User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 209

This is an archive of past discussions with User:Jimbo Wales. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 205

←

Archive 207

→

Admins couldn't stop partial vandalism in Wiki Fa

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, As of Oct 2015 and even older, we have a serious problem about misusing of Wiki policies by 2 partial Muslim users in WikiFa to make vandalism. Recently one another user joined them. But many high level users including semi-admin users (ویکی‌بان means users have the accessibility of Wiki Guard) protected the contents of two articles through rollbacks and reverses. Concurrently I was discussing with these 2 users in the talk page. They have many fallacies too.
In Oct 2015 , 3 admins didn't participate in the request for WP:THIRD opinion by ping. Again no admin participated in the WP:RFC in May and June 2016. The partial users claimed repetitvely the contents of the articles are original research (however the contents are based on secondary sources).
The solution is in the clear answer of three questions :

Using of primary source showing a claim clearly without any interpretation and without any combination with other sources inside the existing articles and sections IS FORBIDDEN ANYWAY? (the primary source has not been used to create a new section or article or new claim but used in a tiny part of an existing article and shows the claimed subject CLEARLY and it doesn't combine different things) (for example assume there is a book 1000 or 1400 years old and a reliable official website approved one page of this book as to be true and translated it. The page shows clearly Ali advised Umar in the conquest of Persia and what Ali said to Umar. The article used this source to claim what Ali said to Umar and nothing more and no combination nor interpretation. Is it an original research?)
Using of primary sources supprted by RELIABLE SECONDARY sources in the way of the claims of the contents inside an existing article or section topics, is it an original research? (secondary sources support the primary sources) in the Criticism of Quran and Muhammad.
If based on WP:PRIMARY , using of the primary sources based on the secondary ones is allowed and useing of primary sources under the defined conditions is not forbidden , if this 3 partial Muslim users are vandalizing and removing reliable sources in different articles repetitively and other experienced users are protecting the articles and the partial users do any thing they want, then with regard to the WP:Protection policy, is it a true admin react to fully-protect the article instead of , at least , warning the partial users? (with regard to the many discussions we had in the talk pages as of Oct 2015)

Note : The Farsi version of WP:MOSISLAM was completely distorted as of 2010 and was not the exact translation of the English version policy core and I translated it precisely (referred to the En Wiki permanent link in the edit summary) and the user reverted and warned me in my talk page and I reverted as vandalism back. He apologised and said he hadn't paid enough attention accurately to my correct edit and he said nothing about stopping vandalism in the articles : Farsi WP:MOSISLAM diff page

Note : I had other different historic and even religious historic contributions to Islamic articles too such as Islam, Smarkand Kufic Quran and ... which that time I was not partial in the view of these partial users but now they accused me to be partial and one of them (Bruno) had made many WP:distuptive edits either in talks and in the edit summary of articles and said many lies against me (personal attacks) and no admin even warned him. However I was right and admins could not warn me too (you may check my talk page too) but they didn't see the disruptions of the user Bruno too.

These 3 partial users remove the contents and sources only as original research : fa:کاربر:Sa.vakilian (Especially this user) and fa:کاربر:طاها and recently fa:کاربر:Bruno joined them.

Wiki is not a practice for WP:Democrocy but these Muslim users in the talk pages claim that they are 3 and I am just one in the discussions. This way the list of protector users is as below and I don't know why admins who protected the article twice and other protector users (those approved my contributions to be not original) wouldn't participate in the talks but they still protect the article :

fa:کاربر:مهرنگار

fa:Special:Diff/17235269/17235311

fa:کاربر:Arian Ar

fa:Special:Diff/16598179/16598185

fa:کاربر:Modern Sciences

fa:Special:Diff/16197879/16197926

fa:کاربر:RAHA68

fa:Special:Diff/16067482/16067492

fa:Special:Diff/16153180/16153209

fa:Special:Diff/17235503/17235607

fa:Special:Diff/16620628/16621284

fa:کاربر:هفشجانی

fa:Special:Diff/16408226/16408260

fa:کاربر:آزادسرو

fa:Special:Diff/16595793/16595883

And more... and admins :

The controversial articles :

fa:نقد قرآن (Fully protected for 30 days)
fa:نقد محمد

What's the controversial contents? what were the sources?

Some contradictions and moral criticisms of the Quran supported by answering-islam.org, skepticsannotatedbible.com and makarem.ir. Secondary sources are referring to the Quran directly and clearly.
Islamic debate about Quran to be the dream of Muhammad (exact subject of the debate) between two Muslims Abdolkarim Soroush and Abdolali Bazargan in BBC Persian Pargar
Iyad Jamal Al-din (the MP of Iraq who were previously in Iran) secondary source from Alarabia (tv) about cruelty and inequality (double-standard) in Islam between Muslim and non-Muslim (Themmi). One of the reasons of essentiality of separation between Religion and State.
Repetitively, Quran has said, ancient Arab people , when Muhammad was alive , were calling him as influenced by Jinni (Majnoon Insaneness) and Quran refuses their claims. Supported by reliable Islamic secondary sources and Quran primary source too (Clearly without any interpretation) such as http://www.shareh.com/persian/magazine/maktab_i/87/10/02.htm
Schizophrenia of Muhammad by Sam Harris second source clearly some information about Schizophrenia of John Nash when he was 30 years old. Muhammad was 40 years old when he claimed his connection to the Gabriel. He had one spouse until the death of Khadija both supported by secondary sources in the Muhammad article. (is this a combination to create a new idea or claim? Schizophrenia is a claim by Harris not me)

fa:حمله اعراب به ایران (fa:Special:Diff/17357567/17361563) again in this article the user tries to remove the reliable source. In this case there is no new topic(section nor article) but there is an authorized sacred text shows clearly Ali advised Umar in the Muslim conquest of Persia (the only claimed thing in the article which is supported by the secondary reliable translate source of Nahjolbalaghe) and the partial user says that using of primary sources are forbidden anyway. The translate source is a famous high level official clergy such as Ansarian here and other official famous clergies too.

AFAIK we can use the reliable primary sources without interpretation or combination :

Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge. For example, an article about a novel may cite passages to describe the plot, but any interpretation needs a secondary source. Do not analyze, evaluate, interpret, or synthesize material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so. Do not base an entire article on primary sources, and be cautious about basing large passages on them.

Conclusion

Sometimes I spend time to grow wiki (and there is a long list of translation TODOs) to help the free knowledge spread and have a better world impartially and it's very encouraging when I see people protect Wiki but when I see some users do any vandalism they want and no one prevent them , it is really discouraging. There are many users from other languages, concurrently, contributing to English and their language thus supervising the quality of important policies in other language Wikis will help to the quality of English Wiki, This is my response to the Wiki invitation https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire

Tnx, my username is symbolic not fanatic I'm just from Earth --(fa:کاربر:IranianNationalist) IranianNationalist (talk) 06:30, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

See Category:User fa and Category:Wikipedians who contribute to the Persian Wikipedia

and Category:Wikipedians in Iran and Wikipedia:WikiProject Iran/Members.

—Wavelength (talk) 16:48, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Your global account information is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/IranianNationalist.

—Wavelength (talk) 17:09, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Animal self-photographs

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

The book Candid Creatures: How Camera Traps Reveal the Mysteries of Nature, by Roland Kays, has a collection of animal self-photographs captured by means of camera traps.

The secret life of animals, captured on camera—Public Radio International (May 21, 2016)

The book reminded me of recent discussions on this talk page about a monkey self-photograph.
—Wavelength (talk) 20:26, 18 June 2016 (UTC) and 21:14, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

What is your question? (As an aside: Those images disturbed me too, because here was a monkey taking better photographs than I can)--Aspro (talk) 23:37, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I do not have a question. I am just mentioning the book as being of possible interest.

—Wavelength (talk) 23:47, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Remember Wikimania 2016 - June 22-28

Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

This is a reminder to readers to focus on Wikimania 2016, in Esino Lario, Province of Lecco, Lombardy Region, Italy, on June 22–23 (pre-conference), 24–26 (main conference) and 27–28 (post-conference), 2016. This week is preparation. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:31, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

How can those of us who will not be attending Wikimania 2016 benefit from it?

—Wavelength (talk) 18:41, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I think there will be some web videos posted after the events, which can be viewed online, but others will know more. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:52, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I see it has been raining in Esino Lario today (Saturday), but the weather forecast is for dry, cool nights with mild days, around 58–79 °F (14–26 °C) for the week (see: Google: weather Esino Lario, Italy). -Wikid77 (talk) 15:29, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Prior Wikimania 2015 videos

I see the 2015 documentary took nearly 6 months to prepare:

"Jan 3, 2016 - A Wikimania 2015 documentary will be released soon. Check this teaser! The International Wikimedia Conference July 15–19, 2015".

On Wikimedia Commons, some 2015 session videos were posted, but I guess Youtube videos would be posted sooner. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:38/00:49, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Fair use images

Latest comment: 8 years ago15 comments5 people in discussion

Hi Jimbo, just a quick question about your interpretation of fair use images of the recently deceased. We've had a few examples lately at WP:ITN (Reg Grundy, Sally Brampton, Jo Cox &c.) where a "fair use" image has been uploaded within moments of the passing of the individual in question, claiming fair use. A lengthy discussion has taken place at FFD during the course of which I managed to persuade a third party to release an image of Brampton under Creative Commons. A common argument has been propounded: "If this individual has died and no free image has been available up until now, it is safe to assume we can use a fair use image. As such, we can use a fair use image until such a time a free image is available". This seems to be now commonly accepted, in particular in the case of Cox who, despite being a very prominent and active MP, no free images appear to be currently available. As you are closer to WMF and have been actively engaged in the Cox image discussion, I wondered if you were able to give some guidance here. After all, if the "now they're dead, we can upload an image" argument seems to negate the use for "Pictures of deceased persons, in articles about that person, provided that ever obtaining a free close substitute is not reasonably likely. " (my emphasis) element of the Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria "policy with legal considerations". The Rambling Man (talk) 17:19, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

As with most things, I think there are multiple values here which are somewhat in tension, such that what we decide to do in a particular case will depend on balancing different factors, hopefully in a more or less consistent way over time through reliance on custom and precedence.

First, of course we need to follow the relevant law. In the US, fair use is subject to a 4 factor test. In my experience, we tend to be very conservative about this - i.e. we tend to avoid fair use even in cases where it is probably fine from a legal perspective. And I think that's a valid overall stance to take.

The question is: what factors might cause us to be more or less conservative in a given case.

As you indicate, one important question is the impact of having a non-free image on the incentives for people to go out and get a free image. I remember a very long time ago talking to someone who was excited about uploading a free photo of a sports personality feeling sad that his freely licensed photo was removed in favor of a professional photo uploaded with a (flimsy?) fair use justification. In most cases, this is why I support having either no photo or a placeholder which asks the public to contribute a freely licensed photo.

Another factor that has some impact is whether or not the person is deceased (or, for similar reasons, whether the photo is of a unique moment in time that is encyclopedically relevant). The broad question here is: what are the odds that we can ever get a suitable free photo?

And another factor is service to our readers - a fair use photo is undeniably better than no photo at all, and when someone is as enormously in the news as this, readers will come to us wanting the clear basic facts - including a photo. We can afford to wait more in cases where the article isn't currently experiencing a surge of visitors.

Every case is likely to have its own unique characteristics. In this particular tragic case, I knew Jo personally (though not well enough) and we have a great many friends in common here in London. She was part of the YGL community and a part of the London political community. I won't bother Brendan about it right now, because I can only imagine what he must be going through.

It's a simple sad fact that a person's Wikipedia entry is their most important obituary, and I think Jo deserves to have a good picture or pictures there, one or more which captures her work and personality as much as possible. I suspect that many people with a recently departed loved one fell the same way and that actually they will have a strong desire to donate a photo if only we ask.

Bottom line: in this case, a legitimately fair use photo is not likely to be an obstacle to getting a freely licensed one because we have a Wikipedian (me) close enough to ask, and that's already under way. So I have no personal objection to having one now. It isn't up to me and it shouldn't be up to me. But I hope these thoughts, although I fear I did ramble a bit, sum up in a useful way some of the various salient issues.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:00, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Jimbo for your lengthy response. Rambling is just fine, I should know. But to sum up your position, it doesn't seem 100% compatible with the wording of the policy, i.e. you have noted scenarios where "provided that ever obtaining a free close substitute is not reasonably likely" isn't actually tested or applicable. We all know that an image of Ms Cox is out there and available to use, but it's just going to take a bit of effort to get it. The policy makes it clear that using a fair use image in the mean time is not acceptable. However, some of our community (including you I guess) think that it's permissible to do so. I wonder if you agree that the policy needs to be re-phrased to cover these other exceptions? The Rambling Man (talk) 18:51, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

As a nuance, it seems to me that there may be a difference, for purposes of this discussion, between a self-limiting temporary use of such a photograph (such as on ITN, where it obviously would be more appropriate for the current photo to be of Jo Cox than of Sidney Crosby, as I think Mr. Crosby would himself agree), versus permanent use in the article itself. And separately, there may also be a difference between using a photograph whose copyright status is purely notional and to whose use no actual rightholder would object (such as a photo of Jo Cox from her parliamentary or campaign website), as opposed to a commercial photograph of actual value to the rightsholder. Newyorkbrad (talk) 20:39, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, and this is captured in the 4 factor test as well - one of the things that helps us to determine whether a use is fair or not is "the effect of the use upon the potential market".[1]--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:17, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that's a nuance that detracts entirely from my original purpose, i.e. to determine whether it is acceptable to simply upload an image of someone moments after they have died, in direct contravention of the policy, yet the policy isn't being globally upheld on Wikipedia because people make casual observations like "if a free image had been available when they were alive, we'd have already uploaded it. Default to fair use until a free image becomes available". That is what I want to discuss. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:47, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I think my points are very much relevant, but I'll wait for others to weigh in. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:17, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I don't think I ever said they weren't relevant, but I'm talking about the general abuse of the policy, not suggested alternatives to the fair use altogether, such as temporary usage. That's an entirely separate discussion. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:41, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I don't understand why you think "if a free image had been available when they were alive, we'd have already uploaded it [so upload any] as fair use until a free image becomes available" is possibly inconsistent with policy, longstanding practice, or Jimbo or Brad's statements here. EllenCT (talk) 13:46, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

No, I don't suppose you would understand. But back to the point, if we're content that any image of any dead person can be uploaded per fair use the second they have died, regardless of the current legal policy, then I would just like clarification from someone who does know what they're talking about that it's fine to do that. And then we should address the wording of the legal policy such that fair use is encouraged from the instance of death. We have hundreds of thousands of bios that are missing images so I'm glad that we now know it's fine to just upload any image and use it. Cheers. The Rambling Man (talk) 21:53, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

I guess if I confine myself to simply discussing this single point, I would have to agree with you. While someone's death certainly does have an impact on the potential availability of free images of them, in most cases of people dying today, it doesn't strike me as having a huge impact. If for no other reason than the proliferation of phone cameras, most people have been photographed a lot more than they would have been in the past, and this is particularly true for people who are well known enough to be in Wikipedia but not necessarily "celebrities". Even if "the person is no longer alive" is a factor, it doesn't strike me as a huge one in most cases. If someone is a known recluse (I'm thinking of author J. D. Salinger) then death will tend to lock down the number of photos to a very small number. For a young modern MP in the UK, that number is likely to be quite high.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:17, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply on that Jimbo. Of course, we can greatly expand the discussion to incorporate some measure of "importantness" of the individual or "utility" of an image (e.g. for main page inclusion), but right now I'm just striving to understand why so many people are working directly in flagrant contravention of one of our legal policies. The Rambling Man (talk) 10:37, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Which specific policy provision are you claiming is being contraveined? There is no way to know whether free images will surface of anyone at any time, but death certainly precludes the possibility that new images will be obtained, free or otherwise. EllenCT (talk) 15:14, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

I've already covered that above, if you'd like to read the whole section throughly. By the way, your assertion but death certainly precludes the possibility that new images will be obtained, free or otherwise. is entirely fallacious and is the basis for the flagrant abuse of the legal policy. I do hope you will work on your understanding of this in future. The Rambling Man (talk) 20:25, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

"Non-free content is used only where no free equivalent is available ... that would serve the same encyclopedic purpose". Purely because a free image hadn't been uploaded yet doesn't mean there isn't one out there - even for a deceased person if they were public enough. Very often a free image is found for someone if they are suddenly in the news because of their death. Laura Jamieson (talk) 15:20, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

GMO Myths and Truths

Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

At this moment, a site-wide banner says: "You are invited to participate in a discussion regarding the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for human consumption." I invite all participants to perform a WWW search for GMO Myths and Truths and to study carefully the information in the pages listed in the search results.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:38, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

That's a good idea, if you want to see exactly how evidence is twisted and ignored by anti-GMO advocates. Then one can proceed to actual research papers for actual evidence. Capeo (talk) 16:56, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Looks like searching for "X Myths and Truths" will typically bias the search results away from the scientific consensus compared to just searching for "X". You'll always tend to get a lot more results referring to a priori unreliable non-scientific opinions (which may happen to reflect the scientific consensus, but there is no way to know for sure without doing additional searches) Count Iblis (talk) 16:59, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, no POV/agenda being pushed here... Reso lute 17:18, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

You will find the conspiracy nuts, but not much else. ThePlatypusofDoom (Talk) 22:59, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Article about TPO

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I was interested in seeing if anyone has a subscription to The Times and could therefore read this recent article they ran about The People's Operator, as well as hearing Mr. Wales' response to it. Everymorning (talk) 00:41, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

russia uses this site for anti ukranian propaganda

Latest comment: 8 years ago28 comments14 people in discussion

Hello, I would like to ask, did Kremlin buy the ru-wiki or something? The russian wiki is clearly being used for Kremlin propaganda purposes, especially when describing the events that took place in Ukraine in 2014. Talking about the Crimea annexation and Donbass invasion, all Ukranian sovereign territories that are now being occupied by Russia. The russian wiki barely mentions russian military when describing those events. It's like making an article about WW2, without mentioning the German Army or Hitler. I tried to write in the "talk" pages for those articles, but was immediately blocked by moderators like Seryo93 and HOBOPOCC. 94.139.128.230 (talk) 21:20, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I see also that it's coverage of the "Violence at UEFA Euro 2016" is somewhat brief and perhaps just a trifle partisan: [2]. Google-translate renders that section heading as "Scandals and the incident in the championship". I'm not sure this is a big surprise, is it. But en.wiki has nothing to do with ru.wiki, does it? And Jimbo Wales has even less control over ru.wiki than he has over en.wiki, doesn't he? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:26, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I've certainly seen some likely effects of Russian propaganda on Wikipedia, see e.g. International recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia - why do we need such a huge article, now only saying that essentially nobody except Russia recognizes these two break-away regions?) Or maybe Obama chmo!

Some of this type of activity is documented at Olgino trolls and Web brigades. It must have been hugely difficult to document this type of undercover activity, but these articles seem to have done so. The difficulty, of course, is to separate the effects of this official or semi-official activity from the results of regular (non-paid) Russians, who may be affected by propaganda activity within Russia. Of course, undercover activity by governments on the web is not limited to Russia. Their have been several recent reports of hacking by the Chinese, internet activity by ISIS, etc. And of course US security services have done some nasty stuff on the internet. So we shouldn't just point a finger at Russia. I do hope the WMF has some plan (not necessarily public) on how to counteract this type of activity. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:43, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

If u read wiki-articles on Crimea Annexation and the War in Donbass, almost in every language, the main reason that is described for those events is the russian military intervention. The only exception is russian wiki. Russian wiki describes those events as Ukranian inner affairs. Which is ludicrious. Imaging an article about WW2 in USSR like this " suddenly in 1941 in USSR a lot of people started dying because of a lot of shooting and bombing, a lot of buildings and property were destroyed because a wide spread usage of explosives being used at that period"... without mentioning even once the cause of the destruction, the german army!!! This is what the russians are doing with Crimea Annexation and War in Donbass articles at ru-wiki. And the are protecting those articles very tightly, they erase any comments or remarks on the "talk" page. This is ridiculous. Especially moderators Seryo93 and HOBOPOCC.94.139.128.112 (talk) 04:44, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Please see Media freedom in Russia and [3] for an example of the extent to which Russia controls Wikipedia. EllenCT (talk) 13:58, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

This is an issue which concerns me but at the present time I don't know enough to really understand fully. What I'd like to see is a careful and accurate translation of the Russian Wikipedia entry on the Crimea Annexation into English, as well as a careful and accurate translation of the Ukranian Wikipedia entry on the Crimea Annexation into English. It is very common in situations like this for an anonymous ip number to come and radically overstate the depth of the problem - but it is also very common that there is an actual problem. Usually, in my experience, the problem can't really be traced to direct government intervention but rather something much more subtle and difficult to deal with: bias and high emotions.

Let's not imagine that the WMF can't do anything, by the way. Let's imagine that a thorough investigation including translations into English which are reviewed by many neutral community members determines that a particular language is being highly biased on a particular point, and that a small group of admins are misusing the tools to enforce that perspective by banning/blocking/locking inappropriately whenever someone tries to add quality and sourced neutral content which contradicts the POV pushing. Serious problem, but a fairly easy solution: de-adminship of the admins in question coupled with appointments of new admins.

But that's a hypothetical because in my experience, it is not usually as simple as that. More likely is that two languages have different perspectives on an issue that amounts to real consensus within that group of speakers. In that context, removing some admin privileges of a few people isn't going to really help, as the bulk of the community will insist on the bias remaining in the article. In such a case probably the best thing to do is much harder and more expensive... but worth it in my opinion. In such a case I think a fairly large in-person workshop with a professional facilitator working in the native language(s) of the conflict can help people reach NPOV agreement.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:51, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Listen, the best example is that the russian "Crimea Annexation"page is called "Crimea joining with Russian Federation". The events that are presented in the article is that the Crimea seceded from Ukraine, and then joined Russia. When in reality the russian troops with no insignia occupied the peninsula, blocked the ukranian forces, then had an illegal referendum and after positive result they annexed the peninsula. This is the objective truth, and this is how those events should be described: "Russian military occupation", "illegal referendum" and "Annexation". This is the objective truth no matter which language you use. But the russian wiki barely mentions the russian military, and claims that Crimea first seceded from Ukraine, and then joined Russia. Which is not true. It first was occupied by russia, and after illegal referendum was annexed. This event in our world can't be described as "normal" or "legal", when one country invades another without warning and annexes part of its territory. If USA tomorrow invades Mexico, occupies Tijuana,and after promising the local population green cards and american salaries, I'm pretty sure that 99 percent of the residents of Tijuana will vote for joining USA. But the Mexico state will never accept this and under international law the referendum will have no legal power, and Tijuana will be considered as "occupied" or "annexed" by USA, and not legally "seceded" from Mexico and "joined" the USA. See my point? This is the same with the Crimea story. You realy should look into that, and don't let ur great project Wikipedia to be used as russian propaganda channel.94.139.128.112 (talk) 21:21, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I think you're probably right, Jimbo Wales. Funnily enough, even at en.wiki, we see regular conflicts between those using British English and those using American English. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:56, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

It is of course much more serious than conflicts between users of British and American English. Jimbo does have a reasonable approach, although at first glance, I think it could be stronger. I'll just add or emphasize some specifics that may back up my concerns.

The conflict - which clearly includes paid manipulation of many social media websites by the Russian government - extends into the English Wikipedia, and from there likely into almost all Wikipedias and the rest of the world.
It's not just about the Crimea Annexation, but on a whole series of current and historical conflicts, e.g. the Holodomor. Both Ukrainian and Russian national identifies are deeply embedded in their interpretations of these conflicts and events.
Most Ukrainians speak and write Russian and thus could contribute to the Russian Wikipedia if allowed. That sentence might be controversial, but Russian language is the 1st language of perhaps 30% of Ukrainians (most of whom are proudly Ukrainians!), maybe another 40% are raised bilingual, and Russian was forced on all Ukrainians in school until about 1990. There's also a very large ethnic-Ukrainian population living in Russia and a pretty influential ethnic Ukrainian population living in Canada.
Having an in-person meeting between Russian and Ukrainian editors could be difficult, but wouldn't necessarily have to be held in a war zone! One difficulty would be that I don't think the Russian Wikimedia group is allowed to accept foreign (e.g. WMF) money according to Russian law. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:29, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Just as an FYI, such a meeting as I described did take place, and further meetings are probably a good idea. I hope to discuss this issue with both Russian and Ukranian Wikipedians at Wikimania later this week. I also have a friend, a non-Wikipedian, who is a native Russian speaking Ukranian, and I'm going to ask her to read a bit and let me know from an "outside Wikipedia" perspective how it seems.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:20, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Grants for projects related to harassment?

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Why not contact the many content contributors you've lost over the years to the nasty editing environment. I dealt with several of the harassers but could never get any help. Years later some had been banned. Others remain. But the God king is badly out of touch with the experiences of the average editor. Really Jimbo you owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people who suffered and who you refused to help. Denial and defensivenss weren't the answers the project needed. Nor was sweeping problems under the rug. Floridarmy (talk) 16:46, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

Please see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire

Feedback is needed on these proposals. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:13, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

See reply thread: "#Problem not Jimbo but RfAs blocked good admins" -Wikid77 (talk) 21:16, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Day of protest against law enforcement undisclosed remote searches

Latest comment: 8 years ago17 comments7 people in discussion

Jimbo, should the Foundation participate in EFF's Day of Action on June 21 protesting the Department of Justice's proposed change to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to allow any government-friendly magistrate in any international law enforcement forum to authorize undisclosed remote searches of unlimited numbers of computers with a single warrant? EllenCT (talk) 13:58, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I think so. But that's only 2 days from now, so it's hard to know what could be organized so quickly.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:52, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Hasn't it been proposed until now then _Muffled ^Pocketed 15:56, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Congress will have to decide in December, so there is plenty of time. It's just that adding the protest banner from the first site will work for just two more days. Nothing would stop Wikimedia from launching its own protest. Count Iblis (talk) 21:06, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

What do you think would be most effective? What needs to be done to display the banner site-wide? EllenCT (talk) 15:19, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

The same sort of intrusive banner we use during the funding drive :) .Count Iblis (talk) 17:11, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Efforts by the community early to define what we want the Foundation to do so that they have a clear signal and feel empowered to act is what is most helpful. The Foundation cares deeply about what the community thinks (contrary to conspiracy theories otherwise!) and tends to be a bit timid and cautious if they aren't sure we support something. I think that's wise.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:07, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

How about not storing reader-identifying logs and shipping them off to Stanford instead of or in addition to a banner? Universities, even when under NDAs, do not provide the kind of protection that repressed minorities require in many countries. EllenCT (talk) 15:11, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, is there any good reason to store those logs? Or any evidence they have ever been used for anything more substantial than suggesting additions to articles' see also sections? EllenCT (talk) 05:19, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Because of the high stakes involved for hundreds of millions of people, I returned these questions from the archives. EllenCT (talk) 11:46, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

I strongly oppose Wikipedia getting involved in any political advocacy. --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 01:35, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately, WP cannot possibly isolate itself from politics. Nyth 63 16:05, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

But we can at least try to avoid taking direct political stances. --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 23:16, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

I strongly disagree. If someone is attempting to violate basic freedoms that directly affects Wikipedia, there should definitely be a strong stand taken against them. Not sure where you live but in the US this looks to me to be a clear violation of Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Nyth 63 11:29, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

Maybe (I personally don't care about this issue) but not by Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself must always remain neutral. If it continues to breach this principle, I for one will seriously consider leaving. --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 16:28, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

This seems a little too political for me. Unless we have a consensus, we really shouldn't do anything political. ThePlatypusofDoom (Talk) 00:15, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

What if we didn't have banners at all, and stopped storing logs which would identify readers and their articles accessed? EllenCT (talk) 19:26, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Problem not Jimbo but RfAs blocked good admins

Latest comment: 8 years ago22 comments9 people in discussion

I'm changing this from a subheading to a heading since a new conversation has started. Carrite (talk) 15:10, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

An extremely detailed review of facts will show how Jimbo is not the problem but instead, for years, has advocated easier wp:RfA processes to authorize more admins to help users overcome harassment (or other problems for admin powers), but numerous good people have been rejected at wp:RfA, and the relatively few admins have ruthlessly hacked away at problems, blocked new users, and locked (or deleted) templates to lock-in bugs for years. More admins would allow more assistance for thousands of users, as "safety in numbers" with more admins to balance the power plays.

