User talk:Matt Britt

Attention: As of 2007-05-22, I have ceased editing Wikipedia indefinitely. My decision to discontinue activity here stems from broken and counterproductive prevailing interpretations and applications of well-intended policies, a lack of leadership and initiative to make tough decisions needed to keep things on track, the sheer impossibility of finding consensus in highly polarized debates, and especially the politics. If you would like to contact me, you may do so via email. You also may (or may not) be interested in my seldom-updated blog.

"Wikipedia is a poor implementation of a great idea." — Omegatron

Archives

Previous talk page archives: [1], [2], [3], [4]

Wikimania 2008/Conference of the Americas

Hello, As you may or may not know, Alexandria, Egypt was selected to host Wikimania 2008 [1]. So as to prevent the hard work of the many Wikimedians involved in the Atlanta bid from going to waste, we have decided to host a conference for the Americas. This is in no way an attempt to compete with Wikimania or make a statement against Wikimania.

As one of the people signed up to help with the Wikimania Atlanta bid, we hope you will join us at the Wikimedia Conference of the Americas. We will be having a meeting tonight in IRC tonight (Oct 15) at 9:30PM in #cota-atlanta on irc.freenode.org to discuss the conference. For more information about IRC see [2].

For more information about the Wikimedia Conference of the Americas see http://www.cota-atlanta.org and our wiki http://www.cota-atlanta.org/wiki.

If you do not wish to receive further notices about the COTA please remove your name from our notify list. --Cspurrier 18:12, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Binary prefixes

I'm surprised you're still able to deal with this sort of mess

I'm not; I quit.  :) Too much bullshit around here for it to be fun anymore.

this situation was one of the things which convinced me that Wikipedia's dispute resolution "system" is completely defunct and not worth participating in any further. The repeated arguments which invariably reduce to familiar squabble and the mass of incomprehensible rhetoric fairly effectively annihilate any hope for progress. There are obvious attempts on both sides to exploit the flawed notion of consensus in order to stagnate the discussion. It's like watching the failures of direct democracy being melodramatically played out in a nerd forum.

Yep.

However, I did find it interesting that the German Wikipedia managed to settle this issue somewhat with a big public vote. Perhaps something similar could be arranged here? It should be painfully obvious by now that no amount of dialog between the concerned parties will ever yield anything more than both sides claiming that their position is the consensus position. This will most likely continue to cause nothing more than page after page of unproductive argument. I would think that at this point it would be far better to just put the thing to rest for some predetermined period (say, a year or two) with a big vote.

Votes are never a good idea, because they polarize the issue, don't fairly represent the whole of the community (just the subset that happened to be online that day and aware of the vote), and prevent people from considering other's viewpoints and changing their minds. I was going to put the whole thing up for mediation, but didn't get around to it before leaving.

I wrote up my opinion here so that I didn't have to keep repeating it everywhere, and so people can refer to it during debates in my absence if so inclined.

Anyway, take care and stay sane. :)

I've been doing much better lately.  :) — Omegatron (talk) 22:33, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Matt you might be interested to know that the German WP vote resulted in IEC prefixes not being used (deprecated) and the terms KB, MB, GB always being used in the binary sense for data sizes and decimal for data rates [3]. If you want that to happen here then of course I agree with you. :) Fnagaton 01:12, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:Karl Süss contact aligner.jpg

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File permission problem with File:Ishihara plate rg.png

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Suspension of admin privileges due to inactivity

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File:Uberpenguin-mail.png listed for deletion

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Notice of change

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(delivered by mabdul 23:36, 3 December 2012 (UTC))

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
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Proposed deletion of File:Oakland-Section map.png

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Proposed deletion of File:I486dx2-tight.png

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