolutionary biologist, is the one who says the spike protein in the vaccines "is very dangerous, it’s cytotoxic."
Us: Kirsch makes several false claims, including that spike proteins used in COVID-19 vaccines are "very dangerous".
Source: Bret Weinstein, who is identified in the video as an evolutionary biologist, is the one who says the spike protein in the vaccines "is very dangerous, it’s cytotoxic."
Looks like, as it is currently written and sourced, it's a BLPvio. Making negative assertations about a BLP without supporting sources is pretty much a no-no. Also, at this point the connected contributor tag is pretty much just a badge of shame. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 13:59, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
@DaneGeld, he's unhappy because he'd been editing the article about himself and had inserted some things sourced to his own websites or to sources WP doesn't consider reliable. The fact he'd done so had more or less missed the radar (the article had been barely watched) until his COVID misinformation campaign started, at which point other editors noticed the article had been heavily edited by its subject and, as we always do, started checking the sources and removing the stuff that wasn't adequately sourced. And of course the article about him changed once his misinformation started to get covered heavily in RS and people saw the article also hadn't been updated.
And then he wrote that WP "transformed me into an evil person in just four days", which had the again normal consequence of getting even more eyes on the article. Personally I don't think the article in its current version makes him look any worse than any of the recent press coverage has. But of course he'd like the article to include stuff from sources we don't consider reliable -- he'd been arguing for that at the article talk. He also wants us to do original research to somehow prove that what he's arguing is true, which as an editor yourself you know we don't do, and he'd been arguing that at the article talk too. Which is what finally got him blocked: he was being disruptive.
Oh, and the reason the article about him in Everipedia article looks just the way it did here back in August is because Everipedia copied all of Wikipedia when it forked, and Kirsch's article hasn't been edited since. Just one more thing Kirsch doesn't understand but thinks he does. valereee (talk) 14:31, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Good edits to the article, valereee. It happens, from time to time, that an article subject "has" a more or less self-written BLP in peace and quiet for years, and then at some point someone notice a ton PAG falls on them, which they often feel is somewhat bewildering. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:54, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Oddly enough, the PAG dealing with treatment and sourcing for BLPs seems not to be adhered to in the article. Trimming cruft and adding recent events is all well and good, but adding BLPvios isn't a good look. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 16:03, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, GGS. SFR, I've joined you at the article talk, sorry, didn't see that before now! valereee (talk) 17:36, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Just letting everyone know that valereee completely addressed my concerns at the article. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 18:07, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, it was actually an interesting article to work on.
I think one of the problems we have is that when someone is as difficult to work with as this article subject, it gets editors into a bit of punishment mode. He just doesn't play nice with anyone whom he can't persuade to do what he wants, which is exactly how he managed to get himself into so much trouble at CEFT. valereee (talk) 17:30, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
This is the type of thing happening too much of WP over the last 5 or 6 years...any person or entity associate with extreme or fringe views with that coverage published in RSes have had their articles because hit pieces and laundry lists of every "bad" thing that can be said about that topic at the cost of covering the topic objectively and in a dispassionate, impartial manner. We don't want to whitewash away this criticism when it is common to multiple RSes, but I've seen this used to push a singular critical statement into articles, creating the laundry list effect. And even when this criticism is backed by many sources, some editors take it to meN that all other parts of these articles covering what you normally expect of bios or groups are taken as having undue weight compared to the criticism and significantly reduced. As such we end up with articles like this one here which come to only or heavily focus on negative coverage, which is not appropriate in tone, as well as OR with wikieditors adding their only feelings only these people or groups in wikivoice just because it may seem close to the same criticism from RSes. We need to be far more aware if this problem, though at the same be diligent for those that want to paint these people and groups far too much in the positive direction. Eg we have to watch for coi editing and overreliance on sps sourced, but still should look to incorporate standard objective material we would normally include. --Masem (t) 14:44, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Oh, I don't know - Sanger's article is remarkably friendly to him considering his recent social media includes cosying up to Neo-Nazis, claiming fascism is a leftist ideology, and suggesting that people who reject gene therapy for COVID should be executed (and thats just in the last week)? Black Kite (talk) 18:44, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Although, when and if Mr. Sanger's more outrageous assertions begin to define him, similar to like-minded individuals such as Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and Mike Lindell, and such defining characterizations are found in reliable sources, then Mr. Sanger's article should be edited as needed. ValarianB (talk) 19:46, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
  • These comments sorta self-demonstrate my point. Up front, we should care less exactly how an individual editor feels about a person or group, but as soon as that turns to the idea that WP should vilify these, without the clear backing of multitude of sources is part of the problem. Editors seem to get blind by their feelings on these topics towards NPOV issues when there is an apparent amount of criticism towards a person or group that seemingly backs their position. Even with a multitude of sources calling out on figures with the same negative voice, WP still should figure out how to present that in a dispassionate voice and in a manner that can lead the reader to understand why the person/group is hated without actually telling the reader they should hate them. If the sources aren't there in multitude, we should not be trying to crowbar that in or making very sure it is attributed opinions. Whereas someone like Alex Jones is universally called a conspiracy theorist, you just don't appear to have the same type of sourcing in this case to be throwing that much criticism at Kirsch. Of course, most of the time fixing these is simply a matter of wording and rearrangement rather than removal of information. --Masem (t) 01:29, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
  • He is (/was) an interesting guy for more reasons than antivaxx stuff. his fortune came from selling the influential niche publishing application FrameMaker (which he was the business force behind) - though as somebody who used that application professionally for around 20 years I find it pretty hard to forgive him that too! Alexbrn (talk) 18:37, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