One RfA wannabe said he was certified to fix jet airliners but "could never become an admin" with the 2013 RfA rules. I have 2 degrees in computer science but have no permission to fix Lua script templates (some of which I helped develop before admin-locked). When the world was confused about the actual innocence of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, Jimbo asked for more admins to please help moderate, unblock new users, or check prior admin actions, but guess how many admins were able to help Jimbo: NONE. Meanwhile, I was wp:topic banned about their slanted Meredith Kercher murder articles, but I can talk about how those articles were saved to provide wp:NPOV text: as for months Jimbo was the only force for reason, reading new sources, moderating talkpages, advising admins to refrain their harassment, and suggesting to reduce details in debated text.

So, @Floridarmy: I suggest to review the prior 7 years to see Jimbo has advocated to reduce harassment, increase civility, and give more people admin powers to combat tyranny against other users. Any questions about that? I strongly believe there is safety in numbers among groups of qualified people. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:00, revised 14:14, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

I personally am trusted to test and certify "safety of flight" aircraft components (otherwise known as "if it breaks, everybody dies") and to design toys that end up in the hands of literally millions of children (making toys that kill kids is bad, M'kay?), yet I could never pass an RfA. The same editors who would not trust me with the admim bit regularly trust their lives and the lives of their children to my work as an engineer. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:15, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

Different environments and attitudes. I know people in similar positions or that carry guns for a living that would not be able to set aside their strong personal viewpoints when editing. Real life responsibilities are not always a good predictor of on-wiki behavior. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 20:30, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

@Guy Macon — More than 10 years experience, 10K edits to mainspace, clean block log and no indications of assholery. Do you need me to nominate you, you should pass easily. Carrite (talk) 00:44, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

If you or anyone else nominates me, I will run on the theory that Wikipedia could use another Wikignome admin who concentrates on the repetitive, often-backlogged tasks that most people don't like doing, but I won't pretend that I think I have a chance of passing or that the position is particularly desirable. --Guy Macon (talk) 08:55, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

I hope that a few of the Administrators who are feeling outgunned are listening. I suspect my nomination would hurt more than it helps but would be happy to co-nominate behind a sage or two if you're really up for a week-long visit to the proctologist... Carrite (talk) 15:17, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

@Wikid77 — I don't think more administrators are the answer to what ails WP, and especially not massively more administrators. You've got a messier block log than most people, but I'd support you if you went up for tools, for what it's worth. Carrite (talk) 00:48, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the support, and I agree there are larger problems, such as the dreadful upcoming "information overload" of 20 million notable (famous) topics to be added, while WP obsesses about every person who ever kicked a ball for money plus where they kicked when. Then, to compound the overload, users are merging lists of people into professions plus stuffing wp:overlinked navboxes into thousands of semi-related pages, and get this: they think templates can have "one" official version to be used across 20 million pages as if updates to the template will not require a whole year to reformat the affected pages for 1 change.

Hence, the wp:developers are studying ways to mega-reformat all pages every month (remember when "fork" was a bad word, and now it will be the way to get a new feature into thousands of pages before the end of next year). Many people do not understand "configuration management" on such a vast mega-scale (wikisearching the template-formatted output rather than static input pages) and are clueless about the avalanche of pages to come. We now see Google ever more unable to keep up with topics in pop culture, even from last year, because subdividing the billions of topics by category-search is the only way to index related pages without ignoring all the other topics people want to read ("no match found" for some famous songs from years ago, or a viral video).

However, meanwhile, so many Wikipedia users are being left helpless (or mistreated) because there are too few admins available to moderate problems among the "20 million topics" which people want to write, and many of those people see WP as a nasty editing environment where help comes too late, or not at all. Many notable topics are being deleted because people cannot get help writing those pages, while the limited admins see themselves as "deleters" not as "helpers" to userfy pages and explain policies. -Wikid77 (talk) 06:34, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

But is it really the job of Administrators to help newcomers write and source out fresh content? That seems outside of the job description. What they have are Delete buttons, not Advise buttons... The defect is rather that Teahouse, etc. isn't more universal and that there aren't an organized group of active Helpers upon whom to call. I'm with you that the topics to write about are gargantuan, but I'm less pessimistic than you about the "nasty editing environment," unless what you mean is the templating of newcomers for minor party fouls with no adequate means of explanation or person-to-person aid in training. Carrite (talk) 15:17, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Some users, who have invested their time in moderating (reverting) the page updates, said they quit because they felt powerless to control user behavior, as hence, they lacked admin support to help them. Consider multiple hack-edits to a page where admins reply there is no basis for minor page-protect to stop IP users from vandalism, er, ruthless scarring and trashification of the page (wouldn't want to use the word "vandalism" where a page was merely deliberately trashed, scarred, hacked and gutted!). Plus WP policies have been peculiar regarding wp:OR, or impregnating dashes to foster the "Dash Master Race" ruling a page where hyphens or parentheses or slashes or text "A to B" would be much easier to write or translate to other languages (in most cases, dashes could be completely removed from pages, except as trademark names: "Dashes–R–Us"). Even Walmart renamed the company from "Wal*Mart" where no one could find the Mart in a phonebook as "Wal-Mart" at the end of the alphabet, but looking instead after "WalMaps". We need a policy "wp:REALRULES" which tells users not to write crap rules which are out-of-touch with reality. So we need more admins to moderate large RfCs to rewrite policies into rules which most people want: "Thou shalt not shove weird punctuation down user throats". We still have Wikipedia trending as Wackopedia, but more admins could reduce that, where much reform is needed. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:33, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Uhm, Wikipedia does NOT or has ever NEEDED more admins....why do people keep saying that?..what it needs is LESS admins, but more ACTIVE admins, that has been the problem since day one..active editor works hard for 6-18 months, runs for admin, wins, remains active for 2 more weeks, gone...returns, is now sporadic....this has been a issue plaguing wikimedia for over a decade now...and yes i said WikiMedia since we have similar issues on other wikis too...we make "being an admin" an achievement rather being just a job title, the damage has been done, irreparable i would add so best thing is to move forward and find a better solution...saying that RfA is broken isn't the answer, saying that we need more admins isn't the answer, they are both infact problems...we need solutions, not more problems....--Ste moc 06:57, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, "more active admins" sounds like splitting hairs, but I'll agree Wikipedia needs "more active admins" even though I don't think many people thought I was suggesting we need more admins who wp:wikibreak every week. The problem with fewer admins has been "bottlenecks" of control, where the misjudgment of a few key admins has led to problems of locked-down pages with slanted text, or deletion of promising articles, or failure to protect templates used in hundreds of pages, or delay in blocking users who hack dozens of pages, or delay in unblocking users who cooperate soon. I wish I could count the number of templates (navboxes) garbled by hack edits (not tested in sandbox versions) which then horrifically garbled over 200 pages each, where such templates need to be reverted, protected, and then watched for requested, tested updates where the numerous admins could actually verify the updated templates in dozens of pages before live updates were installed. We need admins (perhaps 5% of them) to check other admins to deter abuse of power. We need admins to moderate large wp:RfC debates, to politely curb harrassment (with strength of force), when deciding major issues among hundreds of users, rather than let a wp:TAGTEAM slant decisions among a dozen involved users. Concerned users have complained they quickly tire of moderating debates with no ability of enforce behavior, so more (active) admins are needed for all these activities. Also, I think new admins soon quit because they find the workload is too much for the relatively few (active) admins, rather than somehow passing wp:RfA means, "I won my RfA so now I can wikibreak in 2 weeks". -Wikid77 (talk) 15:12, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Speaking as an admin who is active, rather than an active admin, one of my biggest fears when deciding to run for admin was that by becoming an admin, it would impact on my work creating and expanding articles. I'm glad to say that it hasn't, although there have been times when it could have. There are admins that do almost nothing but admin work. Nothing wrong with that, but each to their own.

Any editor in good standing who has been around for, say 5 years, should really consider running for admin. It really is not a big deal, but the extra tools do come in useful. Much quicker to be able to step in yourself and take action than having to ask for help at a board such as WP:AIV or WP:ANI. Mjroots (talk) 20:02, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Admin actions at Islamic calendar

[ added title as subthread of above. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:19, 26 June 2016 (UTC)]

Replying to NeilN's comment above, who's the guy with the gun? An editor reported that misinformation had been deliberately fed into the RfC to discuss the future of the picture in Islamic calendar (which 400,000 people voted to take down) with intent to derail the discussion. 36 minutes later NeilN removed the report. Two weeks ago an editor added it back. NeilN fired just one minute later, and as soon as he woke up Elockid protected the page - permanently.

For those who are unaware of the history, for the past seven years editors have been removing the picture up to half a dozen times a day, but consensus is not high on the list of administrator priorities. Nor is accurate sourcing - locked in is the claim that this is a picture of the Farewell Pilgrimage. It's actually a picture of a man preaching to a small group of Shi'ites in a mosque. The Farewell Sermon was delivered to the ummah - on a camel, on a mountaintop, surrounded by thousands of pilgrims. 92.27.71.157 (talk) 09:24, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

That is an interesting case as the page-protection of "Islamic calendar" to lock-in a painting of Mohammad. In such cases of controversial images, I would have expected the "no-consensus" result would be to remove the picture. Perhaps an RfC should be run to see if most people would agree to omit photos which inflame extreme controversy. Also, that page "Islamic calendar" seems overstuffed with excessive text, such as section "Converting Hijri to Gregorian date or vice versa" which should be a separate article page IMHO. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:19, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

I also notice User:Cluebot NG was being unreasonably nasty there. An editor User:Haroun Mahomed made an edit adding "SAW" after Muhammad,[4] which is not the sort of thing we do for any religion, but certainly does not deserve the edit summary of "Reverting possible vandalism" from the bot. If the bot can be programmed to seek and destroy every instance of "SAW", it can be programmed not merely to EXPLAIN in a DIPLOMATIC way, but to direct editors so advised to the appropriate talk page for disputing the policy should they see fit. (I think it's a good policy, but the point is, people should be in charge, not bots) Wnt (talk) 11:39, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, those people are in charge, through their bots (and templates). In fact, nearly 90% of pages I have edited this year are because of problems caused by locked-in template errors or bots inserting nonsense crap into pages ("DUPLICATE_url" as the same url link). We need more admins to fix problems in bots or Lua script modules in templates. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:00, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

In principle, nothing would stop us from making an entire copy of Wikipedia and let it operate according to some new rules like appointing Admins using a different system. After some period of time, we then evaluate which Wikipedia works better according to several criteria that are fixed prior to the experiment. If things work fine according to the criteria but new problems arise according to some critics, then we run a new test where now that particular issue is the only prior chosen evaluation criterion. Count Iblis (talk) 18:55, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Reply posted below as new thread "#If Wikipedia forked to try new policies" (to let this section auto-archive to shorten page for view on mobile phone). -Wikid77 (talk) 05:03, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

You are all aware that this subthread was started by banned user Vote (X) for Change, right? --NeilN ^{talk to me} 15:18, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

If Wikipedia forked to try new policies

Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

Tangent from "#Problem not Jimbo but RfAs blocked good admins".

As noted in the prior thread, we could consider a forked version of Wikipedia, but I think there then would be numerous follow-on debates over the proposed new policies which could further delay for many months, plus risk a new avenue for hack-edits or vandalism, unless the forked WP soon restricted editing of pages.

Meanwhile, the key issue of needing more active admins to moderate pages and revert/block bad edits would remain a crucial problem on the current Wikipedia. So, the forking of WP would not soon decide debates about disputed topics nor inappropriate photos (especially since many controversial images are hosted on Wikimedia Commons). Consequently, we are back to Jimbo's long-term advice to make wp:RfCs for adminship easier (which I think has been getting easier now), so more admins can moderate the debates to semi-protect pages, remove images, or block users who harrass others to force the results. -Wikid77 (talk) 03:51, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

There is a new RfA reform proposal in the works, but it may not get anywhere.See here. One of the main proposals is creating a group to appoint extra admins, while keeping RfA. ThePlatypusofDoom (Talk) 14:56, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

As of Thursday, 12 December 2024, 01:09 (UTC), The English Wikipedia has 48,398,135 registered users, 122,379 active editors, and 846 administrators. Together we have made 1,257,807,131 edits, created 62,011,396 pages of all kinds and created 6,922,931 articles. You could fork Wikipedia easily enough (several people have, and we even have help pages for those wanting to fork Wikipedia), but the result would be a copy of Wikipedia stuck in time as the real Wikipedia gets updated by those thousands of people. So do you automatically fold in the changes from Wikipedia as they happen? Somehow get several thousand people to review those changes? Copying the software is easy. Copying the content is easy. Copying the community of editors and administrators is really, really hard. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:41, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

It can also be done for only part of Wikipedia, e.g. by ArbCom to see if some proposed remedies could work. During the climate change case an agreement was made that the climate change articles would not be edited. Suppose then that the ArbCom would want to know of some remedy would work in practice. They could copy some historic version of climate change related pages to some special ArbCom sandbox page to the state just before some big editing dispute broke out, and then let some of the involved editors continue from there under some proposed rules (e.g. some under 1RR or 0RR and with some other editors removed), to see if the outcome would be different. Count Iblis (talk) 18:30, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

See User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 114#Ward Cunningham and wikis (September 2012).—Wavelength (talk) 19:33, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Editing News #2—2016

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Editing News #2—2016 Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

It's quick and easy to insert a references list.

Place the cursor where you want to display the references list (usually at the bottom of the page). Open the "Insert" menu and click the "References list" icon (three books).

If you are using several groups of references, which is relatively rare, you will have the opportunity to specify the group. If you do that, then only the references that belong to the specified group will be displayed in this list of references.

Finally, click "Insert" in the dialog to insert the References list. This list will change as you add more footnotes to the page.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Arabic and Indic scripts, and adapting the visual editor to the needs of the Wikivoyages and Wikisources.

Recent changes

The visual editor is now available to all users at most Wikivoyages. It was also enabled for all contributors at the French Wikinews.

The single edit tab feature combines the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. It has been deployed to several Wikipedias, including Hungarian, Polish, English and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as to all Wikivoyages. At these wikis, you can change your settings for this feature in the "Editing" tab of Special:Preferences. The team is now reviewing the feedback and considering ways to improve the design before rolling it out to more people.

Future changes

The "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including: Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Assamese, Aramaic and others.

The team is working with the volunteer developers who power Wikisource to provide the visual editor there, for opt-in testing right now and eventually for all users. (T138966)

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. It will look like the visual editor, and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices around September 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.
Learn how to improve the "automagical" citoid referencing system in the visual editor, by creating Zotero translators for popular sources in your language! Watch the Tech Talk by Sebastian Karcher for more information.

If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 21:09, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Article about TPO

Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Note: The content below is a repost of a comment I made here a week ago which no one responded to before it was archived. I hope to get a response from someone, preferably Mr. Wales, this time around.

I was interested in seeing if anyone has a subscription to The Times and could therefore read this recent article they ran about The People's Operator, as well as hearing Mr. Wales' response to it. Everymorning (talk) 19:12, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Please see page 6 of [5]. EllenCT (talk) 20:59, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I'm confused--what does CONOISE-G architecture have to do with this topic? Everymorning (talk) 21:16, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I expect Jimbo to disrupt the field by introducing arguments and evidence at more transitions than simply that of the contract management component to the policing agent. Investors who can't see that may regret their divestment. EllenCT (talk) 21:22, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Censored from Wikipedia

Latest comment: 8 years ago15 comments4 people in discussion

This fellow remains censored from Wikipedia. Maybe now that he has an obituary in the New York Times you can include him? One of many subjects censored improperly by the gangs of bullies that roam here. Not right Jimmy, not right. Floridarmy (talk) 03:39, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/us/gerald-walpin-watchdog-fired-over-americorps-inquiry-dies-at-84.html# Floridarmy (talk) 03:40, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

That would be page "Gerald Walpin" as deleted 22 Nov 2010 in "wp:Articles for deletion/Gerald Walpin (2nd_nomination)". So does the deletion seem bullied, to be undone by wp:DR (also must first ask the deleting admin to undelete before post at wp:DR). Also: we'd easily recognize his photo in U.S. news media from Pres. W Bush administration or AmeriCorps, but found little about his 2013 book titled "The Supreme Court vs The Constitution". -Wikid77 (talk) 04:18/04:51, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Update: asked closing admin: I have contacted the AfD closer (see: dif353) to ask for undelete as likely now wp:GNG notable, and restore whole prior article "Gerald Walpin". I wish we had admins to likewise review AfD notability of famous people (hint, hint). -Wikid77 (talk) 05:30/05:32, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

I personally think he's just as notable or non-notable as he was in 2010. "Gangs of bullies" does not in any way seem to characterize the polite and thoughtful discussion that went on in the AfD linked above. What actually does constitute bullying is wild accusations like this one. WP:BLP1E is policy, and with good cause.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:35, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for studying this issue. I agree the notability seems near the 2010 level and could be decided by review of newspaper archives (at libraries?). Looks like the 50-50% AfD !votes should have totaled to "Keep" with request to add old newspaper cites to disprove BLP1E, as wp:GNG notable, but perhaps the closing admin felt pressure to "delete when borderline" and now WP has a hole where The New York Times thinks the guy was a topic, plus his Obama "target" became mayor of Sacramento. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:04, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

The last deletion does not seem right. To begin with, it's a 3 to 4 vote taken as a consensus to delete. And the nominator's premise - that the article was "an attempt to do an endrun around an AFD deletion" of the Gerald Walpin firing article - is directly contradicted by the closer's comment at that AFD that "At the moment, we have an article on Gerald Walpin - this article doesn't need to exist alongside that, and indeed, in its present form, clearly shouldn't." Never underestimate the Wikilawyering capabilities of Delete voters, as in this case, where they literally have deleted two articles each because the other existed. I've noted the delete voters have a whole playbook of tricks like that -- editing an article down to nothing and voting to delete because it doesn't have much content, nominating an image for deletion on Wikipedia while nominating it on Commons for some other issue, removing an image from an article so they can delete it as not in use on Commons (preferably while starting an edit war to get the article locked down in the form without the image). Maybe Keep voters have a playbook, but it's all white magic - building the article, finding sources, getting material. There's nothing to feel guilty about with those sorts of tricks. Wnt (talk) 19:04, 28 June 2016 (UTC)

Same tactics have been used to delete useful templates in TfDs closed by non-admin users (then ask admin delete), such as Template:Convert/2 which bypassed a calculation bug in Lua script version of {convert} but deleted as if had no extra value as a template. Then Template:Convert/3 was deleted per false rationale that it followed TfD logic for {convert/2}, when instead it allowed 2 sets of free-form text inside a conversion, as providing a major feature not possible with {convert} nor any other template. For comparison, note the range error "41-41" of 2 different values by Lua {convert} during 2013-2016:

{convert/old|105|-|106|F|C} gives:

This userpage has been blanked. If this is your userpage, you can retrieve the contents of this page in the page history. Alternatively, if you would like it deleted, simply replace the content of this page with {{db-u1}}.

{convert |105 |-|106 |F|C} gives: 105–106 °F (41–41 °C)
{convert/2 |105|-|106|F|C} fixed: 105–106 °F (40.6–41.1 °C)

The correct result range "40.6 - 41.1" was provided by both {convert/old} and {convert/2} even in 2013, while the conversion bug has remained in the protected Lua module of {convert} for 3 years, but proving how use of protected Lua templates can lock-in severe bugs for years. That is the ironic horror, as Lua {convert} can do many features very quickly, except calculate conversions correctly for 3 years. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:13, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

I can see some logic though to not starting a new template when the main one is bugged - surely one template is enough and it needs to be right! Why couldn't you get template editing permission anyway? Testing: 105–106 °F (41–41 °C); 105–106 °F (40.6–41.1 °C); 105–106 °F (41–41 °C)^*. Hmmm, looks like adding a parameter "1" after the last temperature fixes it, so a separate template isn't really required; but the most obvious thing from reading the help page is adding a parameter "precision=1" but that doesn't work. Why not? I think there's a bug here; should be fixed... anyway, we should take this to the template page. Wnt (talk) 18:58, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

The precision problems were much more difficult than just the simple 105-106 case above; and easier to fix in the limited wp:wrapper template {convert/2} than risk altering the main template used in 500,000 pages; see below "Same tactics deleted Template:Convert/2 which fixed Convert bugs". -Wikid77 (talk) 17:37, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Just to follow up, I should say that after a conversation with User:Johnuniq and User:DePiep at Template talk:Convert, it was decided that the named precision= parameter should be taken out of the documentation. The same thing can be done by putting a number in the next unnamed parameter field as I did above, which is used in a ridiculous number of pages, and they didn't want to complicate things. They indeed don't seem in a rush to fix the 105-106 default behavior, but ... well, it's tricky. I mean, do we want all the temperature tables to go from 96 (37) to 105 (40.6)? It's gonna look like crap and then people have to add -1s at all the entries over 100 Fahrenheit, everywhere the template is used ... God knows how much chaos it will be. I see there's already special code for converting temperature in the module, so I'm thinking this was a feature more than a bug - though yes, that remains debatable. Wnt (talk) 15:18, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: the overrounding as "105 (41)" might seem simpler than "(40.6)", but do we want all the temperature tables to go from 105 (41) to 106 (41), as if both temperatures are identical? If so, a parameter "prec=" could be added to use {{{prec|0}}} across a whole temperature chart. Plus actually, many of our editors have complained of overrounding {convert|100|m} as "100 metres (330 ft)" then showing "101 metres (331 ft)" as if only 1 ft separates 100 and 101 metres; this has been trouble for mountain peaks also: {convert|1300|m} as "1,300 metres (4,300 ft)" but {convert|1301|m} as "1,301 metres (4,268 ft)" as if 1301m were somehow 32 ft (9.8 m) lower than 1300 metres! -Wikid77 (talk) 13:23, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Same tactics deleted Template:Convert/2 which fixed Convert bugs: Please note the tactics (to delete Template:Convert/2) had totally ignored how {convert/2} had corrected the conversion precision, now 3 years ago. These precision problems have been very difficult to fix, beyond the trivial case for 105-106 degrees F. Consider, below, the more-difficult decimal precision of 105.001, solved by the now-deleted {convert/2}:

{convert/old|105|-|106|F|C} gives:

This userpage has been blanked. If this is your userpage, you can retrieve the contents of this page in the page history. Alternatively, if you would like it deleted, simply replace the content of this page with {{db-u1}}.

{convert/old|105|-|105.001|F|C} gives:

This userpage has been blanked. If this is your userpage, you can retrieve the contents of this page in the page history. Alternatively, if you would like it deleted, simply replace the content of this page with {{db-u1}}.

← note error where lower 105 converts higher

{convert |105 |-|105.001 |F|C} gives: 105–105.001 °F (40.556–40.556 °C) ← note error as both values convert to same amount 40.556 °C
{convert/2 |105|-|105.001|F|C} fixed: 105–105.001 °F (40.5556–40.5561 °C)

Note the extreme precision, needed to correctly convert temperature "105–105.001 °F" as "40.5556–40.5561 °C" with 4 decimal digits of precision, and how many users do you think would know how to force that precision from the current Lua {convert} template? Even for me, with a degree in mathematics (as well as computer science degrees), this had been an extremely difficult precision calculation to fix, as shown by the 4-decimal precision above. In such cases, we don't want users to struggle to overcome the precision bugs in Convert, but Convert/2 had automatically fixed the precision. I think we have reached an intellectual limit, where typical users cannot easily understand the calculations handled by such templates, and cannot make an informed decision about the value of keeping a template. Meanwhile, fixing {convert} to calculate the correct precision will be very difficult, and hence Convert/2 is still needed 3 years later for such cases (and some which are even more complex precision than what I noted above). BTW: Jimbo has been interested in these types of technical, complex limits to our technology, but does not usually have time to research the details. In this case, the template operation is so complex that most users cannot judge when to delete a template, unable to easily understand the technical problems. In the case above, having a high-quality wrapper template, as Convert/2, allowed bypassing {convert} to automatically correct the calculations with high precision. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:37, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

@Wikid77: I'm sorry, but to me it looks like we can just use {{convert|105.000|-|105.001|F|C|4}} = 105.000–105.001 °F (40.5556–40.5561 °C). If adding a "|4" at the end rather than a "/2" at the beginning is the cost to avoid having the fork of a huge complicated module, it seems pretty cheap. Also, I have more tolerance for a deletion in this context than in the context of an article, because it's essentially redundant content that you could keep in userspace anyway - the deletion just means they don't want people adding it until somebody is stuck maintaining both modules. Wnt (talk) 23:51, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

So you thought the corrected calculations in {convert/2} came at the cost of a complete fork of the Lua script Module:Convert, but instead {convert/2} actually worked as a mere wp:wrapper template (or frontend) to {convert}, as so versatile and maintenance-free, that {convert/2} had calculated the correct precision with either the Lua {convert} or the prior markup-based {convert/old} during the past 4 years. But beyond correcting the calculations from {convert}, the {convert/2} wrapper could also correctly calculate 2 separate conversions spread across a sentence. An example would be a change in length, as 2 related values, old and new, within a sentence. See example:

The fence length of {convert |100|m|ft} gives:
The fence length of 100 metres (330 ft)
The fence length of {convert/2 |100|was increased to|100.5|m|ft} gave:
The fence length of 100 was increased to 100.5 metres (328.1 was increased to 329.7 ft)

In that 100-metre example, {convert} gives a value of "330 ft" but {convert/2} correctly shows "328.1 ft" increased to 100.5 m as "329.7 ft". Hence, {convert/2} could also correctly calculate precision for 2 conversions at once in free-form text, as a feature not possible even with the Lua {convert} after 3 years. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:52, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Philosophical question; how was Italy?

Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

Jimbo, do you see the isomorphism between arguments in [6] and talk page discussions as e.g. per [7]? Do you see the isomorphism between those and scripts of interacting agents in Lincos (artificial language)? Do you think a Lincos Wikipedia would be more valuable than Wikidata? Why or why not?

By the way, how was Wikimania this year? What was your favorite part? EllenCT (talk) 21:12, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I suspect Jimbo is still processing Wikimania 2016, as the videos show it covered numerous major aspects about Wikimedia software plans, Wikipedia languages and Wikiprojects (as noted in post below). His theme seemed to be beyond the world-at-large as "This is Not our World" (so violent) after the shooting death of UK Jo Cox and numerous gun attacks, plus the prior-day Brexit disunity turmoil, versus a policy of Civility. Jimbo focused on the world-wide diversity and acknowledging many positive efforts to improve WP coverage. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:34, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Here are some resources about Wikimania 2016.

Wikipedia Weekly #122 – Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario (1:02:31)—Wikipedia Weekly
Wikimania 2016, Impact on Esino Lario/Overview: Programme (29:54)—YouTube
Wikimania 2016 ("About 2,140 results")—YouTube
Prysmian Group Brings Ultra-Broadband to Wikimania 2016—RealWire (June 24, 2016)
Wikimania 2016, in Italia la convention dellʼenciclopedia online più famosa del mondo—TgCom24 (June 27, 2016) (wikt:telegiornale)

(My translation from Italian to English follows.)

For about a week the small village of Esino Lario has brought together more than a thousand Wikipedians on the shores of Lake Como. The objective? To develop together the new frontiers of digital knowledge.

A small village nestled on the mountains of Lombardy, with Lake Como in the background, a few houses and 760 inhabitants: thus appears the little center of Esino Lario (Lecco), which for about a week has nevertheless become the center of the world, or at least of the digital one. Here, in fact, was the 2016 edition of Wikimania, the convention dedicated to the users who contribute to the development of the most famous online encyclopedia of the planet: Wikipedia. This year's convention was the first gathering of Wikipedians organized in Italy.

The objective of Wikimania 2916 "was that of making known to the world that even a little mountain reality like Esino Lario can be part of a shared and global knowledge", the organizers emphasized. Two worlds in contrast, those of Esino Lario and of the colossus of online information, which has made necessary some "special" preparation: in the months preceding the event, lessons in English were in fact organized to facilitate communication between residents and guests.

"An immense thanks goes to all the volunteers", said today Carlo Mario Pensa, president of the Wikimania Committee and of the Museo delle Grigne. And he added: "At the end of Wikimania there will remain a spirit a little different for the young ones, for us, for the territory and the example for our rulers". Iolanda Pensa, the inventor of the initiative, has reaffirmed the concept which has led to "carrying the technological event, in a very remote place, the desire to conquer a challenge".

In conclusion, Wikipedia has brought the eyes of all the world to the little village nestled in the mountains of Lombardy. Esino Lario will be able now to benefit from optical fiber and from free wi-fi, and certainly will be a smarter and more international village.

—Wavelength (talk) 20:22, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikimania was really great this year for me. Because we were in a relatively remote village, it felt much more "community centric" than usual - although I expect that my perspective is a little different from others. Usually during Wikimania I am put to work the entire time doing back to back media interviews. But unlike for example the most recent two prior Wikimanias held in Mexico City and London - both major metropolitan areas media cities - the amount of press physically visiting Esino Lario was much smaller. This meant that I actually got to attend some sessions, so I suppose that was my favorite part.

On the 'philosophical' question - as I've not read the papers linked and had never heard of Lincos before today, I don't really have any opinion. It's not my preference in life to offer opinions without careful thought (although like most people, I've occasionally done it with predictable poor results!).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:16, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The question about arguments, talk pages, and Lincos was in response to your February claim that humans can't put all concepts in terms of physics and math. In fact, Lincos proved that humans knew how to do that literally more than half a century ago. WIkidata is a step backward. You need to up your business acumen, Jimbo, and threaten to convert Wikidata into a Lincos Wikipedia if all the companies profiting from community work by repackaging Wikidata-based infoboxes on their search results don't provide an endowment large enough to address the risk that the surveillance state starts impacting the quality of volunteer contributions. A Lincos Wikipedia would be superior to Wikidata in its own right, in part because it could encode both articles and talk pages, and in part because numbers are a terrible basis for an interlingua. I'm very glad that Wikimania was fun this year. If media appearances are so draining, why don't you charge for exclusives? How much do you think Comcast would pay for a talk on the relationship between NPOV and paid editing? EllenCT (talk) 17:09, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, I have found the Wikimania 2016 videos to be fascinating, as covering so many major aspects of the global Wikipedias (and tools which take "2 years" to fix). I'm sorry you had to speak there so soon with your personal world in crisis (Jo Cox plus prior-day Brexit vote "coin-toss" after the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting from the region of Wikipedia in Florida), and then muster a positive spirit for the conference. (I guess beyond your future Nobel Peace Prize for civility, you might get an Oscar for a positive role during dire events). But remember how this is a violent world across the continents, still with nightly shootings in the U.S. with perhaps 350 mass murders per year. Much work is needed to foster civility and teach real consensus in votes (no longer "coin flip" to decide a nation's role).

Meanwhile, I'm thinking my favorite part of the conference was you, Jimbo speaking like a 27-year-old (or even a college senior!), so ready to improve the world, and I had to do a double-take to check it was really you sounding so young again. Perhaps that is why people encourage your health, as you only live twice, to have 2 lifetimes, if you observe your health. In the session videos, I noted the Wikiproject Medicine strives for reliability, and I was stunned to hear the WP medical articles have become the preferred medical source for whole groups of readers. So I guess that is another accomplishment, to have facilitated such a change in the Internet medical world within 15 years. Keep it going, retire after age 90, and use the next 45 years to further transform the world. Let's hope these next years will be easier. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:51, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 July 2016

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

News and notes: Board unanimously appoints Katherine Maher as new WMF executive director; Wikimedia lawsuits in France and Germany

Op-ed: Two policies in conflict?

In the media: Terrorism database cites Wikipedia as a source

Featured content: Triple fun of featured content

Traffic report: Goalposts; Oy vexit

Blog: Jimmy Wales names Emily Temple-Wood and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight as Wikipedians of the Year

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:46, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Request for resources to search recent changes and for a unified ranked backlog

Latest comment: 8 years ago15 comments5 people in discussion

Jimbo, would you please see [8] and [9]. How can we move forward on searching recent changes and making a unified WP:BACKLOG list? Do the people you are asking for endowment money know we don't have enough to do those things yet? How can the community help you make such improvements? EllenCT (talk) 15:19, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

It's a good idea, but note the meta:2015 Community Wishlist Survey took the top 10 ideas while 97 didn't make the cut (though they said they might try some of those anyway). It might be worth asking whether the resources are available to turn that up to something more like 50%. It may be tempting to start an informal list of ideas (old and new) at meta:2016 Community Wishlist Survey, if you have the time to go through the losing ideas from previous years, and add more, to have a big batch of ideas ready and waiting before the official two-week period starts in November. Wnt (talk) 15:29, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Would you please do that? I appreciate that you value my judgement, but I am only interested in the improvements which I think will have the greatest benefit per time and effort, and when I last looked through that list, most of the pending ideas did not seem anywhere near these two by that measure. EllenCT (talk) 16:51, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: do you see anything you think would lead to similar improvements with less time or effort? EllenCT (talk) 19:48, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

The wish list is a huge collection of ideas that I've scarcely looked at - I can't really second-guess it well aside from hoping that more people (preferably hires at the lowest possible level, where all the work is generally done) would make a difference, and that if you and others would put down some ideas now, they would be less likely to be missed in November. Wnt (talk) 02:39, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

I just looked through them all again, and still think that a unified and ranked global backlog and the ability to search recent changes are more important than all of them that remain open, but in that order (searching recent changes is less important than a unified ranked backlog.) I agree we should add them to meta:2016 Community Wishlist Survey. EllenCT (talk) 22:39, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

They did more than "try" some of the others; one is marked "Done" while several others are in active investigation. I was pleased to see how many had some activity.--S Philbrick (Talk) 22:17, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, if a benefactor who has not been involved in anti-competitive hiring practices agrees to donate $50 million, I will name my planned unified backlog list after them. Does that help? EllenCT (talk) 16:56, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, if the name would be a form of branding, such as the "Donna's Donuts VisualEditor" or such, then I suspect there might be an uproar among the editing community. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:50, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I would not name my preferred backlog list after non-nutritious food. If you don't think you can trust me, it's your loss. EllenCT (talk) 21:07, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

After having slept on this, Jimbo, I suggest that there are many things the Foundation could name after potential benefactors which would be potentially more attractive to well-heeled donors than the world's biggest to-do list, but my offer stands. EllenCT (talk) 18:57, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Two things - the endowment fund is not really about funding ongoing software projects, but more a very long term "safety" fund - the perspective I take in my own thinking about it is to think about Wikipedia in 50 years time. So we should probably separate out thoughts about how much the Foundation should be investing in engineering, and how they should best prioritize their time, from questions about the endowment fundraising project.

Second, at least in terms of the donors I have so far successfully recruited (announcements will come in due course!) no one really seems interested in "naming rights" to anything. That may in part be a function of who I am talking to at this stage. I'm happy for us to brainstorm about it but at least a priori I'm not particularly hopeful that we'll hit upon a great idea.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:20, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

How do we get past the impasse where the Foundation claims it doesn't have the resources to estimate the amount of resources necessary to search recent changes? EllenCT (talk) 16:50, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

To expand WikiBlame tool for recent changes

It seems like a toolserver fork of the wp:WikiBlame tool could search beyond one page, to check several pages in the wp:Recent_changes list, or perhaps a similar tool already exists. The 1-page Blame tool is connected under "View History" as see: "Search recent history" of User_talk:Jimbo. Also if spam-links have been suspected for days, then a wp:wikisearch of the internal wikitext could be run by quoted company name, as search: insource:"Acme donuts" (or similar). -Wikid77 (talk) 22:21, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

A related issue, for all wp:wikisearches, is the hunt for text containing unusual special characters (such as tilde "~") which the CirrusSearch might not be able to match during a search request. For years, even Google Search had been unable to match "2 2=4" due to a alphabetic-text bias which did not consider " " nor "=" as significant text on a page, and as a mathematician, I just could not believe such anti-math bias continued for years. Consequently, I consider many of today's search engines to be in their infancy, even after 3 decades of should-do-better issues. -Wikid77 (talk) 02:31, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Restore user/talk pages

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Please restore my user and talk pages. Thank you. TimothyAxoy (talk) 17:32, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

TimothyAxoy, you'll want Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion instead. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 20:07, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I've restored them. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:07, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Thoughts about Russian and Ukrainian

Latest comment: 8 years ago11 comments4 people in discussion

Some concerns were raised here recently about alleged bias in the Russian (and possibly in the Ukranian) Wikipedia with respect to the recent conflict between the two countries. As promised, I spoke to people at Wikimania about this, and wanted to report back on what I heard. All remarks reported back under "Chatham House Rule".

The basic summary is that the people I spoke to (from all sides of the conflict) seem to agree that any notion that the Russian government has agents actively working to control what is in Russian Wikipedia directly are not likely true. Remember, the Russians have bravely stood against censorship threats for some time now and believe strongly in the open principles of Wikipedia.

It was pointed out in a way that I think people will find obvious from our experiences here in English Wikipedia that to directly enter Wikipedia as a propagandist on a high profile topic would be extremely problematic and difficult. Lots of people are watching and debating, and the debate centers around making sure to follow high quality sources. An agent would have to follow that train, and it's hard to see how any one person not known to the community for years could have a strong impact on that.

And here is the key: it's a lot easier to simply control the sources. This is a deeper philosophical problem that can't be solved by simply banning a handful of propagandists.

I am reminded of a conversation I had some years ago with the editor of a magazine in Russia. He was very skeptical of Wikipedia and said "If I want to change something in Wikipedia to be untrue, why don't I just offer $500 each to a group of Wikipedians to make it happen." I replied that it would be very hard to do that because news of it would inevitably leak out quite quickly and the users who agreed to do such a thing would be banned by the rest of the community quite quickly. No one person has enough power to make something like that happen. I also responded that it would be much easier to simply bribe him, the editor of a magazine, because due to the hierarchical nature of decisions in that context, he actually does have the power.

Speaking roughly, the situation right now in Russia is that the media is very largely reporting events in Ukraine very differently from the rest of the world's press. Many Russian people believe that the Western press is unfairly biased against Russia. This is the core root of the problem of different reporting in Russian Wikipedia versus other languages, not infiltration.

The solution to this has to come from within Wikipedia. I am unable to find the link at the moment but reference was made in a positive way to a Wikimedia Foundation funded project on conflict resolution in Ukraine, as well as to meetings and friendships between Russian and Ukrainian Wikipedians.

This is hardly all that can be said about this. I still think it would be quite interesting to see two or three core articles carefully translated in a high quality way from Russian and Ukrainian to English.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:47, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

As a side-note, this is part of a wider, academic discussion as outlined in the book Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (2013).

@Karst: - thanks for the ref.

There is even a particular chapter on Ukraine-Russian interactions on Wikipedia Building Wiki-history - Between consesus and edit warring. Of course Google books only offers a preview and the book is 3 years old. I did notice 1 fact that is especially interesting. The author reports that 12% of the editors on Russian Wikipedia were from Ukraine. Can we check this now to see if it has changed after the start of the war?

I'd also like to thank Jimmy for looking into this. From my POV it looks optimistic and perhaps a bit naive, but examining the problem is always a good starting point for solving it. I don't have any solutions myself to the (potential) problem, but may I ask that the WMF keep an eye on it? Along with watching for possible interventions by the governments of China, the US, etc.? I do feel that this is one risk that, while difficult to monitor, could really cripple Wikipedia. Thanks again to all. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:43, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Template:Globalize for worldwide coverage

With enwiki we have {{globalize}} to emphasize an article page should improve a broader wp:NPOV coverage with other world views, and that would encourage use of sources outside of state-controlled, or cultural-bias, sources. Especially, within a key section of an article, then any bias could be challenged to improve a specific section of slanted text, as with the globalize-tag below:

In that example globalize-tag above, the attention of fix-it editors could be pinpointed into a crucial section, to widen the viewpoints.
For example, if a U.S. college student were accused of a crime in Italy, then the text could be expected to be nearly half-based on U.S. source cites, rather than all Italian court documents with the false rationale that U.S. sources would be overly pro-American while only Italian sources could be trusted to publish the "true" facts as established by Italian court decisions. Likewise if an Italian cruise ship capsized off the coast of Italy, with some U.S. passengers onboard, then the text could be expected to cite nearly half Italian sources to globalize the perspective on which details to highlight in coverage of the related events. For each other-language Wikipedia, a similar {globalize} template should be developed to help balance the text for wider, cross-world viewpoints. As we have seen on enwiki, some articles have been extremely biased for months/years by an effort to suppress source cites from other nations. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:18, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

As a follow-up, about balancing reference sources, if the subject were a multinational topic, then sources should be cited from several nations, such as coverage of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as a topic involving many nations. Otherwise, sources from just a few nations might provide sufficient broad coverage of the related events. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:00, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

As a current example, if WP decides to have an article about Wisconsin (U.S.) student Beau Solomon, found in the Tiber River in Rome,^{(see: nyt)} then the text should be half based on U.S. reliable sources and half on Italian documents, to avoid cultural bias in the coverage. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:33, 4 July 2016, source 16:26, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that US sources are reliable and Italian ones aren't? That certainly would be cultural bias. And given this appalling bit of xenophobic rubbish that you posted on Jimbo's talkpage earlier, it's clear that you do think this. I don't like to template the regulars, but you need to cut this out now. Laura Jamieson (talk) 22:38, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

The issue is not just whether U.S. sources or Italy-based sources are more reliable, but also the issues of what people are allowed to say in public within either nation. For example, in the U.S. it is generally acceptable for police to "lie" (to tell known falsehoods) to U.S. citizens, but not to lie under oath during a court proceeding (as committing perjury). Perhaps law enforcement would be extremely difficult if police officers could not mislead people by claiming a search and seizure was mandatory or that if suspects tell all they know, then the police would not arrest them[!] (perhaps for civil disobedience for what the suspects just said). Anyway, such actions by law enforcement are a different concern than bias by news reports or documents in each nation. This is NOT a problem of "xenophobic" views (I have lived for years in Italy), but rather, what statements are legal to be stated in various nations (and by whom). These issues might seem unpleasant, but Wikipedia seems to have low reader confidence for legal issues and needs more coverage of legal terms (such as explaining "inventory search" versus "search incident to arrest" etc.). -Wikid77 (talk) 23:19, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Other source bias beyond national news

As usual, Jimbo, it seems you have noted an extremely major problem in WP article bias, with each nation's sources having various perspectives. Hence, the related bias problems include the following:

Cultural mistrust, as can someone convicted in Italy be quoted in WP pages or revert all quotes? (Does conviction mean the person's words cannot be trusted to quote?)
News media versus government vs other sources: where US Govt says "ISIL" or Europe says, "I.S." or locals say, "Daesh" (or "Islamic State") but U.S. media insists to say, "ISIS" (which "no one else" says who is related to the events).
Layman's term versus official terms: In general, there can be a huge difference in phrasing, such as "area of a circle" versus mathematician's "area of a disk" or computer "multitasking" versus a person trying multiple tasks during the same short time period. (Computers don't do some tasks more poorly just because of multi-tasking; overall runtime could be very similar.)

All such biases from cultures, organizations or terminology could potentially slant the wording of articles. The term "{{Globalize}}" might not fully address alternative views within one nation. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:42, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm not 100% clear on what your issue is with Italy in particular, but I'll try to answer the questions in a matter of fact way. :-)

In general, a conviction in any court does not imply that we can't quote someone. I'm not even sure what you mean by that. For example, in Al Capone we quote Al Capone regarding his own public statements about his career.
When there are different regional names for something, there are several factors that we should take into account. We should consider things like: what will be most easily understood by readers, what term is preferred by various relevant authorities, what context are we using it in, can we use both, etc. In some cases, there is no particular political implication of using one term or another, but in the more difficult cases, there will be - and this must be carefully considered. (In the example you give, my vague understanding is that (a) "Daesh" is deliberately insulting (b) ISIL is a more accurate translation and (c) ISIS sounds the coolest and most menacing (hence why the sensationalist US press likes it, I suppose).
Layman's terms versus official terms - I think we should tend to lead with layman's terms but where appropriate introduce and explain the specialist terms. Our job is to help people learn new things, and starting from where they are (with a general term like 'circle' and explaining to them at an appropriate point in the exposition why experts use a different term, is probably the most useful approach.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 08:50, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps defamation prison in Italy: In Italy, people must be very careful about critical comments, where some public defamation comments can be prosecuted to 3 years in prison, but in the U.S. there are no federal "criminal defamation laws" and only some U.S. states punish slander/libel by up to one year in jail (not penitentiary prison), and the Alabama Supreme Court struck down the local criminal defamation law as unconstitutional on July 6, 2001 (link: [10]). That is why I wondered if quoting a convict in Italy might risk blaming other people for crimes, as dishonorable comments, and hence Italians might strongly avoid quoting people on trial due to the 3-year prison (as who would pay someone's bills or store belongings for 3 years, compared to a few U.S. states average 3 months in jail for severe defamation). In U.S. we hear 1-2 years prison for Tommy Chong website ads for waterpipe bongs, but not months/years in jail for slander, such as saying police yanked person from car, shoved them on ground, and hit them. Such defamation jail in U.S. just seems so rare, so that is the cultural difference of Italy (or some other nations). -Wikid77 (talk) 10:45, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

I guess that's enough about Italy for now, so let's move to other bias in a different topic, about level of focus on details, in new thread: "#Perspective bias and Clinton emails". -Wikid77 (talk) 01:37, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Perspective bias and Clinton emails

Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

Tangent from "#Thoughts about Russian and Ukrainian"

The enwiki editors have used many sources to pinpoint details, in page "Hillary Clinton email controversy" but seem to have lost focus (dwelling on level of Secret classification) as missing the original issue of whether Clinton's email messages can all be retrieved eventually, for public review, per the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), such as read from a long-term archive.

The FBI (link: [11]) found the server(s) setup did not have long-term archival of email (where they found some old deleted messages in disk free space or "slack space"), and other State Dept personnel also failed to archive the related email as required by U.S. federal law, and meanwhile, an extensive analysis by newspaper The Washington Post (link: [12]), of so-called classified emails (or "up-classified") had confirmed what Clinton stated about ~2,100 emails not being classified, at the time, and instead written and sent by about 300 other personnel in various government branches, several of whom the newspaper interviewed (from partially redacted email) to confirm none of them used the tactic of stripping classified headers to send as non-classified email. Plus the 2 dozen emails ranked as "Top Secret" were withheld from the press for security and could not be cross-checked by the public for actual secrecy of content.

Instead of those broad perspectives, considering the related emails by hundreds of U.S. government employees and archives, the WP page seems to dwell on what Hillary Clinton said about the emails, rather than what did the emails say, who wrote them, and how many email messages were properly archived per FOIA regulations. The overall effect seems to be a bias in perspective, where the Wikipedia page cannot address the major issues because of the general focus on other details. So the Clinton-email article page has not yet mentioned the U.S. State Department's classified network ClassNet nor the DoD-State SIPRNet nor top-secret JWICS nor Clinton's use of hardcopy pages to read classified text, nor communication with foreign dignitaries as non-classified text. This situation is just an excellent example of perspective bias, beyond any bias in data presented by a nation's news media. -Wikid77 (talk) 01:37, 9 July 2016 sources Wikid77 (talk) 09:05, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

[13] EllenCT (talk) 07:07, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, that page at McClatchyDC.com uses the phrase "preserve and protect the public record" rather than "email archive" as perhaps a case of terminology bias which could fog the focus on how the U.S. State Department would retrieve emails to meet FOIA requests. In general, such large WP article pages, with several long quotes or 233 sources, are difficult to rewrite to address the major issues. In the Russian WP, the page about the Crimea annexation had over 800 footnotes as plenty of details to fog/obscure the major issues. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:05, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

State Dept has SMART tools for archival: The "new" (2010) system to archive email for the U.S. State Department is SMART (State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset). It is available for use on either the OpenNet (Internet non-classified) or ClassNet (classified) networks of the State Dept, and also allows marking pages as SBU "Sensitive but Unclassified" (source: [14]). -Wikid77 (talk) 07:22, 10 July 2016 source Wikid77 (talk) 11:40, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Terminology bias as cables or emails

A related, but minor, problem is the terminology bias when using the word "email" where the U.S. State Department also uses the term "cable" to indicate a message (after "trans-Atlantic cable"). That terminology difference could deter searches for related pages, but not a bias due to national control of sources. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:15, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Moderator proposal

Latest comment: 8 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

Wikipedia:Moderators/Proposal

As this page (by his leave) often acts as a noticeboard for friendly notices...

There is currently a request for comment open to add a new user-right package with a set of content-related admin tools (NOT block or protect), requested through RfA-like process. I welcome everyone's thoughts on this. - jc37 01:41, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Oppose - I am unsatisfied with the community's ability to successfully apply the reliable source criteria, so I am opposed to devolution of rights from approved administrators. EllenCT (talk) 02:45, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi EllenCT. While you are of course welcome to note this here if you wish, you may want to read the proposal, and leave your comments at the Wikipedia:Moderators/Straw poll. I was going to offer to post it there for you, but I see you've been editing for 3 years now, and I presume you are able to. But that said, if you would like assistance, please feel free to ask : ) - jc37 02:55, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

I read the proposal and I think it would not improve the quality of the encyclopedia. EllenCT (talk) 07:02, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Non-admins and privacy issues: IIRC a major problem with partial admin tools was the trust needed to view deleted pages, which might contain excessive private information about various people or institutions, and hence, the trust level would be the same as needed to undelete pages or block users, that is, the same as full admins. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:22, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

I urge you to read the proposal - that point is well understood.--S Philbrick (Talk) 18:38, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

There's 0% realistic chance of the proposal succeeding, so it's really flogging a dead horse. All various forms of unbundling have been utterly discussed to death; it's not gonna happen until Jimbo or WMF steps in, or possibly when Wikipedia disappears up its own bumhole, when it finally runs out of admins (and, possibly at the last minute, wakes up to the need to change).

One solution would be for Wales to enact his stated belief that adminship is "no big deal", but I think Wales' BOLD spirit has been eroded by the need to be a conservative public face. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.20.193.222 (talk) 16:00, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi

Latest comment: 8 years ago16 comments12 people in discussion

Do you mind if i watch ur talk and periodically maintain it Just to help after u have done such great things! VarunFEB2003 (talk) 14:03, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't know if Jimbo himself will reply to your question, but I'm sure he wouldn't mind another talk page watcher in addition to the thousands of watchers that he already has! CabbagePotato (talk) 07:10, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

It's a wiki. I do have a bias towards good writing, I must say, so "ur talk" and "after u have done" don't give a lot of confidence.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:27, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Note the OP declares as a citizen of India. These expressions seem to be much more accepted in India, even among educated and professional people. I've had several Indian colleagues use "u" and "ur" in formal correspondence and have gently explained to them that it does not convey an impression of professionalism. So it doesn't look great, but we should keep in mind cultural differences in usage. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 13:59, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Fair enough, and I hope I didn't sound too harsh.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:31, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

*doesn't 86.20.193.222 (talk) 17:38, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

It should be don't. "Doesn't" is singular whereas "don't" is plural. Zaereth (talk) 23:58, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Actually, a case can be made here for either usage - the two examples basically can be viewed as being "this use of chatspeak" (collectively then) as a single example in modern English usage. Collect (talk) 13:15, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Your explanation do not inspire any confidence. (sic) 86.20.193.222 (talk) 11:08, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

England doesn't score many goals in major tournaments. (American)
England don't score many goals in major tournaments. (British) Smallbones_(smalltalk) 13:54, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

LOL. I mean Laughing Out Loud. --David Tornheim (talk) 18:40, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Sorry Jimmy wales its right in India we use "ur and u" formally also, Ill take care next time sorry VarunFEB2003 (talk) 14:04, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

JW might also have noted your contributions (such as they are) to his one of his 'great things'- 7.7% are even to article-space... _Muffled ^Pocketed 14:21, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Dunno. JW doesn't have a lot of room to get snooty with the colors of the pie graph... Carrite (talk) 16:41, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Ha! The bloke who runs the kingdom doesn't have to buy his own beans. _Muffled ^Pocketed 16:51, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

The old arXiv blog was a lot more fun to read than the present one. Count Iblis (talk) 20:40, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hey Jimbo do you think I am improving as an editor?[15]

EllenCT (talk) 02:58, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Gerald Walpin undeleted after killed by SUV

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The page "Gerald Walpin" was undeleted on 6 July 2016 per the June DRV, two weeks after the SUV accident in Manhattan. We found sources about him given awards or honors as a prominent NYC attorney, which could be added to the page. Vehicle stats estimate annual 4,700 U.S. pedestrian deaths in recent years, or average 91 killed per week, as up 15% since 2009, possibly due to increased mobile phone use in U.S. as "distracted walking" or distracted driving as trying to phone (read or text?) at intersections. Safety campaigns have advised, "Pick your head up and put the phone down" at crosswalks. Walpin was hit before noon and died in the hospital that day. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:47, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Pages about concrete barriers and barricades

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Several other-language Wikipedias also have some pages about concrete barriers and barricades to deter traffic accidents and protect pedestrian walkways. There are numerous options to block vehicles, including many decorative concrete barriers as shown on Swedish Wikipedia (page: sv:Betongsugga) as safer rounded "bounce-off" obstacles, beyond the industrial Jersey barriers to be used around the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland, Ohio. Even a rectangular park bench can trip a person along sharp corners, so rounded barriers are also people-friendly for crowds. In the U.S. many (confused) people have driven into buildings or stores (several in stolen trucks to rob a store then ditch the truck), perhaps every day of the year. Many beach towns have dangerous walkways along the seawall boulevards or fast beach highways, where bicycles and pedestrians are at great risk. I think Alabama has decided to close some entire beach-area roads for exclusive use by bicycles and pedestrians, possibly because the severe, deadly risk from (distracted) vehicle traffic cannot be controlled any other way. Also, any roadside barriers, which would protect pedestrians along roadways, also create an impact hazard for distracted drivers (or bicycles), so there is a balance trade-off of pedestrian-versus-driver safety. However, the WP pages about barricades (in each language) could offer more about moving temporary barriers (by forklift?) to protect street festivals or farmer's markets during the active days. The RNC in Cleveland is installing staggered rows of Jersey barriers, as so many obstacles that even a large heavy truck would be stopped (or ruined), but allow pedestrians, bicycles, carts or prams to weave between the islands of barriers. These barriers are an important subject which WP is covering, and could help change the way the world will design roadways and festival areas in the future. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:31, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

A few problems with Wikipedia

Latest comment: 8 years ago39 comments11 people in discussion

A. Admin noticeboards are useless for new/newish users...they often bring legitimate complaints about the improper behavior of more established users and they are almost always treated either utterly contemptuously, ignored, or "boomeranged" (a concept/practice that needs to be highly curtailed)..this chases away newish editors from Wikipedia (I've seen it happen many times with my own eyes in only a few months time).. B. these noticeboards are patrolled by the same 4 admins (I exaggerate only slightly) who largely display this bias...again, chasing away new editors.. C. blocks are utterly arbitrary in both instatement and length...I've seen blocks for similar behavior mostly directed toward new editors that were for a period of hours or a period of weeks or a full month.. D. unblock requests are patrolled by the same 4 largely block happy admins (I exaggerate only slightly).. This all amounts to new editors being 'bitten' like crazy at Wikipedia currently...(and I'm talking about good-faith contributors or people with obvious potential to be good contributors). I've tried in the recent past to put forth some ideas/proposals via the established channels but a small group that is part of this established status quo follows me around and sees via various strategies that the conversation is ended..I do believe what's described above needs to be examined by the foundation as the people responsible for these problems are also largely in charge of seeing to any changes to the status quo due to the inherent mechanisms of Wikipedia..Sincerely, 68.48.241.158 (talk) 15:46, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Hey, 68.48.241.158, in prior years, Jimbo has investigated similar complaints since at least 2010, with the hope to "encourage troublesome editors to leave" but Wikipedia seems to act as a magnet for obsessive behavior, and discussions of "term limits" for admins (such as the 2006 limits imposed for admins on Swedish Wikipedia) has not worked here on enwiki. Thanks for taking time to indicate which problems are still happening, years later. Beyond the issues you listed, I have also noticed some admins reverting hundreds of good-faith edits for questionable cause. Previously, I would have recommended to counsel the blocked users to help them return; however, when I tried to help hounded users, then I was accused of "coaching editors to bypass policies" or "collusion" or improperly "wp:CANVASing" other editors to sway opinions. Perhaps there is a relevant discussion on Meta-Wiki, somewhere under META:Main_page. We'll see if Jimbo has any new advice about these problems. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:12, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

I continue to advocate for a jury system to address this concern. At some point I need to bring this to the Village Pump. --David Tornheim (talk) 11:42, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

The best way to fight this kind of abuse is for everyday, normal editors to pop by AN/I every couple days or once a week or something and to chime in sensibly when the lynch mobs are forming. Newcomers are at a disadvantage on the noticeboards and they need rational support when it is deserved. Carrite (talk) 02:16, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

the administering side of WP is a shockingly small universe..you see the same couple dozen editors everywhere...this invites problems, I firmly believe...WP needs new editors and needs editors to stick around to eventually become good admins who involve themselves in administration...WP has 600 admins and falling, apparently..68.48.241.158 (talk) 18:09, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

One needn't be an administrator to opine effectively at AN/I. There are a core of 3,500 or more people who could participate there even right now. Carrite (talk) 02:17, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that would be nice. I think it should be a REQUIREMENT. That's what I mean by jury duty--get neutral people to comment at the Noticeboards, not the same group of people with the same POV who constantly defend their friends--even refusing to look at the RS directly. Why should they bother looking at the RS, if their friends can always be trusted to have the right POV about it? Quite a "good ole boys" network we have. I support efforts to get this fixed! --David Tornheim (talk) 12:02, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

it's a very real problem but one has to very carefully pay attention to even notice it (as of course there's a huge amount of dealing with obvious vandals etc at these boards too)..solutions are not easy to come up with, however...will likely involve some very big picture ideas from the foundation etc...68.48.241.158 (talk) 12:53, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

@David Tornheim: Mandating that volunteers must participate in some forum is a recipe for disaster. However, a voluntary jury duty concept has some appeal to me. In fact, I wrote up a proposal, Tour of Duty which is a sort of voluntary jury duty, coupled with a yet-to-be-fully-defined process for determining which are the under served areas. Spending time at under served notice boards might well make the cut.--S Philbrick (Talk) 18:53, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. That's why bringing things to Noticeboards is often unproductive. Same editors from the talk page who are being a problem just follow you there and create walls of text to keep neutral parties from wanting to participate in the drama or a discussion that is TL;DR. --David Tornheim (talk) 12:02, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

@Carrite: That is a great idea, and having seen the problem described in this section, I tried just that--participating as an uninvolved party at various noticeboards. Unfortunately, I was almost immediately rebuked for participating and told by one or two admins it was none of my business, please go away, that was their job.

In one case, when I tried to be an NPOV voice against a lynch mob, one of the editors retaliated. So, yeah, great idea in theory, but no good when those who claim ownership attack you for standing up to them and can easily get away with it since they know their friends will back them up even when they are wrong. --David Tornheim (talk) 11:55, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Before taking this complaint too seriously, consider the source... The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:31, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

^right on cue (this is the admin who blocked me for seeking recourse against his WP friend who was behaving against policy..when I sought the recourse at a noticeboard the friend went directly to this admin's talkpage and told him to block me...it's all there to be seen if anyone really want to..)68.48.241.158 (talk) 18:43, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Setting aside your blatant misrepresentation of the scenario, given how many different admins have blocked you one might start to think that there's a common denominator here; and hint, that one consistent quantity isn't the different admins. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 19:13, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

With no TP access either... :) _Muffled ^Pocketed 19:17, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

^more will likely be along to, ironically, prove my point...I invite all to examine my account/talk page....particularly anyone at the foundation/Mr. Wales..it's an illustrative case (admittedly there are a few things I would have done differently but only back when I was brand, brand new to editing)..68.48.241.158 (talk) 19:22, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Last time you went down this road you were blocked for a month, and the only mistake was not making it 6. Do give some further thought to my statement above. Also, would you please indent your posts, it's not that hard. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 20:45, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

^He's correct, Mr. Wales, I have been harassed/blocked/stalked for even daring to make posts like the OP I made here on your talk page..the above admin's posts in this thread are alarming and indicative of the problem being discussed, so in that sense it's beneficial to see them here..68.48.241.158 (talk) 00:01, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

^Where is this all going on. What's your best evidence that requires the min. amount of reading to dispute what they are saying against you? I know there are usually two sides to every story of drama. --David Tornheim (talk) 00:33, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

it would simply take a ton of time to get a proper sense of things..one would have to dig through my contribution history, trace the circumstances that have led to my blocks back to their very beginnings, dig up discussions I initiated at noticeboards/village pump etc...many hours would be involved...it's possible (though unlikely) somebody at the foundation would be interested in looking into it as an illustrative case...a superficial look into it would very likely lead to a false impression..68.48.241.158 (talk) 00:47, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I suggest you work on your storytelling skills. Why do you expect someone from the foundation to go through your contribs and tell your story if you can't? That could take hours. Who has the time? --David Tornheim (talk) 03:38, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

If I wrote something up that provided proper context and explanation it would literally have to be dozens of book pages in length, including scores and scores of "diffs"...I just don't have the time for that..and the info is already out in the open anyway for anyone to see and compiled via my contribution history..it could be looked at as a potential illustrative case by someone at/associated with the foundation (of course this is very unlikely to happen, I'm sure)..68.48.241.158 (talk) 11:27, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

My guess is that anyone neutral who looks at this will come away wondering why Wikipedia put up with you for so long. Of course, I'm asking the question myself and failing to come up with a decent answer besides thinking this site is often less than efficient at disposing of people who blur the line between outright trolls and staggeringly gross incompetence. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:30, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

this thread is discussing a culture problem that you are a part of so I mean....and your contributions here speak for themselves and demonstrate this (I won't respond to you anymore here to not make this thread too big etc)..68.48.241.158 (talk) 02:47, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

To the extent I'm part of a culture problem, it's by virtue of not having blocked you for 6 months or a year myself. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:53, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

A problem here may be that complaints like this tend to have a strong "usual suspects" aspects about them. I guess the best way to test to see if there really exists a problem is to let volunteers who have been around here a long time who have a clean record, edit incognito using a new accounts. They will simulate being newcomers, making elementary mistakes (e.g. not sign comments) to make sure they indeed look like newcomers. Count Iblis (talk) 06:28, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

I once tried to broach the very idea you suggest; then was not its time, but I do agree. In my opinion, Wikipedia needs an organ that functions on a level par with the Inspector General's relationship with the government it serves. Best regards.--John Cline (talk) 08:51, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

For a brief case study: incredibly, the issues I describe in the OP exactly played out just again to me. See my contribution history beginning July 15th at 10:48 going forward until blocked. You would have to read the entire initial ANI thread for context, the new ANI thread I was forced to then create and the activity on my talk page related to these..(notice the inability of most involved to even be able to properly comprehend the situation at hand due to apparent lazy/poor reading skills..) Anyway, potentially helpful to examine...(perhaps watch my account too as I expect continued retaliation)..and probably several editors will quickly be here to mischaracterize the situation so look at it all yourself (you'll note the usual suspects also referencing my previous blocks, none of which were proper..but, again, as I explained above it would just be logistically impossible for me to explain all that here)..68.48.241.158 (talk) 18:55, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Need WMF voter judgment tools

Although the wp:ANI sanction-decision process has been difficult to reform, the wp:developers could create software gadgets to impose a broader judgment process by the operation of voting tools. Beyond the distraction of creating a wp:FLOW message system, after the slow wp:LiquidThreads, the WMF could actually implement tools with new features to invite a quorum of uninvolved users to decide the fate of new editors who oppose wp:TAGTEAMs of entrenched editors trying to force false consensus of decisions. The WMF would merely develop a voting tool, released to allow any targeted user to request a broad vote, and then finally a larger "mob" would help decide issues rather than just an insider team. Such use of computer tools, to broaden decision procedures, has been used for decades in other organizations to break deadlocks where organizations could not otherwise improve decision systems. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:52, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

this is potentially a good idea...like pinging a bunch of random though active/experienced editors to request they come look at an ANI thread...68.48.241.158 (talk) 13:22, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Excellent idea. I am ready to start work on putting these ideas together in a single place and having something like a "congress" (e.g. Continental Congress) to hash out details, gain broader consensus, so that the same insiders who want to maintain control won't be able to derail any good efforts at reform with their nay-saying, "it won't work" attitudes. --David Tornheim (talk) 18:45, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

As might be expected, there are wp:developers who would/could work on "something new" (rather than re-hash same tools of prior 15 years). For example, when the Lua script interface was installed in 2013, I noted to the developers how the speed of "#invoke" seemed very slow, and a developer in the area quickly found a way to adjust Lua as 2x faster within a few weeks, as effectively making most Lua-based templates run 2x faster (for small templates). -Wikid77 (talk) 15:13, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

If only you had a way to ping random experienced editors to participate in such a discussion... ;-) Carrite (talk) 14:31, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

I think previously we had discussed a "sign-up" option, such as with wp:FRS feedback user-lists, and perhaps only use the jury-tool when requested by the wp:ANI defendant ("victim"), where otherwise many people would accept sanctions in realizing they were "wrong", so relatively few people would ask for a broader vote, such as facing wp:topic ban sanctions. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:13, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Didn't we look at the FRS source code and weren't able to figure out how it distributes requests? @Harej: how does it do that? Is it fair? Are human decisions involved in the distribution of FRS requests? EllenCT (talk) 20:08, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Quickpolls. This was piloted back in 2005 but discontinued six months later. --MuZemike 06:08, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

That wp:Quickpolls process (from March 2004) was a 24-hour vote to back an admin's decision, but the slower 7-day "wp:Quickpolls#Alternative proposal: Slowpolls" gave a whole week to decide further sanctions, yet advised that the opposed admin should lose admin status when losing the vote, and hence the Slowpolls was untenable to gain agreement, as bundling user sanctions versus admin desysop. However, the Quickpolls trial provides more (12-year) evidence of how processes are difficult to gain approval, and therefore, creating a new WMF voter tool might be easier to approve than altering a WP policy. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:31, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Need edit-limit tools

Another way the wp:developers could radically alter WP edit-battles would be by implementing some per-user, per-page edit-limit tools, such that the suspected editors would be restricted to only "10 edits" per week/month to the specific page(s). In prior years, WP has had problems with editors pruning pages to remove crucial details by soon making 100 minor "innocent" edits, to perform "death by a thousand cuts" to cleverly slant an article by partially removing many opposing facts. A related problem is rapidly edit-conflicting a page (to deter other editors) by edit-saving various small changes every minute to conflict-out other users for many minutes or an hour. To improve tool efficiency, such per-user edit-limits could be based on user complaints of excessive edits, rather than limit every user who edits a chosen page. At the limit, rather than an admin needing to warn (or block) the editor, instead the edit-limit tool would deny access to edit-mode of the page (perhaps as a combination of usernames and related IP addresses). Obviously such edit-limits could be bypassed (with effort), but in general, computer-run limits tend to have the expected effect on curtailing the unwanted user actions. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:13, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good. Where is the IdeaLab proposal for it? EllenCT (talk) 20:04, 15 July 2016 (UTC)

Why U.S. police kill more whites than others

Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

After many questionable claims of U.S. police "bias" against blacks (not proven by facts), there has been a growing collection of wp:RS reliable sources (on the Internet) to remind people how police, for decades, have killed far more whites than others (hello?). However, due to racial tensions in the U.S. (and related regions), we need more encyclopedic text to provide a fuller view of the issues, such as "why" U.S. police have killed more whites than others, plus comparisons of anecdotal evidence to show how unarmed people of other races have also been killed by U.S. police (similar to the rare black shootings), while also emphasize how many police are killed by suspects rather than the other way round. One of the sources of confusion has been the inclusion of Latinos (under "Hispanics") as termed "white" when reporting confrontations with law enforcement officials. This whole subject needs careful study, to avoid the dismal public conclusion, "Hey, Wikipedia seemed to attract informed people, but how sad the racists have taken control" (let's avoid that result). Meanwhile, one source began to illustrate the dangers of claiming "police bias" as with the 2015 data showing 990 shootings (Washington Post: 2015, or 2016), with 948 male but just 42 female in 2015 (as 22-to-1, 948/42), as if the police have an imagined anti-male hatred bias to target men 22x more than women (not true), when actually other factors affect why men are confronted by police much more than women (not as gender bias). Previously, there had been few sources to cover these conclusions, but now in 2016 more sources are being published to dispel such myths of U.S. police bias, and WP will be able to give fuller, encyclopedic coverage tied to sources, plus include how many police officers are killed in comparison. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:20, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't know why you are posting this here, but I very strongly encourage you NOT to POV push on Wikipedia entries.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:08, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

It is a difficult topic, with potential for slanted views but for different reasons than annexation of Crimea; however I will beware POV-pushing and avoid it where it surfaces. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:58, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

(EC) Its also rubbish. The actual claim (easily proven) is that minorities are killed by the police at a higher rate than white people. Pointing out that (more white people in total numbers) is just a way of attempting to minimise the impact of the grossly out of proportion rate of death-by-police amongst minorities. Wikid appears to have fallen (like many others) for the statistically unsound pseudo-logic put out there by people like Jay Stalien. The simple reason why more white people are killed, is there are more white people. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:06, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Well perhaps more white people are killed by U.S. police because they couldn't reach a hospital in time, or the minorities were shot earlier with more doctors available. I think a key issue might be the count of shot-and-lived (unless gunshots almost always fatal), where perhaps more minorities were shot-and-lived. Otherwise, if half the U.S. population is white and half of killings are white, then minorities are the other half as same difference. Beware false calculations which claim a difference, because women are 50% of U.S. population, but in 2015, police killed men 22x times more than women (948/42 of 990 reported in 2015). In previous years, the actual killings by police were severely under-reported (as less than half) to the point that the proportions are almost meaningless when trying to count minorities in those years. Perhaps we need to wait until the 2016 counts are near year-end or organizations retro-count 2010-2013 by scanning news reports for those entire years. Meanwhile to answer the question, "Why are women shot less?" can help answer why white people are shot more. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:41, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

This is not the place. It is a serious subject and deserves serious discussion, but using Jimbo's page simply because it is highly visible is simply wrong.--S Philbrick (Talk) 12:58, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Except neither of those questions require answering. The fact men are shot more than women is *not* a serious subject for the simple reason (much like the increased numbers of white vs black deaths) men commit violent (often armed) crimes significantly more and are more likely to be armed in general than women. More white people as a total number are shot because there are significantly more white people. You might as well ask why more pork is eaten in Europe than the middle-east. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:20, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

As many people have said, this isn't really the right place for this discussion. The only thing that I'll note is that a serious analysis needs to compare like-for-like by controlling as many confounding variables as possible. But this is difficult and certainly beyond the scope of our work as encyclopedists and well into the realm of original research. Other than as a generally well-informed member of the general public, this is not a question of particular interest to me, so I'd appreciate that if there aren't any specifically Wikipedia related dilemmas for us to puzzle over, this discussion move elsewhere (including, perhaps, off-wiki).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:31, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

Articles on controversial topics

Latest comment: 8 years ago17 comments7 people in discussion

Are there any ideas for improving the editing environment and neutrality of articles on controversial topics? --Bob K31416 (talk) 18:57, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Reliable sources, civility, a neutral point of view, perhaps? _Muffled ^Pocketed 20:08, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

We have tried those, and imagined the policy wp:NPOV would allow balanced views, but we have found people systematically removing details for 9 years, such as murder victim's rent money missing while suspect had "$4,000" in bank account, and I think the only solution is to define article-content rules, such as murder event must note any "missing valuables" and "signs of forced entry" and description of wounds (blunt force trauma) or cause of death in lede paragraphs (not hidden in paragraph 96 below). Likewise a product-defect issue must list details, rather than say some think defective while others think not, because the details help understand the issues, while removing major details can cloud the topic as wikifogging. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:18, revised 22:39, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I was hoping for a unified WP:BACKLOG sorted by a combination of quality, pageviews, and eventually objective importance, but the community is not allowed to wish until November. EllenCT (talk) 03:17, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

How would backlog help address this problem? --David Tornheim (talk) 02:27, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

We already have a backlog, but it is scattered across dozens of categories, some of which get much better service than others. (For example, the nine categories in {{opentask}} which get many thousand views per day do not include BLP issues, which are widely recognized as our most serious problems.) Unifying the backlog and sorting it by multiple factors in a manner similar to how WP:MOSTEDITED combines standard scores of both edits and editors to rank and sort articles (see also this example combining standard scores of pageviews with the ORES Start-class probability prediction of articles which ORES predicts are Stub-class for another example) will enable us to more clearly communicate to editors the articles for which improvement will have the greatest impact. This will allow more efficient use of volunteer time and resources applied to improvements. By focusing volunteer time and effort on the most serious problems ranked by their relative impact and importance, controversies will likely be addressed sooner. EllenCT (talk) 19:42, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: Thanks for introducing me to the backlog page. I wish I had known about it earlier, so I could have helped sooner. Seems like we should give notice to editors who exceed a certain number of edits of the desire for help to reduce backlog.

So are you suggesting that the Backlog should be based on a vote (is that note what it is based on now?), and the vote should include controversial articles, or that should be raised in importance, which presently don't have their own metric? I'm not that familiar with how the backlog is generated. From your description it sounds pretty complicated.

I have witnessed edit warring over the application of an NPOV tag to an article, which I believed was meant to discourage third parties from helping to see disagreement and fix a log jam. I fear that similar kinds of gaming of the system would be applied to backlogs. --David Tornheim (talk) 01:08, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

@David Tornheim: there is something called SuggestBot which has been used to help with similar efforts, but I don't think it's very good. It just picks random articles to show people from the set. Instead, I have proposed combining many backlog categories into a list and sorting it by how many people would be affected by improvements (i.e., pageviews), how much the article needs to be improved (i.e., its ORES start-class prediction probability for articles that ORES predicts are stubs), and eventually, objective measures of article importance (e.g., based on models trained on WikiProject importance scores, times a per-Wikiproject multiplier for overall importance, or just training models on people's mean opinions of importance.) I too have seen people who want to hide disagreements go to great lengths to try to remove dispute tags before the dispute has been resolved. Those people should be ashamed of themselves. "Oh, but there should not be a 'badge of shame'!" they say. That is a sure sign of preferring censorship to serving readers well. EllenCT (talk) 02:22, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

I think we need to have juries to solve this problem--I will keep you in mind when I raise this issue again. If a WP:gang of editors controls the POV there is little that can be done about it, even if the view is clearly not supported by the WP:RS. The gang will go to any noticeboard where an issue is raised to testify as if they are neutral observers and sway the vote their way. I have seen even lying about the RS as being considered acceptable behavior. As long as the involved parties of the gang form the "consensus", then their POV will reign, regardless of what the RS actually says. The only way to fix the problem is to get neutral eyes on it. The big problem with getting neutral eyes is neutrals will say, I'm not interested in *that* topic or the "drama" (kicked up by the side that unreasonably forces its POV), so the neutrals avoid it and things stay polarized, often in one direction. Editors get topic banned for standing up against the WP:gang that controls a POV. I think a jury of non-involved parties is the only way to break this terrible pattern that makes Wikipedia unreliable and biased. --David Tornheim (talk) 02:27, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

See a thought piece on the problem at Wikipedia:Advocacy articles where several possible courses of action are mentioned. One suggestion is to recognize that certain articles can not be made "neutral" without including contradictory language within the article, thus one solution might include in such dichotomized areas two distinct articles, with a firewall between them, and mentioning to the reader that the article has two distinct points of view, rather than fudging contradictory claims in a stew of some sort. Collect (talk) 23:21, 19 July 2016 (UTC) .

It's an interesting idea, but based on what I have seen, I don't see how it could work. Consider Attack on Pearl Harbor. Anyone who points out that the DoD (Dept. of War at the time I think) was aware that the Japanese Navy was out and that it was likely to attack and that Pearl Harbor was on alert because of it, so that it wasn't completely a surprise attack, is immediately deemed a conspiracy theorist by those who control that article. Anything related to the fact that it was not entirely a surprise are placed in the "conspiracy theory" article to make sure that such facts do not "pollute" and stand equal the standard version we get in American history books. Those who control that article would never allow the two to be on equal footing. I have a feeling that is true of all other disputes were ownership is taking place. --David Tornheim (talk) 02:40, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

The same applies with GMO's. When you show WP:RS of scientists that have concerns about GMO's, such quality WP:RS is deemed fringe by those who control the article and is removed. See: [16],Talk:Genetically_modified_food_controversies#POV_change, User_talk:Coffee#Continued_Problem_with_POV_edits_by_Kingofaces43.