I think Masem said it well. This story has a lot of different components, many of them very defensible regarding Wikipedia. But we also have the general underlying issue described. Just becoming more aware of / open to seeing the problem will help. But tweaks in the policies and guidelines will help, including updating to adapt to the major changes in media that have occurred in the 15 years since they were essentially set in stone. We should also apply our internal rules to discussions about what Sanger said; it seems that many responses there have been ad hominem regarding Sanger rather than about the discussed issues. North8000 (talk) 20:36, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

  • Just sitting back thinking about how Jimmy's page could become the seed for some pretty interesting video games, especially if you branch out to the drama boards and talk pages of controversial articles. The possibilities are endless. ^_^ Atsme 💬 📧 21:05, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi Jimbo, I have a concern about how Wikipedia handles the CC BY-SA license. In particular, I'm worried that if we delete from public view (using anything that masks who contributed what such as WP:Delrev), we are violating the license to use people's work and are thus in a state of copyright violation. The exact requirement is that each person making changes is to "indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications". I'm assuming the legal folks at Wikimedia have thought about that. I'd like to hear what the thoughts on the issue are. Thanks, Hobit (talk) 05:04, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Do you mean WP:REVDEL? Signed, IAmChaos 06:01, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Wow, all that research I've done and I got the link wrong. Yes, that's right, thank you. Hobit (talk) 16:16, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Hobit, the requirement you cite is part of CC-BY-SA 4.0, but absent from the 3.0 (Unported) license Wikipedia uses. MLauba (Talk) 16:40, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
Yep, that was pointed out to me elsewhere too. Thanks! Hobit (talk) 22:15, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
Thank you so much for creating Wikipedia! It sure was a great idea! Leejordan9 talk
sandbox 22:43, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 January 2022

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:21, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

New navigational box, for pages helpful as introduction

Hi. We have a lot of introductory pages, and a lot of guides and central pages to help newcomers to find introductory pages. I felt that instead of adding another page to list the links, perhaps a nav box might be helpful to some newcomers.

Below is what I came up with so far. Please feel free to comment, provide feedback, etc. this is Template:Introductory pages. thanks!

Thanks! ---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 20:30, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi there

What is your Dog name? lol Puppet reel (talk) 10:29, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Wordle

thum
thum

Kudos for your interview with the BBC just now about Wordle (at the end of the broadcast). You said that "...people are fed up with the viciousness of social media ... there's always a yearning for something simple and good...".

Wikipedia has lost a lot of the simplicity now and is more about the viciousness, eh? So do please keep pointing to the path of virtue. But what we really want to know is how you're doing with today's word. The BBC wouldn't let you post spoilers but we're not so stuffy, right?

Andrew🐉(talk) 14:30, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I just got today's in two. Roast is the best opening word, fight me if you disagree. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 14:38, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
Unfortunately, Wordle was just bought out by the New York Times. Matter of time before it gets tucked behind their paywall. ValarianB (talk) 15:30, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
@ScottishFinnishRadish: Personally I prefer ARISE. While "O" is more common than "I" in a text, in a dictionary "I" is more common than "O" and I see Wordle more as a dictionary test. MarcGarver (talk) 18:40, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
Now we're in a fight. Consider yourself on notice. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 18:45, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
I'll stay neutral in the fight about which starting word is best and why it is so obviously TALES. But about the buyout I'm actually optimistic. There are many free wordle copycats out there and popping it behind the NYT paywall would be a silly thing to do. They can keep a ton of Internet goodwill (and traffic) by keeping it free and just using it to entice people to pay for their crossword product which is paywalled. (Writing good crosswords so often as they do is expensive, so I see why they charge for that. Wordle is super simple and already done, there's no real cost involved).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:04, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
Fight, fight! If you want to talk about "obviously", an initial word that takes out (or takes in) as many common vowels as possible is obviously the best. Is there anything better than ADIEU out there? I didn't think so. Unless possibly AUDIO. Bishonen | tålk 20:24, 1 February 2022 (UTC).
BAH! Don't need that many vowels to start, and D is low value. Getting two vowels is enough to lead you to your second choice, and hitting three big consonants, in common placements, is handy. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 20:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Black history resource

This talk page has had discussions about finding online resources for African American history, and African-American newspapers have been raised, if we can get them. So in that vein, I'm sharing a possible although limited resource I recently came across, which may lead to other ideas: Delmont, Matthew F. (2019). "Black Quotidian". Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781503607040. Retrieved 2022-02-04. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Reply tool might get here soon

Just a heads-up that the reply tool might finally be turned on for all "desktop" users early next week. Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Offering the Reply Tool as an opt-out feature. ― Qwerfjkltalk 07:34, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Update: Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Reply_Tool:_rollout_slightly_delayed. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:12, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Happy Chinese New Year!

恭喜发财！

Happy Chinese New Year!

🐯🐯🐯 — Mhawk10 (talk) 02:09, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Gong Xi Fat Cai Bagelpigeon (talk) 16:22, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

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