Do you really think those editors who approve of this removal would allow an article that points out that a organization as big as the British Medical Association called for a moratorium on GMOs and said that the studies were insufficient. They will call that WP:Fringe, even though it is not, or put it in GMO conspiracy theories. They would never allow such quality RS to be put on equal footing. This is why Wikipedia is broken. --David Tornheim (talk) 02:40, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

The community held a very open RfC with an impressively high level of participation, and reached a clear consensus about how to present the GMO source material. The only editors who are complaining about the supposed unfairness of the process, and claiming some sort of conspiratorial effort to suppress The Truth^TM, are the small number who disagree with the consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:17, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

^Illustrates my point. Two non-involved admins agreed with me there was a problem here: User_talk:Coffee#GMO_RfC_language_transfer, where criticisms of GMO's unrelated to the RfC were deleted with misleading edit summaries. One closing admin. to the RfC said that the edits "twisted" the concrete results of the RfC [17]. Are you suggesting the two non-involved admins. believe in a GMO conspiracy theories? --David Tornheim (talk) 20:44, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm tempted to say ^illustrates my point. But I do accept that you are talking about the aftermath of the RfC, as opposed to the RfC itself. However, you were able to revert the changes you objected to, and for the most part, your reverts have held. If you didn't get your way 100%, that doesn't mean that you were treated unfairly. And the non-involved admins concluded that they did not see any reason to sanction anyone as you had rather loudly requested. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:47, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:POVFORK articles are not allowed. The core content pillar WP:NPOV policy instructs to explain both points of view in articles describing topics on which there are multiple points of view in conflict. It is never necessary to include contradictory language. If there are two conflicting noteworthy points of view on a topic, they can both be stated as attributions to reliable sources instead of written in Wikipedia's voice. EllenCT (talk) 19:49, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree. --David Tornheim (talk) 20:30, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 July 2016

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

News and notes: Board faces diversity and skill-base issues in new FDC appointments

Discussion report: Busy month for discussions

In the media: Women in science editathon gets national press; Wikipedia "shockingly biased"

Featured content: A wide variety from the best

Traffic report: Sports and esports

Arbitration report: Script writers appointed for clerks

Recent research: Using deep learning to predict article quality

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:19, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Ban question

Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

Is there a page on Wikipedia that lists bans and unbans you've personally imposed? This would go back to the 2003-05 period of time. If not, I'm specifically interested in the ban(s) and unban(s) of User:JoeM. Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:00, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I have no idea. Why?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 03:01, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-July/026676.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (talk • contribs) 07:41, 23 July 2016

I corrected the above link (it's apparently "lists" not "mail" now). Johnuniq (talk) 07:55, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: Thanks! Blooming phone shut down on me. 2A02:C7F:BE16:8400:393B:EAE8:314:D272 (talk) 08:12, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

And apparently logged me off! Unbelievable. _Muffled ^Pocketed 08:23, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

My thanks as well.--Bbb23 (talk) 19:41, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Electronic surveillance in Russia

Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Russia has a new set of electronic surveillance laws, named after Irina Yarovaya, who proposed them.

Russia Asks For The Impossible With Its New Surveillance Laws (July 19, 2016)—Electronic Frontier Foundation

—Wavelength (talk) 00:57, 20 July 2016 (UTC) and 23:31, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

“

Russia’s ISPs, messaging services, and social media platforms ... cannot reasonably comply with all the demands of the Yarovaya package [so] they become de facto criminals whatever their actions. And that, in turn, gives the Russian state the leverage to extract from them any other concession it desires. The impossibility of full compliance is not a bug—it’s an essential feature.

Russia is not the only nation whose lawmakers and politicians are heading in this direction, especially when it comes to requiring backdoors for encrypted communications. Time and time again, technologists and civil liberties groups have warned the United States, France, Holland, and a host of other nations that the anti-encryption laws they propose cannot be obeyed without rewriting the laws of mathematics. Politicians have often responded by effectively telling the Internet’s experts “don’t worry, you’ll work out a way.” Let us be clear: government backdoors in encrypted communications make us all less safe, no matter which country is holding the keys.

Technologists have sometimes believed that technical impossibility means that the laws are simply unworkable – that a law that cannot be obeyed is no worse than no law at all. As Russia shows, regulations that no one can comply with aren’t dead-letter laws. Instead, they corrode the rule of law, leaving a rusting wreckage of partial compliance that can be exploited by powers who will use their enforcement powers for darker and more partial ends than justice.

”

Sad. EllenCT (talk) 02:56, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

An encryption could "backdoor" the secret key(s) by echoing each character of a key at every 8th-14th byte of the encryption depending on day of the week, then for short messages append the remainder of the key(s) at end with marker tokens. So yes, the encryption software could be forced to reveal the secret key(s) within the encrypted message even as white noise bytes (with no need to change the laws of mathematics), but also make it somewhat difficult for novice hackers to decode each embedded key. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:20, revised 14:23, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

8th-14th byte? What? How about we ditch certificate authorities and other forms of key escrow for pure Diffie-Hellman exchange of cascading diode bridge noise entropy-based keys with perfect forward secrecy only? EllenCT (talk) 05:05, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

This legislation is especially relevant to the work of editors in these categories.

—Wavelength (talk) 02:28, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Still unanswered FRS question

Latest comment: 8 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

@Harej: does the Feedback Request Service distribute requests with or without human intervention? Can you please point to the location in the FRS bot's source code where the distribution of requests to user talk pages is made? If not, can you please say who maintains that source code at present? Thank you. EllenCT (talk) 16:22, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

EllenCT, requests are done automatically. The current maintainer of the code is Legoktm who can explain more on how it works. (It is probably very different from when I first wrote it several years ago.) Harej (talk) 17:19, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

@Legoktm: could you please help us understand this? The question originally came up in February, and it's still unanswered. I would love to recommend the FRS, but before I can do that, I need to understand how the requests are distributed: randomly? If so, where is the random number generator invoked in https://github.com/legoktm/harej-bots/blob/master/frsbot.php#L53 et seq? Round robin? By sign-up order per batch (meaning, those listed later on the sign-up lists will tend to get fewer FRS requests)? Are human interventions involved? Can the FRS system be gamed by modifying the order of the sign-up lists? Or by modifying them between the time an RFC is posted and announced by FRSbot? How many users does the FRS inform of each RFC? Can that parameter be changed? If so, where? Where is the documentation for your code? Do you intend to comment your code? Thank you for any help on these questions you can provide. EllenCT (talk) 18:33, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I am not proficient in PHP (I mostly do assembly on small microcontrollers with maybe 64 bytes of RAM total) , but if I am not mistaken, most good PHP randomizer programs use the mt_rand() function to generates a random integer using the Mersenne Twister algorithm. I don't see that in the code you reference; any chance that it is being invoked in some sort of function or subroutine that I am not seeing? --Guy Macon (talk) 16:50, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Not claiming to be a PHP expert either, and I only quickly scanned the code, but as far as I can tell that code applies no deliberate randomization. I think (but wouldn't swear to it) that it uses some variant of LRU sorting and filtering based on users who have either been notified of a given RFC already or have been notified about a number of RFCs in general above a configured threshold (one per 30 days I think). Based on my understanding of the linked code, which users are notified and in what order should be entirely deterministic. In practical effect—and again a caveat regarding my understanding—all users who have signed up will be notified every time unless they match an exclusion criteria. The exclusion criteria that I spotted are: a) you've been notified of this RFC before; b) you've not signed up for RFCs in this category; or c) you've already received the maximum number of RFCs per time period that you've allowed in your signup.
It also appears to go through the entire list of users who have signed up on every run, and applying its own time-based sort on the list, which would imply that there is no obvious way to game the selection based on modifying the sign-up list (at any time, before or after the RFC is posted). There may be a way to affect the order a given user will appear in for that user's first RFC notification, but not for any subsequent notifications. That "may" depends on a separate task that gets the list of users from WP:FRS and inserts it into the database (and which I haven't looked at). But since this code gets all users from the database each time I think it unlikely that this can be effectively used as a vector for gaming the system.
Personally, my biggest concerns here would be that the code has the hallmarks of "sysadmin programming" (quickly thrown together with the priority on getting it to work, not on making it maintainable; cf. eg. the lack of source code comments and the use of variable names like "$temp01") which makes its author a single point of failure and a bottleneck (which, incidentally, I'm sure he's aware of, but even Legoktm has a finite number of hours per day to maintain existing tools and develop new ones; so my concern here should not be taken as a criticism of his work!). Any risk of gaming the system seems unlikely and non-obvious, if not even non-trivial, to exploit.
Anyways… off-the-cuff and inexpert, but hopefully of at least some help until Legoktm has time to chime in with a fuller explanation. --Xover (talk) 18:51, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi, I'm not sure how we ended up on Jimbo's talk page, but basically the FRS tries to notify as many people as possible, there is no randomization.

Are human interventions involved?
No? Yes? The bot takes instructions from humans about new RfCs I guess.
Can the FRS system be gamed by modifying the order of the sign-up lists?
No? The bot maintains its own database.
Or by modifying them between the time an RFC is posted and announced by FRSbot?
I don't really understand what you mean here and what is being modified, but I don't think so.
How many users does the FRS inform of each RFC? Can that parameter be changed?
It depends on how many users are eligible to be notified.
If so, where? Where is the documentation for your code?
There is no documentation.
Do you intend to comment your code?
Not really. It's not my code tbh, I just ported it to work on tool labs and somehow got stuck maintaining it. I'll review pull requests though! Legoktm (talk) 11:25, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

@Legoktm: thank you. We are here because we are trying to figure out whether FRSbot can solve jury selection problems which could lead to more robust dispute resolution. Any idea whether it's round-robin or first-in-first-out per batch by signups? Where is the FRSbot database? Are its contents public? How much money would you take to document the code, and how much time do you think it would take? EllenCT (talk) 17:38, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Endowment fundraising brainstorming

Latest comment: 8 years ago67 comments10 people in discussion

Jimbo, please suppose you wanted to approach the wealthiest families to ask them for endowment grants. Is there any reason to exclude royal families and "autocratic ruling dynasties," whatever those are? EllenCT (talk) 03:21, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

[removed comment from the usual banned editor] Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:01, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

No, he's not in either category at present, but he's a good illustration of the failure mode. There are plenty of rich families, most of whom maintain family offices for coordinating philanthropic requests and gifts, so there is no need to approach those who may have a conflict of interest in wanting to whitewash Wikipedia articles about them. I am worried that there is no systematic approach to all of them, and approaching each on a case-by-case basis seems substantially less likely to produce the same kind of response than a coordinated approach in a systematic way across all of the philanthropically inclined wealthy. EllenCT (talk) 15:22, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I welcome calm discussion on the endowment (without the usual bs from the usual places). There was a fairly long discussion on meta on how to get the endowment going, and I participated fairly actively. But I don't get over to meta that often and most folks on enwiki probably get over there even less often, so this is as good a place as any to discuss this.

The first defense from possible problems implied by EllenCT is simply to tell all prospective donors that giving to the fund does not come with any implied privileges or influence over the encyclopedia (or anything else - it would be an unqualified gift). Actually I think many of the prospective donors would enjoy hearing that. The entire purpose of the endowment IMHO is to insulate our projects from the outside pressure that might occur if we had to raise money in a hurry (no, we don't want to sell ads; no free passes on your company's dirty laundry, etc.)

A 2nd defense would simply be common sense. If you had a choice between asking the following people for money, which one would you choose? Pablo Escobar, Carlos Slim, or Donald Trump? Well Donald is a bit busy right now, and Pablo is in jail and likely to have any money he can get his hands on seized, so Carlos looks like the winner. Now some (many?) people probably have something against Carlos. I don't know what they have against him, I haven't checked, but everybody who has money has somebody who doesn't like them. If we were to have a list of attributes of people who we wouldn't take money from we could really limit ourselves and almost guarentee a very small endowment. Do they sell drugs? "ethical drugs"? alcohol? But excluding notorious criminals and major officeholders in corrupt regimes would be just common sense. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:01, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

The Meta discussion is here. The one thing I wasn't clear about there that seems to have happened is that we are concentrating raising the endowment from large donors. Sure those are the folks who have the money, and asking our small donors again (say a special endowment raiser in the Summer or tacked on at the end of our usual fundraiser) might give them *donor fatigue*. Still I don't think we should rule out our usual small donors. Perhaps we could mix the two groups together with "challenge grants" or matching grants ala NPR. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:44, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

I think there are good reasons to exercise judgment about donors, and that this needs to be done with a full assessment of the entire context. As Smallbones indicates, virtually any source of money could be complained about by someone, so the issue needs to be approached in an adult, thoughtful, and balanced way.

The most important principle needed is already absolutely crystal clear - donations do not buy any influence or control over the content of Wikipedia. Period. There is no wavering on this from anyone, anywhere, as far as I know. No one on staff has ever suggested it, no one on the board has ever suggested it, no one in the community has ever suggested it as far as I know. We are all clear on this point.

After that there will be considerations of both ethics and strategic communications. It is difficult to set down a full set of a priori principles here, but some broad outlines seem obvious to me, and probably to others. To use Smallbones' examples: Pablo Escobar, no; Trump, no; Carlos Slim, yes. Bill Gates is another example - very unpopular in certain free software circles, but that's not reason to not take a donation to the endowment. I could list a number of dictators who we should reject as donors including for example Nazarbayev.

One thing that is different in the case of Wikimedia, versus other nonprofits, is that we are in a very strong fundraising position and we have a great many wealthy friends who love Wikipedia. Other nonprofits may not have the luxury to be so cautious about who their donors are, and as long as they remain steadfast in principle #1 (i.e. to not give a pass to bad people just because of a donation) then I don't have a problem with that, even though we would choose differently in the case of Wikimedia.

On a separate note, the original question asked about "royal families" as well as "autocratic ruling dynasties" and I just wanted to note that most of the modern European monarchies don't seem particularly problematic to me - anyway, much less problematic than lots of other folks around the world.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:59, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

The elephant in the room

We might also want to discuss the elephant in the room: every time revenues to the WMF go up (as they have every year so far) the WMF ratchets up the spending so as to eat a large portion of the increase. If the WMF had limited year-to-year spending increases for everything other than keeping the servers running to 10% increase per year, we would already have a large enough endowment to run Wikipedia forever without ever again holding a fundraiser. Right now, if someone gave us ten billion dollars with no strings attached next years spending would go up by five to eight billion. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:34, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

To me, the elephant in the room is why we keep hearing the tired old meme that the WMF is inefficient at supporting us, the editors. It's clear that we need the WMF as a legal entity to keep Wikipedia and other projects on the internet. We also need them to improve and update the software, to provide the at least the minimum enforcement needed for policies such as child protection, harassment, and paid editing, to legally represent the foundation and editors where needed, to grow the movement and increase editor recruitment, e.g. in the global south. There are also things that the WMF does that, while not strictly required, are very nice to have, e.g. grants to support Wiki Loves Monuments and other global and local projects of importance.

I would suggest that anybody who thinks that the WMF is inefficient to find some comparison non-profits who work in the internet/educational field to be able to say something like "here is non-profit x which does a lot more with less money." I've looked around but never seen any such comparisons. There are not many groups that do something like what the WMF does, but they are out there, maybe the Khan Academy and similar projects. Please get some real evidence before complaining.

The reaction of some editors is likely to be "we don't need comparisons. We've seen that software project y was expensive and people didn't like it so it was never implemented." That reasoning, however, ignores the fact that software development is very difficult and risky even for the biggest and most experienced for-profit companies. Sometimes software just ends up not living up to expectations - that's just a risk anybody takes when they try to develop software. More generally, in any enterprise mistakes will be made as a normal everyday fact of life. Perfection exists only for those folks who perfectly accomplish nothing.

So if anybody want to drag up the old "WMF wastes donors money" meme, please come up with some real evidence to back up your claim. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:18, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

The numbers speak for themselves. Everything you mention was being accomplished ten years ago but today the WMF is spending 300 times as much (52596782 ÷ 177670 ≈ 296) to accomplish basically the same job. I could accept a 10X increase, but 300X? How can anyone justify something like that? Is the WMF really accomplishing three hundred times more than it accomplished ten years ago?

Year	Total Support and Revenue	Total Expenses	Increase in Net Assets	Net Assets at year end
2003/2004^[1]	$80,129	$23,463	$56,666	$56,666
2004/2005^[1]	$379,088	$177,670	$211,418	$268,084
2005/2006^[1]	$1,508,039	$791,907	$736,132	$1,004,216
2006/2007^[2]	$2,734,909	$2,077,843	$654,066	$1,658,282
2007/2008^[3]	$5,032,981	$3,540,724	$3,519,886	$5,178,168
2008/2009^[4]	$8,658,006	$5,617,236	$3,053,599	$8,231,767
2009/2010^[5]	$17,979,312	$10,266,793	$6,310,964	$14,542,731
2010/2011^[6]	$24,785,092	$17,889,794	$9,649,413	$24,192,144
2011/2012^[7]	$38,479,665	$29,260,652	$10,736,914	$34,929,058
2012/2013^[8]	$48,635,408	$35,704,796	$10,260,066	$45,189,124
2013/2014^[9]	$52,465,287	$45,900,745	$8,285,897	$53,475,021
2014/2015^[9]	$75,797,223	$52,596,782	$24,345,277	$77,820,298

--Guy Macon (talk) 16:05, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

A reminder: I asked for a comparison of another non-profit that is doing similar work to the WMF that is doing more for less. You obviously haven't shown that.

Instead you've given a comparison of the WMF to itself 10 years ago. That strikes me as comparing an apple orchard to an orange pip - yes they both have something to do with fruit, but that's all. You say "Everything you mention was being accomplished ten years ago" that's nonsense. In 2004 (correct me if I'm wrong) they had one employee, or were soon to get one. It's time for an adult discussion on this matter, if you think that the WMF is inefficient please show that using some real, relevant figures. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:10, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

There is no nonprofit "that is doing similar work to the WMF", and you know it. We enjoy orders of magnitude more unpaid volunteer hours, and we aren't trying to feed the poor or cure diseases. All we do is serve up content on a website. It is really good content, but still.

So you think comparing 2015 Wikipedia to 2005 Wikipedia is apples and oranges but comparing Wikipedia to some non-encyclopedia is valid? You have set up a question that has no real answer, but completely glossed over the fact that you cannot justify a 300-fold increase in spending over 10 years.

Let's look at your claim "You say 'Everything you mention was being accomplished ten years ago' that's nonsense" in detail.

"It's clear that we need the WMF as a legal entity to keep Wikipedia and other projects on the internet". Was the WMF not a a legal entity in 2005? Was Wikipedia not on the Internet in 2005? Please explain, in detail, why you think that it takes three hundred times more spending to keep Wikipedia on the internet in 2015 vs. 2005. Is bandwidth 300 times more costly? Did CPUs get 300 times more expensive for the same computing power? Storage? Did the wages of a good sysadmin increase by a factor of 300? Are lawyers making 300 times as much?

"We also need them to improve and update the software". Please explain, in detail, why you think that the software in 2015 should cost three hundred times more than the software in 2005 did. Again, I could accept ten times more, but three hundred? No.

"to provide the at least the minimum enforcement needed for policies such as child protection, harassment, and paid editing". We didn't protect children in `2005? We didn't have to deal with harassment in 2005? If you said these problems are 10 times bigger today I could buy that, but three hundred times bigger?

"to legally represent the foundation and editors where needed, to grow the movement and increase editor recruitment, e.g. in the global south". Again, all things we were doing in 2005. Maybe we are doing them ten times better today, but not three hundred times better.

"There are also things that the WMF does that, while not strictly required, are very nice to have, e.g. grants to support Wiki Loves Monuments and other global and local projects of importance" Things that are nice to have do not justify multiplying your spending by three hundred.

I realize that you really don't want to discuss that 300X increase in spending. I wouldn't want to do so either if I were taking your position. Would you like me to start digging and finding out how much the increase of spending was for other nonprofits, or would you be willing to accept that the vast majority have not increased spending by a factor of 300 without accomplishing anything they weren't accomplishing when they were spending 0.33% as much? --Guy Macon (talk) 18:12, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Guy - you are stating without any basis that Wikipedia is wasting money or inefficient. It's up to you to show what you're talking about. Spending has gone up 300 times since 2004. I don't think that is surprising at all. In that time Wikipedia has gone from a non-profit startup operating on a shoestring that almost nobody had ever heard of, to being perhaps the most important new educational institution of our time that just about everybody on the internet uses. Yes costs grow, and Wikipedia has grown. The growth has been amazing. But that is all you've shown. You suggest that maybe growing by a factor of 10 would be ok with you. Where did you come up with that number? Are you saying that Wikipedia is now 10 times better than it was in 2004? Where did you get that idea from? Do you have anything to back it up?

You say that there is nothing to compare Wikipedia to. Really? There are lots of sites on the internet that are educational. I mentioned the Khan Academy before, you might try various MOOCs and online education programs. Lots of universities have online programs - what are the costs and benefits of those programs vs the costs and benefits of Wikipedia? If you can't show anything like this, you really have no case for saying the WMF is wasting money.

What I really object to is those folks who go campaigning to convince folks to *not donate* to Wikipedia. Guy, are you one of these folks? Sure, if you don't like Wikipedia, feel free not to donate. If you have some basis for thinking that the WMF wastes money - even if you can't prove it - then maybe suggest to your friends to not donate. If you have any real evidence that WMF folks are misappropriating money, then report them to the FBI. But otherwise campaigning against WMF fundraising is completely unethical IMHO, beyond the pale. Let people who want to donate donate, let people who don't want to donate not donate. But don't mislead people with unsupported allegations.

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:25, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

OK, I get it. You think that anyone who suggest any limits to the WMFs huge spending increases is "campaigning to convince folks to not donate to Wikipedia". Got a diff where I have ever suggested such a thing? I didn't think so. I have been crystal clear: get the spending under control, build up an endowment, and free the WMF from having to depend on donations forever. It's called financial prudence.

Will you still be a rah-rah ever-increasing-spending supporter when the WMF is spending two hundred million a year? A billion? What happens when the ever-increasing-revenues (so far) experience the inevitable downturn? When that happens will you finally admit that maybe, just maybe, the WMF spending like a drunken sailor wasn't the wisest course of action? --Guy Macon (talk) 23:47, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Sorry if I misunderstood what you were driving at. But I haven't seen you push the "don't donate" idea, that's why I asked. I'm sure you've seen some of that though, and their financial analysis isn't that far from yours. Below where you say you think that the total WMF budget should be $5-10 million, seems very unrealistic to me. An 80-90% cut in funding would likely result in an 80-90% cut in the output of the things people want from the WMF. Maybe a bit less of a cut in output, but in any case the cut would be huge. No use quibbling here. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:05, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, has Khan Academy's Smarthistory (which I believe that you played a major role in forming[18]) been the recipient of any of the WMF spending we are talking about? --Guy Macon (talk) 23:58, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

As far as I know Khan Academy has received $0.00 from the WMF. Smarthistory, which is now a separate organization, has received $0.00 from the WMF. (Could somebody on the board confirm this?) I didn't help form Smarthistory, but I did work on a Wikiproject cooperation with them. And I'll add that, while I enjoyed working with them on-Wiki, I received exactly $0.00 (total) from both of these organizations. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:57, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: how much do you think is necessary for the Foundation to help address paid, government sponsored, and otherwise organized advocacy? I have no confidence in the community's ability to be free from the influence of such attempts at gaming the system. The record of such incidents uncovered over the past decade has shown that this risk has been increasing in terms of the number of people involved and the number of articles which they attempt to influence. Do you think measures to address these problems have been keeping pace with the magnitude of the risk? Do you think the risk has been growing faster or slower than foundation finances? EllenCT (talk) 20:43, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

How much do I think is necessary for the Foundation to help address paid, government sponsored, and otherwise organized advocacy? I think that five million US dollars a year, with a limit of no more than 10% yearly growth, can accomplish that and everything else the WMF does. You might be able to talk me into ten million, but that's a stretch. Not that the WMF is particularly effective in addressing organized advocacy -- I think the record will show that Wikipedia volunteers have done the lion's share of that work.

By comparison, five million dollars is roughly five times what the Free Software Foundation spends and about two million less than the Electronic Frontier Foundation spends -- and the EFF is involved in many lawsuits, does a lot of lobbying, and does a lot more software development than we do (and they do it far better). See [ https://www.eff.org/issues ].

Remember, I was here and actively involved in Wikipedia in 2009. I can tell you as an eye witness that in 2009 the WMF was not in any way failing to meet its responsibilities despite spending "only" 5.6 million dollars. As of 2015 they have added another 47 million dollars on top of that 5.6 million, and it has bought us...what? What, exactly is the WMF doing that they weren't doing and doing well in 2009? --Guy Macon (talk) 23:31, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

You and I have a very different assessment of the extent to which organized advocacy has affected the quality of the encyclopedia. I think it would take $75 million per year to address the issues. As far as I'm concerned if $5.6 million wasn't enough to optimize volunteer time with a unified backlog and implement a way to search recent changes in 2009, and $52 million isn't enough to even figure out how much searching recent changes would cost, then we need to get money to the people who can do those things. If it's so bloated, what would you cut? EllenCT (talk) 01:05, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

$75million would let you employ somewhere on the order of 1000 people on $50,000 per year (allowing 50% overheads). What, exactly, are 1000 going to do in fighting organized advocacy? About 110,000 editors edit in any given month, only about 10,000 of those are particularly active (at least 25 edits in a month - source). Do you really need one full-time employee for every ten active users??? What are they going to do all day? GoldenRing (talk) 12:41, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

They would work through the unified backlog which the Foundation doesn't allow us to wish for until November, using multi-level review of each other's work, assigned randomly, to distribute requests among them fairly and allow them to complete them correctly. They would supplement the work of volunteers just as volunteer firefighters work alongside professionals. There is only one way to find out how effective this would be. EllenCT (talk) 05:00, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

By "There is only one way to find out how effective this would be" do you mean "keep increasing spending without limit forever?" If not, how much is enough in your opinion? A billion dollars? A trillion dollars? You seem fine with a 300X increase that didn't solve the problem you describe, but you seem certain that increasing spending even more will solve the problem. Surely you have an estimate of how much spending should increase... --Guy Macon (talk) 06:35, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I've already stated my precise estimate, but I'm not confident the supplemental amount is larger than its expected error. EllenCT (talk) 13:36, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Does this include money needed for equipment like internet servers? Count Iblis (talk) 20:53, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't believe that we actually own the severs, but rather rent hosting. I may be wrong; the WMF is pretty stingy with the details of what gets spent where.

Last year the WMF spent $1,997,521 actually hosting all of our pages. That's 3.8% of total spending.

Compare this to:

Travel and conferences $2,289,489
Donations processing expenses $2,484,765
Other operating expenses $4,449,764
Awards and grants $4,522,689
Professional service expenses $7,645,105
Salaries and wages $26,049,224

Sources are listed in references of the table I posted earlier.

Good luck getting the WMF to reveal any details other than the above broad categories. I have been trying to find out exactly what we bought under the category "furniture and computers" for years. I cannot find that information out and neither, it seems, can Jimbo or the board of directors. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:00, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

On the contrary, please see meta:Wikimedia servers which is a few years out of date and might not have the Texas datacenter. EllenCT (talk) 05:00, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

On the contrary, that page describes how our servers are configured, not whether we own them or rent them. In 2007 I was able to get the details of what was bought and how much it cost -- see m:Wikimedia budget/2007/Q1/hardware/purchase 1, but I challenge you to get that information for 2014 or 2015. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:35, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Well perhaps if they actually held their conferences in hub cities with already existing infrastructure rather than picturesque tiny Italian valleys miles from anywhere where the carrier pigeon is the fastest means of communication... The travel and conference costs would drop a bit.... Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:21, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Didn't you hear? Conferences in picturesque tiny Italian valleys are absolutely essential. Without them the WMF would not be able to (...rolls dice...) deal with paid editing. We need to spend, spend, spend! Spend like a drunken sailor, otherwise we won't be able to (...rolls dice...) search recent changes! --Guy Macon (talk) 13:06, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Why "rolls dice"? Are you implying that you have any evidence that a hard spending freeze would improve the encyclopedia more than growing the organization to address observed risks at the rate they have been observed to grow? If so, please state the evidence. EllenCT (talk) 13:39, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I am implying that you are starting with whatever you think Wikipedia needs to do better (and I agree on most of your choices), ignoring the fact that a 300X increase in spending didn't fix those problems, and making the unwarranted assumption that even more spending will somehow give us a different result. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:26, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Many problems have been fixed. Some are still with us. I have no evidence that the problems we face do not require additional spending, and if you do, please bring it to our attention. EllenCT (talk) 16:10, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I doubt "The travel and conference costs would drop a bit". The "picturesque tiny Italian" village (not at all a valley) was I think about the same distance from a major international airport (Milan–Malpensa Airport) as the 2014 central London venue was from the London airports, and I would imagine an awful lot cheaper as a venue. Oddly enough conference venues in major hub cities are rather expensive to hire. Johnbod (talk) 13:18, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

They could have held the 2014 event in a perfectly good venue *at Heathrow* (Or to be honest, almost any major international airport in the EU or the US) for a fraction of the cost. Not to mention getting a deal on accomodation. So yes, unless the WMF is willing to pony up a complete breakdown of the costs associated with the ridiculous location they chose this time, I am quite confident in saying it was far more expensive that it needed to be. Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:08, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I can't be bothered to pursue this, but I'd advise against considering a career in event management. Johnbod (talk) 14:15, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Mark my words, Some day the inevitable will happen: [A] Revenues will stop growing and start shrinking (nothing grows exponentially without limit forever). [B] The WMF will make only minor cutback in spending, or maybe not even that. [C] We will burn though our savings. [D] A bunch of people at the top will be fired. [E] Everyone who now thinks that a 300X increase in spending is just peachy keen will really, really wish that when the money was rolling in we had built up an endowment instead of spending it on things like conferences. But by then it will be too late. I am sure that those conferences are nice, but shouldn't making sure that the actual website will never shut down, become advertising-supported or end up sold to Google in a bankruptcy sale be a higher priority? --Guy Macon (talk) 15:26, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Just how much does it cost to keep the websites on the internet? As for what they do with the money that people give them, there are two primary thinkers about that, the people who give the money, many anyway, and all the finance people at or those professionally advising the WMF, or on their ctte's. There is no reason to think they don't think about that and the endowment. Begging the question, endowment for what? Is it an 'embarrassment of riches', perhaps. It seems obvious to me though that the WMF is and has been quite some time more than just keeping websites, it has something to do with leveraging a 'free knowledge and dissemination movement' (written, visual, audio, and computer code). What's the value of that? Who knows, but those in the movement will have something to do as long as they want to do it, with or without an endowment, or even a WMF, although chances are if the WMF goes away, they will create something(s) to take its place. Of course, the WMF can fail to keep itself going, that's a given. Life goes on. Perhaps what you are suggesting is that the WMF is a monopoly, and yes monopolies are both inefficient and a success but, so what? Should it try to maintain its monopoly, indefinitely? Why? -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:57, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

How much does it cost to keep the websites on the internet? Last year the WMF spent $1,997,521 actually hosting all of our pages. That's 3.8% of total spending. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:17, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, so your arguement is all for a small endowment to cover that, which hardly seems like something that won't get done since they are going to have an endowment and it likely won't be all that small. Alanscottwalker (talk) 01:59, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Endowment return and investment asset allocation questions

A no-risk investment gets you a roughly 2% return. To insure that we could keep the servers running no matter what would require a 100 million dollar endowment to guarantee the two million needed. And that's assuming that the WMF does nothing else. Sure we could stop the Wikimanias or stop paying €18,000 ($19,755 USD) to send Wikimedians to pop concerts in Germany as "accredited photographers"[19] or they could cut back some of the staff increase (3 employees to 240 employees in 9 years)[20] but they would still have to do some things, like defending us when we get sued. I estimate five million US dollars a year, with a limit of no more than 10% yearly growth for the WMF to keep running. That would take a 300 million dollar endowment. We haven't saved enough. But, of course we all know that the WMF won't cut spending to 5 million a year if revenues plummet. At best they will freeze budget growth and start spending down our current endowment. When that hits zero we go bankrupt. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:14, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

2% is not a reasonable performance goal. However, it is probably a reasonable lower bound expectation to use for conservatively setting endowment size goals. See Figure 1 on page 2 here and e.g. [21] for a more detailed discussion and performance correlation breakdown. EllenCT (talk) 18:50, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

At least in the US, running an organization off endowment investment is bizarre. Also, one can't say how much that Germany example, or those conferences actually raked in for the foundation to offset the cost -- what's called in business financials "good will" is the largest, most important asset the Foundation has, not money. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:47, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

It seems to work for Harvard, See Harvard University endowment. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:34, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

No. Absolutely not. Harvard has not just raised an endowment and run off it, as you argued. It actually accepts a ton of money from others and government, and every year, more and more, as you already complained about, and charges tuition and fees to run itself. Not to mention, it charges rent on land holdings and buildings. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:33, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Harvard and at least 828 other nonprofits:

“

The largest endowment among all charities in 2007 was $42 billion; the 20th largest was $7.84 billion.... the largest endowments [earn] superior investment returns... other types of charitable organizations... on average achieve substantially lower investment returns for their beneficiaries, their employees and their donors than should be possible.

”

Please see also Part II of that paper: "nonprofits whose primary business is predominantly financial ... consistently earn higher returns.... larger nonprofits, older nonprofits, and private foundations will tend to outperform," So, should the WMF go with an established, low management fee, commercial endowment fund e.g. Vanguard's until the new endowment investment team has proposed investments that actually would have outperformed them for at least a few years? EllenCT (talk) 18:25, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Again, it is false to claim Harvard runs just off endowment return. It incredibly raises substantial sums, more and more, every year. 21:37, 24 July 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alanscottwalker (talk • contribs) 21:37, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I seem to have no made myself clear, and for that I apologize. I didn't say that Harvard runs off endowment return with no further fundraising or that Wikipedia should run off endowment return with no further fundraising. What I was trying to convey is that Harvard could run off endowment return with no further fundraising and that Wikipedia can't because we haven't saved enough. Thus, Harvard is protected should their revenue stream shrink, and we are not. I would add that Wikipedia is far more likely to experience a huge and sudden drop in donations that Harvard. All it takes is one scandal, and it doesn't even have to be real -- a wholly manufactured scandal can kill fundraising very effectively if it gains traction.

Are you of the opinion that our donations will increase exponentially forever? Has that ever happened anywhere? Are you of the opinion that donations will never, ever decrease? Are you of the opinion that, if our donations see a big drop, that the WMF's spending will track that drop as it has tracked the recent increases, or do you think they will eat into our savings to make up the shortfall? I don't say that we shouldn't have fundraisers. I say that we shouldn't have to have fundraisers. This is something that is within our grasp if we just start being prudent with our spending. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:43, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, in addition to the return performance question above, regarding going with an established low-management fee endowment fund until the team you are putting together can prove that they can outperform them on paper for at least a few years, I also have asset allocation questions. [22] (from [23]) indicates that real estate investments averaged under 10% of endowment fund investments in the 1980s and 90s, but have since ballooned to become a far more prevalent type of endowment investment, at around 30%. What are your thoughts on this trend in particular, and whether real estate is an appropriate endowment investment in general? EllenCT (talk) 18:25, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

If an endowment is meant to keep Wikipedia going through hard times (think the Great Depression) it should be in investments that have zero risk of losing the principle. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:43, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

An investment with zero risk is like a fraction with a zero denominator. They exist only in theory, not in practice. Risk can be minimized with time and effort, but not zeroed. EllenCT (talk) 20:10, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

ElenCT is asking pretty much the right questions here (maybe a bit too specific) but I would like to go thru the idea of an endowment and what it can do for us in a more systematic way. I've expressed similar opinions before to the WMF, but maybe I'll be a bit more specific here, and my views are my own only.

What should we expect from an endowment? The following seem reasonable to me:
- The WMF has taken on some obligation to disseminate our work here, but I'd think this could be accomplished at a minimum level by dedicating $10-20 million to keep the servers on (perhaps in read-only mode) for 10 years, if the WMF is otherwise incapable of doing it. This is pretty minor.
- The WMF would like to be able to attract the best employees and other partners (e.g. GLAMs), which means that they should be able to guarantee that they'll be around in 2-5 years, no matter what happens. Say 2-3 years expenses should guarantee that, maybe $150-200 million (pretty important)
- If there is some shock that makes it impossible for the WMF to raise any more money (hard to imagine, but maybe technological (new platform) or political (e.g. cyber world war)) the WMF should be able to finance a major technological change while still operating (maybe in a reduced mode) for 2-3 years. Perhaps the total of the endowment should be raised to $250 million to handle this. Looking ahead 10-20 years, I doubt we'll need this. But looking forward 50-100 years, we'd very likely need it.
- I wouldn't want to limit spending by the endowment to just the above cases. Probably the most likely need would be where we see a major tech change coming 5 years down the road and need to develop a response in good time. Still a $250 million total endowment should be able to cover that contingency.
- There is a requirement by the IRS that an endowment spend a minimum % each year, so as not to be a vehicle to accumulate huge wealth without benefiting society. I think it is 3%-5%. That amount should be enough to keep the servers on in perpetuity if the money is not otherwise needed.

I'd pretty much limit the purpose and the spending of the endowment to these type of things. I don't see a case for trying to fund the WMF in perpetuity from the endowment. 1st this never really works, e.g. the endowed chair that Isaac Newton held is still going and pays the holder about 10 pounds a year. We just can't see if there is a need that far out in any case

We are more or less tied to a specific technology, and while we can hope, to be able to make the switch to the next one, nothing would be guaranteed. Consider that broadcast radio was the most important media for say 1920-1955. Still going but pretty unimportant most places. Broadcast and cable TV were the most important media for about 50 years, say 1955-2005. It's still very important, but why do we think its successor, the internet, will still be around performing the same function in 50 years?

Other than the above, I think the WMF should be able to fund itself through the annual donations. This should help focus the ED and the board to make sure that the services the WMF provides are recognized by the public as being important. Sure the endowment can help with the occasional bump in the road (mostly described above), but the WMF should be able to prove its worth every year. More, particularly on investments, later. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:47, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

You could have asked similar questions about WAIS, gopher, FTP, X.25 networks, TWX, Telex, phototypesetting via punched tape, tickertape, the telegraph, the printing press, postal services, semaphores, and the alphabet, all of which have built on and been able to incorporate the content of the earlier. I predict the Latin alphabet will survive the singularity. If it were up to me, I'd set a full perpetuity for everything the WMF does now (except for the mobile apps, which I think are redundant with the web service, distract vital resources from it, and we know people who use them donate and contribute less) plus, someday, professional support of the WP:BACKLOG as a goal, and use endowment income to reduce small donor fundraising by whatever amount it produces while the Foundation follows the existing budgeting process. EllenCT (talk) 20:40, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

(ec)

As far as investment returns, we'd have a pretty long term horizon (given the above purposes), say 50 years. There wouldn't be any real reason to accept a 2-3% "risk free return". Rather with a well diversified portfolio we could make around 6% more than that annually, on average. By "on average", I mean something like a total of 8% plus or minus 20% per year. So if we got the extra 6% annual average for 10 years, plus one year of -20%, we'd still be well ahead (more than 40% total). Since we likely wouldn't need much from the endowment over that time, it makes a lot of sense to make the "riskier investment". Of course there would be a lot of screaming in those few years when we get the -20% returns, and we shouldn't do the "riskier" strategy unless we could say "that's just one year in a long term strategy that is almost guaranteed to do better" BTW, nobody ever screams when you get the 20% years, though they might start saying "what's the use of stockpiling all this money in the endowment, we've got things we could spend it on." Dealing in a disciplined manner with both extreme outcomes would be equally important.

Trying to beat the market is the loser's game that everybody wants to try. The above returns would be available to us by just investing in an index fund, and paying a very low 50 basis points (0.50%) in annual fees. Folks who try to beat the market usually fail in that goal and also end up paying much higher fees, e.g. 150-300 basis points. The higher fees often end up eating up any gains since they are paid every year on the entire balance and compound.

Of course with a fund of $37 billion like Harvard we might be able to hire a true investment genius (but who knows ahead of time? and btw they had a -30% return in 2008), but with $250 million, we'd be pretty small beer to the market.

So what well diversified portfolio to invest in? Vanguard's no-brainer 500 index beats most active managers over 5 to 10 year periods, even before fees are counted. But we probably should diversify outside the US and with some smaller firms, not just the largest 500. So similar funds in Europe and Asia, minimizing fees. There's perhaps an interesting question about whether we'd want to be over-weighted or under-weighted in internet stocks. I'd guess, from donations of stock by internet entrepreneurs who'd like to lock up the stock for a few years (require us to hold the stock), we'd likely be over-weighted in any case.

How about bonds - aren;t they lower risk? Not really these days, and they'd really expose us to inflation risk. Right now you can lock in some really low returns for the next 10-20 years. Not my favorite.

How's that for a complete investment strategy in a couple of paragraphs? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:09, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

How about a long-term investment strategy that will keep Wikipedia running even if the US experiences another great depression or hyperinflation? We don't know what lies 30 or 50 years down the road and the US economy looked pretty sweet in the 1910s and 1920s. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:56, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Just a couple of responses to this section. First, in terms of how the endowment funds will be invested I should point out that I personally believe in the semi-strong form of the Efficient-market hypothesis with some caveats, which in this context means that I agree very much with the general advice for low-fee index fund investing. The exact mix among asset classes that we should pursue is a complex question about which we should be thoughtful and take advice from active professionals. The kinds of factors I'd personally be thinking about there would include that we should likely want to consider that the global scope of our work and spending and fundraising means that our investment portfolio should not be too US-centric.

Second, I'd like to thank Guy Macon for his views on spending, even though I agree with them more in spirit than in the details. There are very valid questions, obviously, about what overall level of spending the Foundation should be pursuing, and very valid questions about spending priorities on various kinds of activities. But I think, Guy, that your analysis is much too harsh and factually mistaken in lots of ways, and that it also fails to take into account various risks and needs. Yes, we could cut back to just paying for servers and bandwidth, minimal "maintenance" on software only, no spending on community or chapters, no spending on mobile development, no spending on GLAM partnerships, etc. But I believe that such a path would not be the safest path and indeed would be suicidal for our mission.

One thing to note is that we are setting the endowment up very carefully to make sure that it can't just be a rubber-stamped piggy bank for some future spendthrift CEO/board. (I am thinking about questions relating to the endowment with exactly the 30-50 year mindset that you mention!) Here I've learned a lot from my experience on the Guardian Media Group board, and the relationship between GMG and the Scott Trust (which owns GMG but is a separate board which oversees their endowment fund). Our structure won't be exactly like their's obviously, but the core principle is that the endowment will have a different board composed mainly of different members. For the WMF to tap into the endowment fund, there is an additional "checks and balances" with a board who will rightly be considering long-term safety as being first and foremost.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:19, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Way to bust my door-in-the-face technique, Jimbo... (smile) --Guy Macon (talk) 06:53, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Addressing the philanthropically inclined wealthy in a systematic way

Jimbo, I agree that donations should not buy influence. Even if there are sufficient wealthy friends who love Wikipedia, as you say, do you see that there is the risk of an appearance of a conflict of interest involved with soliciting endowment donations only from established friends?

Again, I want to urge you to approach the philanthropically inclined wealthy with a systematic process that will not only avoid requesting donations from those who have been involved with controversies in the projects, but also will not favor those with whom you or the Foundation have pre-existing relationships. I have commented in the past about companies that profit by selling ads thanks to the hard work of Foundation volunteers through the use of Wikidata to re-synthesize infoboxes in search results -- a practice which is likely harmful to consumers of medical information, because the most important vital facts as customarily appear in article introductions are far more rarely covered in Wikidata. That is one important reason to avoid the influence of such large corporations, which may be fast friends with the Foundation, and may be the easiest to convince of the value proposition supporting the endowment. Similarly, who is to say that today's friendly tycoon or royal family member might not be tomorrow's labor market abuse poster child or despot crushing people under jackboots, iron fists, and using known false information to send our children to unjust wars in distant lands?

Therefore, I recommend the following process to address endowment fundraising:

Create a list of the family offices of the wealthiest families;
Add royal families in good standing among the international community;
Add reputable wealthy individuals who have been involved with philanthropy;
Remove those known to have used their wealth to promote controversial views, convicted criminals, autocrats, despots, dictators, opponents of human rights, those with a pattern and practice of civil law violations including labor market abuses, and those whose donations might otherwise tend to bring the Foundation into disrepute;
Remove subjects with prominent or ongoing controversy issues in the projects' articles concerning them;
Prepare letters to the remainder soliciting donations, and make it entirely clear that it is inappropriate for you to discuss issues with articles with potential donors, but include the usual detailed instructions for reaching OTRS volunteers;
Invite donors to a reception and banquet where you would speak for half an hour on a different topic depending on the level of donations; for example,
1. Donors at the $5 million or greater level could be entitled to a talk about the relationship between organized advocacy editing and the core content pillar NPOV policy;
2. Donors at the $20 million or greater level could be entitled to a talk on your views of Wikipedia's de facto role in financial market governance;
3. Donors at the $50 million or greater level could be entitled to an open "fireside chat" talk where all you do is answer their questions for an hour;
For the wealthiest potential donors for whom it is convenient, hand deliver the solicitation, and bring t-shirts and buttons for everyone in the office when you stop by; and
Follow up with telephone calls personally after two, four, and six weeks.
...Non-profit!

Please let me know your thoughts. EllenCT (talk) 20:42, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: I'm guessing they're already doing about half of that already. I hope anyway. Some of the rest seems a bit extreme, but we'll see what Jimmy thinks. 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 strike me as totally over-the-top and almost nobody would want to get such "bonuses" from Jimmy.

The paper linked in 7.2 has a very interesting title "Crowd Governance: The Monitoring Role of Wikipedia in the Financial Market" and I've even skimmed 3 pages! My initial reaction is that Wikipedia contains almost no useful financial information related to corporate governance - so how could Wikipedia effect it? We probably do have some good info on a company's products and marketing, and the names of the folks in the top offices, but real financial info would have to start with audited financial statements, which every publicly traded company has, but they almost never are linked to in Wikipedia. About the only information asymmetry I can see that a Wikipedia article would reduce is the possibility that a small scandal is developing somewhere in the world related to the company. Company insiders would probably know about these, and Wikipedians probably like to report on these. Any big scandals however would likely be in the major papers already. Interesting idea, but the practicality looks iffy to me. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:47, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

@Smallbones: why not let donors decide for themselves? What do you think they want to hear about Wikipedia? That you are interested in the subject of one of the proposed talks contradicts your assertion that almost nobody would want to hear Jimmy's reflections on it. I would pay a lot of money for a ticket to any one of those banquet talks. You aren't almost nobody, you are an editor who has indirectly enriched the lives of countless others now and for posterity. If you think you can do better, let's see your proposed donor banquet topics. The governance thing works because brands watch their articles more than they tweet. EllenCT (talk) 00:58, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: I think I owe you a big thank you for something in there, Thanks. The rest I'm not so sure about :-) I wouldn't pay even a million for any of those talks with Jimmy - but maybe that's just me. I'm a little tight with my money sometimes. I would pay $20 for an hour long "fireside chat" with Jimmy, but only if he bought the beer. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:23, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

So, what do you think rich donors want to hear from Jimmy? "How to make small talk with your chauffeur using Wikipedia"? "Understanding and relating to the plight of the poor and dispossessed by monitoring Wikipedia for emerging threats to summer chalets"? "Are the articles on your investment artwork properly cited to the most reliable sources"? "Controversies in Ming Dynasty pottery articles"? "Hiring the best lear jet pilots by contacting active WikiProject Civil Aviation editors on their talk pages"? Come on, it's not polite to insult someone's judgement without trying to do better, especially while brainstorming. Sofixit! EllenCT (talk) 02:36, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean to insult you or your judgement in any way - just a bit of joking. I don't have any experience asking billionaires or centimillionaires for money, and I doubt that I'd be any good at it. I'd think that many of them are very busy and would just like to cut a check after a few pleasantries - or actually somebody else cuts the check with just a phone call. Just about anybody who might give a million would likely get chatted up as much as they wanted. Possible topics that Jimmy might know about for internet types: the future of crowdsourcing, or maybe is internet harassment going to kill crowdsourcing?, possible changes in copyright laws, the right to be forgotten, internet or mobile growth in country x, government interference in the internet, etc. The point wouldn't really be that Jimmy knows more about these topics than the potential donor, or even that he is a true expert in these areas, but that his opinions might end up changing in some small way how these issues turn out. That's my take in any case. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:05, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Some of those are very good ideas. I would put the future of crowdsourcing at the $10 million level, but someone in Research would need to help write that speech. Changes in copyright law could be at around the $2 million level. Do you think Jimbo has expressed coherent and consistent opinions about the right to be forgotten? I'm not sure anyone has, so I would steer clear of that, and harassment is just depressing, and I doubt rich people care about it, but who knows, throw it in at $30 million and see if there is any demand. I'm not sure Jimbo can give a talk on mobile growth without the appearance of a conflict of interest or worse, making statements that stockholders of his for-profit companies might conceivably be able to sue him for. By the way, not even joking about questioning people's judgement unless you try to do better is an (the?) essential characteristic of brainstorming.

But the point is, by making the topic dependent on the donation amount and awarding reception and banquet talk tickets, the family office personnel will have to put the decision in the hands of those who control the money, which means we won't get a brush-off from staff decisions that the wealthy themselves never see. EllenCT (talk) 05:16, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

There's a lot in this thread, and I'll try to go through it now in a systematic way to give feedback as best I can. If I miss something important, please ask again.

1. "do you see that there is the risk of an appearance of a conflict of interest involved with soliciting endowment donations only from established friends?" - well I think this could be problematic in a way, but this isn't really a relevant question, as we are not only working to contact existing friends, but to cast a relatively wide net. As far as my work personally, I'm going to be most effective talking to people whom I have known for years and who I know are favorably pre-disposed to like the idea of an endowment for Wikipedia. But of course there's no reason to limit the requests to just that group. I want to emphasize that while I think it could be problematic in a way (mainly because it would limit the fundraising unnecessarily), I don't really see how it would constitute a "conflict of interest". For whom?

2. Of course we are pursuing a systematic process as you outlined. Marc Brent at the Foundation is in charge of it, and he's doing a good job.

3. Given that I very happily do all the things in your list of 1-3 free of charge all the time, I don't see how donors would consider it particularly interesting to have those be perks. When I have meetings with potential major donors (which I am doing more and more as we ramp up the endowment campaign) we have conversations about all kinds of things... they often are really interested in all the same kinds of topics everyone is interested in - how do we deal with potential corporate abuse of Wikipedia, etc. I would say that virtually no one in the entire world seems particularly interested in my views on financial market governance except for you. :-)

4. "I'm not sure Jimbo can give a talk on mobile growth without the appearance of a conflict of interest or worse, making statements that stockholders of his for-profit companies might conceivably be able to sue him for." - that's almost certainly false. I talk about mobile growth all the time - it's a staple of my speeches to talk about the growth of mobile, particularly in the developing world, and why I view it as critical for Wikipedia. I really can't imagine any shareholders having any issue with anything that I might say on the topic.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:27, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Item 1 reminded me of an issue I'm dealing with in another venue. I'm the new co-president of an organization. I've observed that our approach to selecting new board members relies too heavily on reviewing our collective list of established friends. I view that as a problem. I'd like to see more diversity on the board, and think the lack of diversity stems partially from our board selection approach. However, while I would call it a problem, I wouldn't call it a "conflict of interest". It is a common problem of boards, can be addressed relatively easily if you make the attempt, but the problem is possible insularity and lack of diversity, not conflict of interest. --S Philbrick (Talk) 12:18, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

I totally agree.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:01, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, thank you. I am sure that plenty of wealthy people would be interested in your reflections on the ways people interact with brands on Wikipedia, and I stand by my recommendations. EllenCT (talk) 13:45, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Work for you

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Okay here's my job for you, I won't pay you. Okay here it goes: I have a treat for editing my userpage for sockpuppets which is a threat of watching my page here and it's possible the blocking admin there can view my userpage as online stalking. And I don't want that so can you hide my userpage from ALL annons. Since you are a Biomois employee/ Founder of Wikipedia. I think you can do that. Thanks! DatNuttyWikipedian (talk) 17:18, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Maybe you shouldn't announce your intention to break the rules of another website on Wikipedia in the first place. --118.148.101.138 (talk) 12:07, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I was kidding I know an admin there that watched me and I used it like a trap to fool the admins there. And I shouldn't have said what I said it was possibly my WikiStress Gary "Roach" Sanderson (talk) 17:28, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Wikimail doesn't work

Latest comment: 8 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion

Hello, Jimbo. Recently I found that wikimail didn't work - after sending letter wikiinterface showed message that my letter was sent, but recipient didn't get any e-mail. I tried to send a letter to myself and this attempt failed too - I did not get letter to my e-mail box. There are at least 2 tickets about this problem: ticket about the problem in the English Wikipedia and ticket about the problem in the Russian Wikipedia. I tried to reset my e-mail address on the preferences page in the Russian Wikipedia: I managed to delete my e-mail address from the preferences and I got letter about it from [email protected] to my e-mail box. But all my attempts to set new e-mail address in the Russian Wikipedia failed: I did not get any letter to my e-mail box. I managed to confirm my e-mail address on the preferences page in the English Wikipedia. But in the English Wikipedia there is the same problem: when I send a letter to myself I get nothing to my e-mail box. Could you pay your attention to this problem, please? Раммон (talk) 05:56, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Top priority, I'd imagine. _Muffled ^Pocketed 07:02, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Is your email provider Yahoo? If so, this is a documented bug at their end and not our fault. ‑ Iridescent 08:58, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I tried mail.bg and gmail.com. Раммон (talk) 11:55, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

FYI, it's not a bug at their end. While, yes what Yahoo is doing is uncommon, and breaking many traditional email flows, it's not a bug and very much intentional and documented, and I'm personally of the opinion that it is a VERY good idea and more email providers should adopt the Yahoo DMARC reject policy. It's just disruptive to the general mail ecosphere. What worries me, is that this piece of our software platform is not really owned by a team, and no one seems to feel the need to take action to mitigate the problem, regardless of where it originates from. It's not acceptable. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:16, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

This will provide some useful background reading for those, like me, who aren't familiar with the Yahoo issue. Раммон, I don't know about your issue and this isn't really the best place to raise a bug report - although a general discussion of processes and whether we are being responsive enough to things like this is of course welcomed here. Just... don't expect a discussion here to lead to direct action!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:20, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the answer, Jimbo. But I have never used any yahoo's e-mail service, so I do not understand, how yahoo relates to mail.bg and gmail.com. Раммон (talk) 13:18, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. I don't know either.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:35, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

This is a pure guess, based on TheDJ's comment above. GMail also uses the p=reject DMARC flag - it, with Yahoo, were two of the contributors to the DMARC standard. Mail.bg doesn't have a listed DMARC policy record at https://dmarcian.com/record-tools/mail.bg (or a couple of other tools), but if (that's a BIG IF for me,) the "problem" does indeed rest with the DMARC status as pushed through WikiMail, they probably should. BTW, I only spent about thirty minutes initial readthrough of what DMARC is - your problem interested me intellectually. It's actually the receiver's email domain that decides what to do with suspicious mail and queries of the sender's DMARC policy, if any (and what to do if no dmarc policy exists from the sender's server for that matter.) I've never enabled email myself and don't intend to for testing. Just trying to help as to the 'whys' of your problem, and I hope this helped! LaughingVulcan 01:09, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Interesting copyfraud lawsuit

Latest comment: 8 years ago11 comments7 people in discussion

Carol M. Highsmith, a very famous American photographer, is suing Getty Images for $1.35 billion, in effect for copyfraud under 17 U.S. Code § 1202 - Integrity of copyright management information See news stories at Hyproallergic and Techdirt (which has a copy of the suit) and many others.

Carol has donated at least 18,755 photos to the Library of Congress copyright free which Getty is selling without permission on their website. They even were dunning Carol (e.g. $120 per photo) for using her own photos on her own site.

Carol was one of our jury members for WLM-US in 2012 and seems to be very aware of and supportive of Wikimedia's mission. We have at least 1,500 of her photos at Commons. I have to wonder whether some of the folks Getty was dunning got her photos from Commons.

I'd be surprised if Getty is not similarly selling without permission our photos at Commons. For a related example, I noticed a photo of our main page (turned 45 degrees) from around the date that we blacked out, that Getty was selling. I uploaded that pic as an example for the copyfraud article, but for some strange reason a Commons admin (now banned) insisted on deleting it.

I'm not sure if there is anything we can do to support the lawsuit, but it would be in our interest (preventing copyfraud) if she won. Maybe a friend of the court brief?

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:01, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I love your idea. You should pass it along to the legal team to make sure they are aware of it!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:34, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo Wales, before anyone thinks it's a good idea to support this lawsuit, once should be making sure their own house is in order first. This article states:

You see, Highsmith is such a wonderful person that she donated a massive collection of her photographs to the Library of Congress -- over 100,000 of them, for them to be released royalty free for the public to use. She didn't put them fully into the public domain, though, instead saying that anyone could use them so long as they gave credit back to her. It was basically a very early kind of version of what's now known as the Creative Commons Attribution License (which didn't exist at the time she made that agreement with the Library of Congress).

I have bolded the pertinent part above. I see over 1,000 of Carol's photographs on Wikimedia Commons, which rely on Commons:Template:PD-Highsmith, which states:

Ms. Highsmith has stipulated that her photographs are in the public domain. Photographs of sculpture or other works of art may be restricted by the copyright of the artist.

LOC states: "Carol M. Highsmith's photographs are in the public domain."

That news article indicates that Ms Highsmith did not release her works into the public domain, but rather requires attribution for her works.

I certainly wouldn't want to be using any of her works from Wikimedia Commons given the legal ramifications of doing so. 115.166.4.231 (talk) 22:47, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Then the template needs updated to reflect that attribution is required more explicitly. The template itself somewhat does so, but it doesn't otherwise make it clear. —Jeremy v^_^v ^Bori! 23:07, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

In addition to crossing the t's re the Highsmith photos, it would be smart to do a search of Commons and Wikipedia imagines to make sure there are no Getty images hosted. (I know, from personal, painful, experience, that this can occur.)--S Philbrick (Talk) 23:14, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

There is actually a category on Commons "Category:Media licensed by Getty Images" with 239 images in it. 238 of these images are obviously public domain. The last image is a screenshot of the enWiki main page sold by Getty to the Washington Post (and uploaded by me) see below. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:50, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't understand the Australian anon's concerns "I certainly wouldn't want to be using any of her works from Wikimedia Commons given the legal ramifications of doing so." I don't think there are any legal ramifications for users of the photos, but sending Highsmith a bill for using one of her own photos, that's obviously a different matter.

One thing that Sphilbrick's story reminded me of. Photo uploaders should check whether any of their own photos are carried and sold on Getty. Call me a cynic, but if company is ripping off freely licensed photos from the Library of Congress and then selling them, then they very well might be ripping off Commons as well. So please do check some of your pix and list any ripoffs here or on my talk page. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:12, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, Jimbo Wales, just some further comment here. Also, please beware before joining Smallbones on any of his crusades. You seriously need to "not trust and absolutely verify" anything the guy says. Above, he stated that "a Commons admin (now banned)" removed an image from the copyfraud article. Martin H. is the editor who removed Smallbones', quite possibly libellous, original research. The image with that very problematic caption was removed by numerous editors, but Smallbones chose to edit war his original research into the article. The image itself was deleted by AFBorchert on Commons after a lengthy discussion.

Now we see Smallbones inserting into the copyfraud article information on this case. Although it's not a BLP, Smallbones seems to have a serious beef with Getty Images which I think needs to be investigated as he does appear to be using Wikipedia as a playground to settle grudges. 115.166.4.231 (talk) 23:26, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Similar screenshot to the one deleted from Commons. This one was sold by Getty to the Washington Post without any attribution to Wikipedia or a CC-BY-SA license mentioned

If anybody wants to read the deletion discussion at Commons it's here. The now banned admin I referred is the guy who started the deletion and just would not let go despite just repeating the same old mantra (approx) "Just because a photo is a derivative of a CC-BY-SA screenshot, doesn't mean that the photo is CC-BY-SA, no matter what the license says." I'm used to another banned Commons admin making personal attacks such as the one above, so I'll just ignore any repetition of the above pa. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:39, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Smallbones is right here - unfortunately, he is originally right. At the moment it would be inappropriate to include it in the article based on one editor's determination it is copyfraud, even if we know it is - as familiar as Wikipedia editors have become with these issues, we should bear in mind this is still rather specialized knowledge. However, should the WMF get involved with this action, have the legal team come up with a determination that confirms his opinion, put it out in a press release that gets cited in a few newspaper articles, why then I expect editors could put it not only in copyfraud but in Getty Images itself, beside mention of the lawsuit described above. :) Wnt (talk) 12:41, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

FWIW, Getty has images of postage stamps from the USPS, clearly marked as copyright by USPS in the images, where their description does not include the information as to the actual copyright owner, and where the image may be used in accordance with USPS conditions which are fully unrelated to paying Getty a single sou. Collect (talk) 13:55, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Monsanto must be pleased

Latest comment: 8 years ago68 comments19 people in discussion

We have successfully scrubbed the lede of GMO controversy article of all mention of scientists or academics who have concerns with GMOs. [24] [25], following Monsanto's PR campaign to "enlist academics in the G.M.O. lobbying war".

Will we soon completely dispose of the WP:NPOV requirement to make edits like these easier? We did such a good job giving BP's version of the Deepwater Horizon spill, until some reporter had to call attention to it--as if such POV writing is problematic.[26] --David Tornheim (talk) 17:58, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Your insinuation that those who disagree with you on this issue have been "enlisted" by Monsanto is way out of line. It's precisely this inability by combatants on both sides to consider that their opposite numbers are acting in good faith that has made the editing environment on GMO articles so toxic. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 18:06, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I am not a "combatant". I was not suggesting that editors were "enlisted" by Monsanto, but that editors were quoting the enlisted scientists and deleting the concerns of scientists that were misbehaving by criticizing GMOs. I'm sure Monsanto is pleased, and these editors should be praised for their success in presenting Monsanto's view and eliminating scientists' views that do not conform, as we did for BP.

I never suggested this was not good faith. I have no doubt editors believe they are doing what is best for the encyclopedia, and they are certain that the numerous scientists who raise concerns about GMOs are just nuts, and these editors have every right to believe that. Similarly, I have no doubt those who put BP's views of the Deepwater Horizon spill for good reason believed that BP's views were the most accurate and encyclopediac. If you have evidence the editing is not "good faith", please provide it. --David Tornheim (talk) 19:07, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

David Tornheim should have been t'banned from the GMO area a good while back. I'm amazed the community is still tolerating this stuff. Alexbrn (talk) 13:42, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Alexbrn and Carrite since they've voiced similar concerns, this is mostly because I believe people really just don't have the time or energy anymore to put up yet another AE case, especially with the history of all this. That and those of us involved in the topic have been trying to ignore David's behavior issues and focus on content. It looks like there's enough concern from the community though that an AE case should hopefully help put a stop to this behavior, so I've opened one up here. Kingofaces43 (talk) 17:49, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

The attack on Folta was absolutely ridiculous. Monsanto essentially gave the university a donation to help cover the costs of his existing outreach program, so that he could essentially do extra work for free. What a scandal! --tronvillain (talk) 18:22, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I know. What could possibly be wrong with using the university to do your PR work? [27] or buying politicians LEGALLY to get the legislation you want. [28]. The idea that money "corrupts" is naive. [29] [30] --David Tornheim (talk) 19:13, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Doing more of the science communication he was already doing isn't "PR work." And I don't think sixty grand buys a lot of politicians. A corporation about the size of Whole Foods somehow controls the government eh? --tronvillain (talk) 21:56, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

@Tronvillain: did you read the Forbes piece you linked to? "Monsanto’s $25,000 donation to the university’s foundation to support travel, food, and a digital projector for Folta to deliver a year of monthly academic and public GMO education workshops.... To be clear, the $25,000 was not a grant or contract and in no way provided personal funds to Folta, either as salary support or additional remuneration" (emphasis added.) If it wasn't for personal funds, then who ate the food? Similarly: "I don’t think a visit and a donation from the Monsanto Company is a relationship.... If I had this to do over again I’d absolutely call this a relationship." That contradiction is either evidence of denial or willingness to say what he doesn't believe to avoid similar situations in the future. EllenCT (talk) 21:48, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I read it thanks - as I said, additional work for free. You're complaining that he got to eat while doing that work? Pathetic. --tronvillain (talk) 14:43, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree completely with David Tornheim, whose work in this area has earned my greatest respect. What he points out are facts. His opponents are reduced to smears and gamesmanship. Bravo for doing the hard work, David! Jus da fax 20:03, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

@Driftwoodzebulin: and @Alexbrn: Your edits are in the two diffs at the top of this discussion, so you have a right to know that your edits have been mentioned. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:39, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I posted on the talk page of the article here, where you of course threatened me for "casting aspersions" for shedding light on this.

You said "'scrubbing' implies a deliberate attempt to suppress information" [31]. You mean like white-washing? Well if it was not a deliberate attempt to delete the criticisms from scientists, are you saying these edits were accidental? --David Tornheim (talk) 22:19, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm saying that, absent evidence to the contrary, the edits should be considered good faith. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:37, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I did not discuss motivations. I was showing the results of the edits. The effect of the edits speak for themselves. --David Tornheim (talk) 22:50, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

I see that you said: "...scientists that were misbehaving by criticizing GMOs. I'm sure Monsanto is pleased, and these editors should be praised for their success in presenting Monsanto's view and eliminating scientists' views that do not conform..." In my opinion, you did not say in so many words that the editors' motivations were to please Monsanto, but you implied it. We had an RfC about this, with something like 90 members of the community taking part. There's a heated discussion going on right now about the policy against outing, and part of what editors are discussing is how to handle evidence of COI in a proper manner. Doxing someone is obviously a bad approach, but insinuating a COI is not beneficial either. ArbCom determined that calling editors "shills" for industry is unacceptable. What ArbCom in their infinite wisdom failed to fully anticipate is how editors are learning to avoid the key words that would trigger AE, but still communicate their distrust of the community consensus, wink, wink. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:01, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

If this page is under discretionary sanctions and he said that, the only curious thing is why David Tornheim is still working on this topic. Carrite (talk) 02:20, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

The paid editor calls for punishment of unpaid volunteer for pointing out POV-editing. And we wonder why readers are losing confidence in Wikipedia and we have a hard time keeping volunteers. --David Tornheim (talk) 02:35, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Really? Paid editor, I forgot that. So, presumably if I offer Carrite enough money, he will strike his comment and nominate you, David, for Admin? Jus da fax 02:48, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Yowza!!! Touched a nerve there, didn't I? I forgot to mention that I'm on the Monsanto payroll, rollin' in the bling, baby, my network of Roundup Ready Sockpuppets paving the way for the Final Victory of my corporate masters. Wooooo!!!! Somebody ping me when this case hits ArbCom, I'd be happy to put in a couple hours of edit history research, gratis... Carrite (talk) 04:37, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Given your unique qualifications and proper attitude, I was going to suggest you contact them at the email below; but I see you are already one step ahead of me, padding your resume. Excellent! You have a bright future ahead of you. --David Tornheim (talk) 05:39, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Is there any policy against simply telephoning Eric Sachs, Monsanto's director of ~~online PR~~ Regulatory Policy & Scientific Affairs and just asking if they've been coordinating activity on Wikipedia? 97.118.166.40 (talk) 01:08, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

What an interesting email that is! Also interesting that two years ago is when I noticed a surge in aggressive pushback by Monsanto. The "Holding Activists Accountable" section featuring Kevin Folta is fascinating. I just noticed Mr. Folta's article neglected to mention his alleged COI in the article lede, and have added a sentence per the existing article. Jimmy, this might bear watching. Jus da fax 02:04, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

If you take a longer term view, and I mean on a time scale of a generation, then what you see is that David Tornheim & co. by winning the argument in Europe, have created precisely the conditions allowing them to make the points that there are now making here. You have to ask how Monsanto ended up being in a monopoly position. The reason is that European companies cannot compete due to political roadblocks. If this had been different, then such companies operating EU rules would behave in a more acceptable way as judged by David and then a lot of the opposition to GM foods that actually derive more from Monsanto's business model and has less to do with the fundamentals of genetic modification, would not have arisen in the first place. Count Iblis (talk) 18:48, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

There is a lot more to it than that. You are making sweeping generalizations on issues with very complex interrelationships. How much do you think the monoculture brought about by Monsanto's monopoly costs consumers in those generational time-scales?[32][33][34] I'm a proponent of genetic engineering, and I see it as no different in principle than animal husbandry and crop hybridization, but I am opposed to the situation where rampant consolidation has led to monoculture issues instead of robust competition between seed producers. EllenCT (talk) 19:12, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

The bottom line is that a reasonable debate to deal with real problems never took place in Europe. What happened is that Europe pretty much turned its back on the GM industry by not participating in it. One then loses any influence one could have had to shape this industry. Count Iblis (talk) 19:56, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

If you visit http://ec.europa.eu/food/dyna/gm_register/index_en.cfm change "Registered / Withdrawn" from "All" to "Registered" and click Search, you can see about 70 varieties of GMOs, from American and European manufacturers. Europe has most certainly not turned its back on the GM industry. EllenCT (talk) 20:58, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

If you try to buy GM foods in the supermarket here, you may be dissapointed :) . Count Iblis (talk) 17:32, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

If consumers in Europe reject GM foods while American consumers show relative indifference, is that equivalent to saying "reasonable debate to deal with real problems never took place"? EllenCT (talk) 18:10, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Retaliatory filing for shedding light on this issue

Kingofaces43 has filed an action against me at WP:AE. See Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#David_Tornheim. --David Tornheim (talk) 21:03, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I was particularly impressed with the part of the complaint where he accuses you of ranting for objecting to the removal of wikilinks from references about one of the diseases caused by a controversial pesticide. EllenCT (talk) 21:12, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I don't have anything useful to add to this debate directly at the moment, as I'm not familiar enough with this area to have any ability to make thoughtful judgments. I find much of the above discussion reasonably productive, but other parts of it I find disappointing and not very helpful. "Monsanto must be pleased" is a combative and irrelevant way to start a discussion. I frankly don't care one way or the other if Monsanto is pleased. Perhaps they will be pleased because they have managed to help communicate factual information to the public in the face of crazed pseudo-science. Perhaps they will be pleased because they have managed a coverup of monumental proportions in their ongoing quest to poison the public. Or perhaps (more likely) they are a large large organization with a mixed set of motives, some of which we might rightly approve of, and some of which we might rightly disagree with. My point is, the criteria for good writing in Wikipedia has nothing to do with what Monsanto wants - nor with what critics of Monsanto want.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:00, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Sorry if my title gives offense. I will keep your concern in mind before posting on your page in the future. The title is meant as an attention grabber. I see your page as a public forum, and it is the last safe place I can talk about the problem on Wikipedia. I would never use something like that in an article.

I totally agree with your last statement that what Monsanto or Monsanto's critics want in the articles is not what is best for the encyclopedia, which is why I made this post, because too much of the articles are written from Monsanto's perspective rather than being NPOV and balanced, where critics' views are being unreasonably deleted. --David Tornheim (talk) 11:48, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

The boxes at the top of Talk:Genetically modified organism have information about the exhaustive and exhausting RfC that was held on the topic. Are you saying that Monsanto have influenced the outcome of that RfC? If so, does that imply that a significant number of participants in the RfC were stooges acting in the interests of Monsanto rather than Wikipedia? When an RfC is held, should it be binding or should editors continue to argue about the findings in any available forum? Johnuniq (talk) 12:07, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

No, of course not (to your question "does that imply that a significant number of participants in the RfC were stooges...?"). Yes, of course, the RfC should be binding. I did not question the findings. Some of the recent edits I refer to following the RfC went *way* beyond what was determined by the RfC, that a closing admin called them "twisting the result of the RfC". Please see my comments and diffs at WP:AE and at Coffee's talk page (referred to there). --David Tornheim (talk) 12:16, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

What Johnuniq fails to note is that there were two previous RfC's on GMO's that went the other way. So much for "binding." Jimmy, while I'm no scientific expert, I have followed the "GMO's on Wikipedia" issue for several years. David Tornheim is on to something. I submit that he is being harassed because he has been unusually effective in pointing out deficiencies in the writing of some of the GMO articles, and the methods used by parties with a demonstrably pro-Monsanto slant. His comment regarding your Talk page here being a final safe haven is sadly true. May I suggest you look into the matter further? David's defense at WP:AE, noted at the top of this subsection, gives additional details, for starters. Jimmy, you have previously expressed concerns regarding undisclosed paid editing, and advocacy editing. I contend this thread outlines a fascinating case study, given the fact that Europe and other countries worldwide have enacted legislation regarding GMO's and glyphosate, the herbicide in "Roundup" weed killer that Monsanto makes billions of dollars from. The stakes in how that information is presented on Wikipedia are substantial. Thanks for any time you can spare for investigating. Jus da fax 12:10, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Jimmy, what I find interesting is the email from the IP (in the section above). Monsanto's PR campaign began in 2013, which is exactly when Wikipedia changed forever for me. As I warned you then, when it first became apparent to me, Wikipedia has a Monsanto problem. Ever since I edited my first Monsanto-related article, I received essentially the same treatment as David, and experienced my first of a never ending series of noticeboards, with people crying out for me to be banned from WP in the last ArbCom, even though Roger Davies weighed in saying there was no evidence provided for any of the claims made against me. The thing is, if editors who ask for a reasonable amount of neutral information from your biotech articles are harrassed and eventually silenced, it's your brand that is hurt when articles read like PR. Wikpedia should not be quoting GMO advocates in its "scientific consensus" sourcing, but many editors "voted" that Pamela Ronald would have top billing in this most controversial claim, and critics (or "anti-GMO" advocates), such as Sheldon Krimsky, would not. Krimsky found that no consensus on the safety of GMO food exists in the scientific community. petrarchan47 คุ ก 12:47, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Not shockingly most editors did not find a source from a guy with a philosophy degree, with zero scientific research background, who gave massive weight to Seralini, and had already written and anti-GMO book, all that compelling. Capeo (talk) 15:52, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

What was shocking is that editors decided to cite instead Pam Ronald, who is known is a GMO advocate by her own university, and who had to retract the two papers on which her research was based due to silly errors like mislablelling bacteria strains, leading her to start from "square one" in her lab, according to her own words. Now Wikipedia is using her as one of 3 sources claiming there is a scientific consensus, without giving attribution to her, using WP's voice, making the encyclopedia in essence a GMO advocate.

What is shocking is that editors here remain unaware that Seralini has been vindicated, in what editors referred to as a very high quality source, Domingo 2016. Notwithstanding, when long-term studies were conducted (i.e., Séralini et al., 2014b), the results were tremendously controversial. This paper was released the night the RfC closed. In it, Domingo also eviscerates the notion held by the US of substantial equivalence; it is not science-based and is used for nothing besides GMOs. This undercuts the second source, which is a 2003 statement saying natural foods are no different from genetically modified ones ("substantially equivalent" so no need for testing, questions, or worries).

The final source for a "scientific consensus" was picked over a more recent, heartier source which found that there is no consensus whatsoever: IAASTD, 2008 (under the auspices of five UN agencies, the World Bank and the W.H.O.). The IAASD, which was the group that concluded there was a consensus on global warming, concluded there was no consensus on GMO food safety. It is shocking that editors would choose an older source instead, and hard to believe this was in alignment with NPOV. I saw no evidence in the RfC that most editors really checked into sources, and indeed there were far too many to expect us to give them due diligence. I spent a good month looking into them, and am embarrassed for Wikipedia that it is now voicing pure GMO propaganda based on cherry picked, subpar sourcing.

Most shocking of all was that this RfC did not have consensus to move forward, as one can see by looking at the final comments before it opened; it took place on account of a few individuals, by ignoring the voices of others. I have never seen anything like it in my time here. Not very community-based in my opinoin. petrarchan47 คุ ก 23:11, 28 July 2016 (UTC) petrarchan47 คุ ก 03:28, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Unless and until we get some actual evidence to the contrary, I think it is highly unlikely that the issue here is paid advocacy - and as is well known, I'm quite the hawk against paid advocacy. What I think is far more likely is a bit of a crusader mentality against pseudoscience by people who have been working diligently to keep it out of Wikipedia for a long time. I'm not saying that is the case here, by the way - as I said in my first response, I don't currently have enough information to guess. But there are areas that I do know about where I know exactly how these debates tend to go, so let me talk about that for a moment. Here I will speak not just about the principles of Wikipedia but about my own personal beliefs, and I say that just to be transparent.

Some areas of knowledge attract crackpots and cranks, and the victims of crackpots or cranks who then become advocates of very bad ideas. One example is a particular pet peeve of mine: homeopathy. There is a long standing pattern to debates in this area. The pro-homeopathy people cherry pick results which purport to support homeopathy with very little concern for the basic principles of study quality, and (importantly) with very little concern for the basic principles of statistics. (The odds of getting 5 heads in a row is 1/32. Imagine a room with 500 people in it holding a contest to see who has the 'ability' to get 5 heads in a row. A few will very likely manage it. We can all agree that doesn't really mean anything. Similarly, do enough studies with a 5% or 1% margin of error, and eventually you'll get some false results. That's how it works.)

So you'll get a handful of studies pointing in one direction with the vast majority pointing in another direction. Why? Well, point to big pharma, point to what the tobacco companies did, point to all the many ways that science might be corrupted, etc. Make the argument that the coin flipping experiment proves that there is significant scientific uncertainty about whether people have the ability to flip 5 heads deliberately. Make the argument that homeopathy works or that at least should be treated as a plausible theory based on a handful of papers.

I think most people (except homeopathy advocates!) will be with me to this point.

When confronted with this people can quite naturally get fairly intolerant of people coming around again and again trying to push an agenda. This is true even when we stop and acknowledge that, for example, Monsanto is a big company that many people don't like, etc. The danger here is one that I think most people are aware of - the danger is that if you are used to batting away nonsense claims from POV pushers, then when you get into new territory with new information, there can be excessive conservatism.

Now please everyone keep in mind a couple of things - (1) "Jimbo said..." is seldom a useful argument. (2) I'm not taking sides as I know too little about GMOs to have an opinion worth listening to on the particulars of the topic. Both these things seem plausible to me: that there could be serious dangers (and amazing opportunities) in our newfound abilities to edit genes (CRISPR and similar), and that there are pseudoscientific luddites fear mongering. What is going on at Wikipedia in these areas I don't know.

What I am saying is that based on my long long experience, and unless and until specific evidence arises, we should not assume that any editors in this area are pro-Monsanto at all, much less paid advocates or tricked by paid advocates. What we should assume is that some of us may be crusading out of sincere beliefs and thus slightly less tolerant and reasonable in dialog than we might hope if we stepped back to reflect.

This is what our old saying of "Assume Good Faith" is about - and it works for both sides of a heated debate like this. Assume the other person isn't a Monsanto shill. Assume the other person isn't a pseudoscientific Luddite. Assume that we all want to improve the encyclopedia and avoid heated rhetoric that tends to cause people to dig in and not listen.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:02, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, do you think we should continue to extend good faith to the scientists quoted in [35] who promised Monsanto "a solid return on the investment" for undisclosed grants in support of their efforts? What do you think the chances are that the campaign to show the pro-Monsanto opinions of "third-party scientists" mentioned therein is not active on Wikipedia? EllenCT (talk) 18:45, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

The author of that statement Kevin Folta edited his own article. [36]. Interesting that admin. JzG said that is not a COI! Kingofaces43 suggested that crafty use of blogs might be helpful for parity. But for Séralini affair a very different approach is used [37][38] to handle criticism of a living person. --David Tornheim (talk) 20:56, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

It's not a COI. As I said, it's a real-world person trying to fix problems with their biography. Not everybody in the world is familiar with the arcana of Wikipedia policy and guidance, our obligation to people who have issues with articles is to try to help them and guide them to fix the problems within the rules, not scream COI and chase them away. IOf Dr. Folta had emailed OTRA he would have received a long description of how to go abouty fixing the problem without falling foul of the rules. I am intimately familiar with this because I actually wrote it.

The difference between Folta and Séralini is pretty obvious. Folta is doign good science and science communicaiton, and is bing harassed by the anti-GMO brigade for his pains, and Séralini is publishing junk science driven by an agenda. Any credible criticisms of either will of course be reflected in Wikipedia. The credible criticisms of Séralini include his use of science by press release, the terrible quality of his studies, and his concealed conflicts of interest. The credible criticisms of Folta include the fact that he naively took money from Monsanto and placed it in an arms-length communicatios fund, raising an obvious hostage to fortuine especially among the tiuny group of people who consider Monsanto to be the devil incarnate. The major point here is that Folta is being harassed with frovolous FOIA requests funded by the organic industry and their anti-GMO machine, and Séralini is part of that machine but was busted for doing crap science. Guess what? We have all of this in the sources n those articles already. Guy (Help!) 11:00, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

@JzG: from the point of view of someone who very firmly believes the GMO industry needs substantially more competition by, among other things, being based primarily on open public taxpayer-supported research than private patents, Folta's actions did nothing but enrich himself, Monsanto, and Monsanto's few competitors at others' expense. Both absolute pro- and anti-GMO positions are wrong. In Jimbo's terms, they ignore either the serious dangers by trying to censor any mentions of the risks of opportunities or vice-versa. That is a false dichotomy and a perfect example of the kind of controversy with which NPOV is designed to deal. However, in the face of coordinated efforts to try to show "third-party" scientists saying good things about GMOs when they are actually on the payroll of Monsanto, the result is the kind of censorship which occurred after the RFC in this case, and which did not result in the RFC's agreed-upon improvements to the articles. How do you distinguish what Folta did by trying to cover up his industry payment from companies hiring editors over the internet to try to avoid directly editing their own articles? EllenCT (talk) 15:46, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

I think the answer to this should be obvious. Folta is a living person who has been subject to harassment for his public support for science, coming here to correct a perceived problem with his article. As with every single biography subject we should treat him with respect while gently steering him towards the proper way to engage with the Wikipedia community to fix issues with his article. If he had gone out and hired people on the internet then that would indicate that he had good knowledge that self-editing is wrong, and we would be justified in being very firm in resisting this. The idea that one is not permitted, by virtue of being unpopular, to make one of the most basic newbie errors, seems to me to be flawed. We live in a world where scientists who work in areas fraught with political controversy, are subject to harassment. This has happened to several noted climate scientists and to vaccine advocates as well. In a climate where deliberate falsehoods and motivated distortions are a standard tactic, we have to be careful in evaluating any criticisms of such scientists. There is a crucial difference here with Séralini, for example, because criticisms of Séralini focus on his science and the ways he has tried to sidestep the normal process of scientific discourse. I find it regrettable that groups whose ideology is aligned with environmentalism, have taken to the tobacco industry playbook. It is disappointing to me that the organic movement, for example, is funding harassment of scientists. I find that uncomfortable because I have always seen these kinds of anti-science rhetoric as predominantly a libertarian tactic, but it seems that my ideological bias is not supported by the facts. .Guy (Help!) 11:46, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

It's more regrettable that GMO manufacturers, including Monsanto and Bayer, have taken to the tobacco industry playbook, but entirely predicatable. The reason we should follow WP:LEAD's advice about representing the controversy in Folta's article's introduction is because of the damage Monsanto did to the reputation of scientists when they decided to coordinate undisclosed paid work to try to manufacture the appearance of independent third party scientists saying good things about their products. The lack of disclosure makes those scientists seem like they are lying for pay, and that hurts the good scientists trying (but failing) to convince anti-vaxers and climate deniers of the error of their ways. The "organic movement" has a point about butterflies, bees, and fireflies, do they not? We shouldn't blame the messenger, however misguided, or further weaken freedom of information. We should make it clear to Monsanto that their behavior has shot them in their own foot. EllenCT (talk) 13:28, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree that allegations of POV should only be made with evidence. That's why I provided evidence of strong pro-industry POV editing above and here. Yet, rather than acknowledge this is a problem, Wikipedia shoots the messenger [39]. If I am silent, you will know why. --David Tornheim (talk) 20:56, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

If there is a problem with the way the science is conducted, like failing to declare a COI in scientific articles when that is required, then that will have to be dealt with by the relevant journals. If a dispute lingers on there, then there will be plenty of scientists who will write about that not just in newspapers but also in the peer reviewed journals themselves, see e.g. this article. Count Iblis (talk) 22:19, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, Re one of your comments above, "Assume that we all want to improve the encyclopedia and avoid heated rhetoric that tends to cause people to dig in and not listen."

For controversial topics, it seems that most editors dig in and don't listen with or without heated rhetoric, based on their beliefs outside of Wikipedia. It would be nice if someone who is trusted to be neutral and whose comments carry considerable weight, could come in to influence a discussion, instead of having the outcome of the discussion be determined by those with the same belief outside of Wikipedia that are the most determined and have the greatest numbers. --Bob K31416 (talk) 14:57, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

In the case of GMOs, a large RfC was recently run on the central disputed question (of food safety) and so a large number of fresh editors commented. However, as you see above when the outcome doesn't go the right way the cry from the "losing" side is "I saw no evidence in the RfC that most editors really checked into sources". For a number of topics on WP (guns, I/P, GMOs, etc.) as in real life there are some people who are ideologically totally committed to a position and no amount on reasonable argumentation will help. Alexbrn (talk) 15:06, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Appeal

FYI. I appealed the proposed decision of the case against me that was lodged for making this post on the grounds that my evidence of POV-editting (and other evidence) was completely ignored. Appeal here.

I also created a separate action here asking ArbCom:

Is it *always* wrong to identify an edit as pro-industry, even if it has a strong pro-industry point of view?
Is there a double-standard where pro-industry claims about edits are unacceptable, but pejorative labels (e.g. pseudo-science, incompetence) and associations (e.g. with anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, etc.) of editors who notice a pro-industry POV are totally okay?

I look forward to how ArbCom answers these and the other questions I posed. --David Tornheim (talk) 05:40, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

FYI. I reasserted my appeal and added evidence that the reason for increasing punishment was that I had asserted my right of appeal. [40]. --David Tornheim (talk) 00:02, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Towards resolution

Jimbo, this whole issue goes back to the questions of how much paid advocacy editing has occurred in the past, how much is likely actually occurring, the rate at which it is growing, the extent to which it inhibits community progress towards improvements, the extent to which it causes animosity and instruction creep, and the amount of money it would reasonably require if professionals were to supplement the efforts of volunteers to counter it. Is it reasonable to ask Foundation experts to study these specific questions as part of the endowment goal setting process? EllenCT (talk) 16:30, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Except it isn't. It goes back rather to the question of how much lassitude should be given to problem editors who accuse, insinuate or imply that their perceived "opponents" are industry shills in order to try and win content disputes. The time the community wastes on dealing with this actually detracts from the effort to solve real (rather than imaginary) paid editing problems. Alexbrn (talk) 16:43, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Do you think the community would be more productive if people were forbidden from explaining the reasons for their doubts of others? EllenCT (talk) 16:49, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

They shouldn't be expressing their "doubts of others" other than through the the processes outlined in WP:COI. Using the industry shill gambit to try and get the upper hand in content disputes is just not helpful and wastes the time of clueful folk who have to clear up the mess that inevitably ensues. This is why we have had such a problem with GMO-related articles. I'm not impressed with the limp administrator response. Alexbrn (talk) 16:58, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Regarding the "limp administrator response", remember that this topic is under discretionary sanctions so that it's harder for admins to address misbehavior. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 17:06, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:COI requires editors to consider whether "good-faith determinations of WP:DUCK" are warranted. Do you consider discussion of media reports showing actual conflicts of interest and attempts to hide industry payment and coordination any different in terms of disruptive accusations, insinuations, and implications, than discussion of PR departments hiring editors pseudonymously? EllenCT (talk) 17:10, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

It's quite simple: if there is a COI issue pursue it through WP:COIN and the associated procedures of WP:COI. Don't keep riffing on an unividenced "suspicion" to try and get the upper hand in content disputes in content-centric venues. Alexbrn (talk) 17:22, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Is that how you personally would treat an editor who repeatedly joins in every complaint against you, even on topics they have never edited on before? The only COI issue I've brought up more than once had to do with something that happened a long time ago. Until there is an explanation, I respectfully decline your request to stop referring to it as the reason that I am hounded by the editor in question. EllenCT (talk) 18:06, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

That's actually an example of factional behavior, which ArbCom has ruled on in previous cases, e.g. in the climate change case. What is undesirable is to have factions of editors who go about editing in tag teams and then start to follow each other to other pages. Count Iblis (talk) 17:13, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

In practice, as far as editing highly scrutinized articles is concerned , a COI is not going to cause problems requiring a COI investigation. If Donald Trump were to come here and edit his own article in a problematic way, we could just invoke the trouble he causes here and then take appropriate measures. So, referring to a COI would not be necessary. A COI is only a problem when editing in relative obscure corners of Wikipedia where the problem editor can get his her way pretty much unopposed. The loophole that would exist without the COI policy is that an editor can always behave nicely, he can let others revert his edits without protest, and yet cause problems for Wikipedia by editing in obscure corners of Wikipedia. Count Iblis (talk) 18:24, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Well, Jimmy? Is it worth having measurements to support round numbers? EllenCT (talk) 20:03, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I think that there is much room for criticism with Genetically modified food controversies. To start with, it is a WP:POV fork from Genetically modified food. The controversies should not even be in a different section, let alone a different article. I've folded controversies into the main text for other articles in the past - it really isn't as hard to do as people seem to think. You just have to look at the content with the frame of mind that for purposes of organization it doesn't matter what point of view it has, just what it is talking about.

The more specific problem is that the current controversies article starts up with and emphasizes things about advocacy groups and perception. But the article is about the issues themselves, not how they are argued. That means taking a step back and asking whether GM food can be made unsafe. As I've said here before, it certainly could be. The example I used was beans into which abrin might be inserted - a fine strategy against insects and fungi, to be sure! But also homicidal. That said, I chose the example because it was obvious, not because it was a good attack - a good attack would be one that is ignored until the health of millions of people is compromised. For example, if you loaded foods with trans fats you could kill millions of people (it's been done before...). Or to be more realistic, suppose you loaded canola oil with an altered balance of fats so that fish fed from it would have "healthier" omega three rich fish oil... and then there was question whether the fish oil was actually a healthy intervention in the diet or counterproductive. Well, that's not entirely unrealistic - though honestly I don't think the GMOs there would make a measurable difference, I can't be sure nothing would go wrong. The thing is though, articles about GMOs shouldn't be edited like we can be sure that nothing will go wrong, that we're never bringing home the Old Al Qaeda store brand of beans from the supermarket. What we know is that GMOs that have passed regulatory review and are widely regarded to be safe are ... widely regarded to be safe. But we should disclose up front the possibility for harmful GMOs, the types of risks people worry about, and reasonable estimations by people of all viewpoints as to how likely (or unlikely) those risks are thought to be.

I'm saying this here rather than at the talk page because these are general flaws in Wikipedia I'm seeing over and over. The deprecation of "controversy" sections and articles is being widely ignored, and people are abusing WP:FRINGE to mean that "one side is right and everyone else is fringe". If you know, as an ordinary citizen, that the use of something like GMOs is controversial, then whether they should be or not the two sides of the issue are both mainstream opinions and not fringe, and the debate should be covered earnestly. Wnt (talk) 15:41, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

If only more people understood NPOV. EllenCT (talk) 17:33, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Wnt, you did bring up these issues at the articles themselves, and you experienced what David and I have - no changes to the articles are allowed. There are perma-editors on site to "talk" with you until you give up and go away. I tried only to add the percentage of Americans who want GMOs labeled - and that was disallowed. To this day, Wikipedia does not tell its readers this information. I rest in the knowledge that the GMO suite is so well spin-doctored that it is obvious, and no sensible reader will consider Wikipedia a valid source for information on this topic. What does bother me is the rather Orwellian word at the top left of the articles: "encyclopedia". WP has looked the other way when editors try to sound the alarm. We are left with GMO articles void of substance and a damaged brand. The RfC on scientific consensus resulted in a PR statement that acknowledges no questions whatsoever. The GMO articles do not unpack the sources used in the consensus statement, and of the 83 editors who participated in the RfC, none besides the regulars showed any interest in helping to work on improving and expanding the articles. Those who do are one by one driven away through noticeboard bullshit. And no one stands up to this, because at the end of the day what matters more here is to stay on the right side of the right people, and keep from getting on the wrong side of, in this case, the powerful Project Medicine clique, because when you end up a noticeboard, which you will, the gang will show up, and you're toast. That's really more like an online social club than an encyclopedia. And only those who are heavily invested in the content of contentious articles will end up editing them. Some adults are dedicating their days to defending Atrazine and Glyphosate. The default position is that dedicated (fanatical) editors is a good thing, and questioning possible pro-industry POV was made illegal by the masterminds at ArbCom (though questioning possible anti-GMO POV is still legal and quite popular). Wikipedia finds itself with the most valuable property on the web for many topics. Yet it responds to the obvious problems associated with this fact like an autistic two year old. petrarchan47 คุ ก 04:08, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Why not create more RFCs on each proposed change? EllenCT (talk) 15:05, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

RFCs can work for key points, but are a poor way to build an article. There are several rfc's in the GM area from the last year where the discussion exceeded 10k words over the inclusion or move of a single sentence, and there are only so many uninvolved editors willing to participate in such tedium. I see now that one of those rfc's still has not been formally closed.Dialectric (talk) 15:19, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Copyright Office and libraries

Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion

The United States Copyright Office is reported to be preparing a proposal of changes to copyright law involving libraries.

The Copyright Office is trying to redefine libraries, but libraries don’t want it — Who is it for? (July 27, 2016)—Internet Archive Blogs

—Wavelength (talk) 00:49, 30 July 2016 (UTC) and 19:10, 30 July 2016 (UTC)
For convenience, here are some relevant links: American Library Association (ALA), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).—Wavelength (talk) 19:10, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Additional information can be found on these pages.

—Wavelength (talk) 23:44, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Why is the Internet Archive worried about this? Per your Federal Register link, this appears to be an attempt to give museums the same rights libraries have to make digital copies for research, archives, preservation, and security; add new categories of works to those exemptions; permit the reproduction and distribution of publicly available internet content for preservation and research purposes ("with an opt-out provision" -- is that it?); allow outsourcing of those copying activities; and remove the three copy restriction, presumably for institutions that want more robust backups. EllenCT (talk) 14:57, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

My first post has an external link to a page containing the following sentence: "Now the Copyright Office wants to completely overhaul Section 108 of the Copyright Act, the 'library exceptions,' in ways that could break the Wayback Machine and repeal fair use for libraries."

On that same page, the phrase "extended collective licensing" is linked to a page containing the following sentence: "We submitted comments in coordination with Creative Commons and Wikimedia, who will submit their own comments tomorrow." Probably someone representing the Wikimedia Foundation can provide more details.

In my third post, I linked to a page of the Federal Register, a page with a large amount of information which I have only skimmed. You can help me if you cite a specific section and quote a specific passage in that section.

—Wavelength (talk) 22:17, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

The Federal Register notice is nothing like repealing fair use for libraries; they want to add it for museums and strengthen it very considerably for libraries. Looking through [41] it seems that the Internet Archive is complaining mostly about orphan works, because the "extended collective licensing" proposal (to address the longstanding Google Books-related issue of serving copyrighted material publicly on the internet) requires collecting fees when there is nobody to distribute them to. I can see how that is a problem, but it's nothing like repealing fair use.

Why don't we propose that fees for orphan works be distributed to wikipedians in proportion to the number of bytes served per day that they each have added? EllenCT (talk) 00:51, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Topic banning mildly problematic editors

Latest comment: 8 years ago30 comments14 people in discussion

The AE request against David Tornheim has ended with a topic ban for him, David has decided to leave Wikipedia. Let's for argument's sake ignore any fairness issues here, ignore anything that has to do with the personal side and just consider the interest of Wikipedia. So, we only take into account that the GMO articles have to be of high quality, reflecting the sources appropriately and that this has be done without too much drag on the editors in having to deal with problem editors. From this perspective David seems to have been such a problem editor to some degree, and superficially it seems like a good thing that such editors stop editing there. But here we don't take into account that the pool of editors will to some degree reflect the opinions held by the public. If in the public opinion some POV is more strongly reflected than can be justified by the reliable sources, then we'll always end up having to deal with editors who'll argue points that lead to nowhere as far as we're concerned, and that can cause frustration in some cases this gives rise to less than ideal behavior. If we remove such editors then other editors with a similar POV who were just lurking because their POV was already been argued for, will take their place. The danger is then that these other editors will cause more trouble than the editors we removed.

Another problem I see is that without the "wrong POV" being argued for here (suppose that other editors with that POV do not actually step in, or they get blocked due not not being able to articulate their POV in an acceptable way), then the GMO articles lose a bit of their credibility. People who tend to believe in some of the conspiracy-like theories about GMO may believe that Wikipedia is part of the conspiracy by the way Wikipedia deals with people who argue for changes in the article. So, we lose credibility not because of the actual content of the articles but by making it more difficult for people to voice their criticisms on the talk pages. Count Iblis (talk) 22:06, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I (and many others) would take exception to the description of David Tornheim as 'mildly problematic'. 'Extremely problematic, time-consuming and pov-pushing' would be a more accurate description. At which point the heading 'Topic banning highly disruptive editors' would be less sympathetic wouldnt it... Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:32, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

About "problems" with David Tornheim. He only tried to insert different, critical but still scientific point of view. But is it fringe and really "different"?. Let's see, what we can find in the wide-cited National Academies report (2016).

" The overall results of short-term and long-term animal studies with rodents and other animals and other data on GE-food nutrient and secondary compound composition convinces many (for example, Bartholomaeus et al., 2013; Ricroch et al., 2013a,b; Van Eenennaam and Young, 2014) but not all involved researchers (for example, Dona and Arvanitoyannis, 2009; Domingo and Bordonaba, 2011; Hilbeck et al., 2015; also see DeFrancesco, 2013) that currently marketed GE foods are as safe as foods from conventionally bred crops."

Can we find in our Genetically modified organism article at least that not all experts are convinced? We can find that there is "scientific consensus" as hard as a brick. Note, how many examples of convinced reviews (3) and non-convinced (4). But may be all non-convinced are freaks? And articles are retracted? No, we don't know knothing about it. But their reviews still are not in use in the article,

But may be there are much more convinced independent scientists? Lets's look for independent reliable article, which tries to find whether majority of scientists are convinced now. And there is review by Domingo (2016) (2016) which in "Recent reviews in the scientific literature on GM plants" part investigates this case over the past five years, and mentions Bartholomaeus et al (convinced), Snell (convinced), Tufarelli et al. (convinced), Bawa and Anilakumar (non-convinced), Kramkowska et al. (non-convinced), Zdziarski et al (very non-convinced) and Domingo himself not very convinced. So who is "problematic editor"? Cathry (talk) 09:29, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

"He only tried to insert different, critical but still scientific point of view" ← not quite. How about: "He caused prolonged friction in the community by repeatedly accusing other editors of being dishonest industry shills". Alexbrn (talk) 09:47, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Уou can be sure that in my mind I called those editors much worse names due to their behavior. Cathry (talk) 10:02, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

How about bringing diffs once in a while, Alexbrn? You haven't been editing the GMO suite but weigh in with fact-free opinion as if it's helpful. It isn't. Where do you witness David calling another editor a "shill"? petrarchan47 คุ ก 03:31, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

His tactic of late is the same as yours, rather than say it directly, imply it in a way which leads to an unavoidable conclusion. Hence the "Monsanto must be pleased" post, or this most posting here[42] where it is claimed "industry" is "doing advertising" for free, here on Wikipedia. The implication is unavoidable, if industry is "doing" something here. Alexbrn (talk) 04:57, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Here's a key phrase to grasp: warriorism. Carrite (talk) 13:55, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, the community has restricted me from discussing economics, and just a few days ago arbcom has restricted me from raising conflict of interest issues. In the first case, the allegations on WP:ANI included the supposition that I had annoyed you, and in the second case, the fact that I supported David Tornheim when he raised the issue with you was cited as problematic at WP:AE. Do you have any comments about the use of people's communications with you to censor them? Would you prefer that I abide by, defy, or try to appeal the restrictions? EllenCT (talk) 17:28, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Could you point me in that direction of that discussion? I can say that your behavior here has been fine. The right word would not be annoyed, if I'm thinking of the incident(s) that whoever said that probably had in mind. I have been bemused at your persistence in hoping that I will speak out publicly on topics in economics.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:37, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

[43], [44], and Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#David Tornheim EllenCT (talk) 19:14, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo should obviously answer this, but I'll put in my 2 cents here. I've seen lots of bad behavior on this page and your, occasionally slightly annoying behavior (lots and lots of questions from way out in left field) doesn't rank anywhere near the top in the bad behavior department. You have clearly been discussing in good faith, have a pretty good opinion of yourself (like most of us here), know a lot about modern left-wing economics (though you're a bit uneven). Often a very good participant here, occasionally slightly annoying. Overall better than most.

I haven't seen either the ANI or ArbCom discussions, but as I understand it ArbCom has the final say on any disputes here (as they do on any enWiki page) but they properly leave it up to Jimmy to "police the page." IMHO you should abide by both restrictions for a short period of time, and when you are completely calm ask them to reconsider. Jimmy's talk page is generally seen as a place for open discussion, with only those who are obviously lacking in good faith removed sometimes. Just my opinion of course. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:13, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

EllenCT, as has already been pointed out, ArbCom did nothing to you. Your newest restriction was placed at AE by consensus of Admins not Arbs. Also, if you actually followed the COI procedure it wouldn't have happened. Instead you repeatedly, in multiple venues, inferred that users had a COI with zero evidence other than your opinion of their edits even after being told repeatedly that you were casting aspersions. Capeo (talk) 18:55, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

I disagree with "zero evidence" but I am not allowed to say why. EllenCT (talk) 20:37, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

You presented zero evidence of a COI as every admin who looked at your "evidence" concluded. You might be able to make the argument that you presented evidence of a POV editing but that's nothing close to COI editing and that's not how you worded things. You stepped into a contentious area that just had an ArbCom case, an RFC and a long history (that you seemed unaware of) like a bull in a china shop and started throwing around accusations. You were asked multiple times to stop by editors and admins alike and you ignored them. I find it hard to believe you are shocked you have been sanctioned. Capeo (talk) 20:51, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

I completely disagree with this inaccurate charactization, but again, I am not allowed to say anything of substance in my own defense, so why don't you just write an even longer paragraph smearing me even harder on the same topic? Am I allowed to ask one of the administrators who did take my accusations seriously to defend me in the ways that I can't? There would be less resistance to the facts that I am no longer allowed to state if they didn't impeach so strongly. EllenCT (talk) 21:43, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

That's the great thing about WP. Everyone can just check the history and decide on their own if my characterization is accurate. But to remove all interpretation let's simplify it to the base facts: you made improper COI allegations, you were told to stop by admins, editors even pointed you to the proper venue and process to present evidence, you persisted despite warnings, you were sanctioned. On top of that, as OiD and the admin who placed the sanction point out, the sanction is only to abide by existing policy. It also only applies in areas under discretion of the GMO ArbCom case. Though I expect if you went to a different subject area and behaved the same way the next sanction would be worse. You've received a community sanction and an AE sanction in quick order. Perhaps, rather than lash out and claim everyone is misinterpreting or oppressing you, the better course would be to examine your interactions with editors and alter how you deal with people around here. Perhaps, I don't know, stop being so confrontational about things no matter how much you personally believe them. Capeo (talk) 22:06, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Whats REALLY hilarious is that it is not even a real sanction! Its just an instruction to abide by WP:NPA by not making allegations with zero credible evidence - something that every editor should be doing already. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:22, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

I disagree with this characterization, too, but at least in this case I am allowed to say that you are allowed to raise issues about my motivations for including questionable material, but I am not allowed to raise issues about you doing the same thing. EllenCT (talk) 21:52, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

And there we have it. The fundamental misunderstanding of policy at the heart of this. Only in Death is NOT allowed to question your motivations nor are you allowed to do the same to him. Particularly not in regards to off-wiki, private influences you believe are motivating an edit. People are blocked for such aspersions regularly. You question the edit not the editor. This is basic stuff. If you seriously suspect a COI is in play there is already a process for that. That process isn't throwing around public accusations. Capeo (talk) 22:23, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

The COI process is explicitly a formal way to question motivations of editors, and I am no longer allowed to use it. EllenCT (talk) 01:39, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Just an short observation: When checking David's talk page, my brain registered the heading "Notice that you are now subject to an arbitrary enforcement sanction". I don't think this is a good sign. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:44, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

I find it hard to regret decisions, by whomever made, to topic ban editors who then leave Wikipedia. It demonstrates that they were unable to take (ideally constructive) feedback, and even when given free rein to write elsewhere on Wikipedia, chose to take their ball and go home instead. Jclemens (talk) 21:31, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

I completely agree with this sentiment. It is a nearly perfect indicator that a departing editor is a POV-pusher who is here for the wrong reasons. Now let's get busy writing and maintaining an encyclopedia, shall we? Carrite (talk) 22:55, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

^Some serious hypocrisy here. Rather than assume good faith we have these derogatory posts, that could easily be classified under "casting aspersions" that I have been accused of. I am called a POV pusher without evidence. Yet, when I *provide strong evidence* of industry POV, that is not acceptable, I need to be silenced and punished for shedding light on the problem. People are even lying and saying I called editors shills and undisclosed COI or paid-editors. I never, ever did. Prove it. I know better. Instead I followed the rules and provided *evidence* of POV edits. But instead of looking at the evidence, people are just ignoring the evidence and calling it "casting aspersions" to show POV edits.

I had a lot of faith in Wikipedia when I started a number of years ago, which used to be far more balanced than it is now. The harsh and punitive way I have been treated for raising legitimate concerns is so outrageous, I see no reason to be part of this project. I can only imagine similar treatment for raising pro-industry concerns on any other article. To continue editing as if such treatment is acceptable would only condone it.

Let's just be clear, Wikipedia is become like all the other places where industry can do their advertising, but here FOR FREE. I am very saddened by what has happened to Wikipedia. --David Tornheim (talk) 00:22, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

See: "#WP has solutions for all business needs" but not "EOQ equation". -Wikid77 (talk) 17:35, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

As someone who has tried to prioritize edits by how much they improve the encyclopedia by serving the readership, and is no longer able to do so, I completely disagree with the sentiment, and wonder if I should try a clean start. EllenCT (talk) 01:39, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Turning over a new leaf sounds like an excellent idea, but editors subject to a sanction cannot make a WP:CLEANSTART. The idea that you need to be able to engage in univendenced accusations of COI to "improve the encyclopedia" is exactly what you need to drop. Alexbrn (talk) 05:21, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

As Capeo says, people can check the history decide for themselves whether the accusations were "univendenced." Why do you use the plural "accusations" -- it's not like anyone has ever complained about more than one such instance, is it? The fact that you would use scare quotes around the only reason we are supposed to be here speaks volumes. EllenCT (talk) 11:58, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

More aggressive WP:ABF - quotation marks can (as here) be used for quoting things you know: I was quoting your words. Alexbrn (talk) 12:04, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

A cupcake for you!

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

For being so amazing and founding Wikipedia ZaYen (talk) 19:20, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Racist title or not?

Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, I have 2 questions bold here :
There is an article with this title "Invasion to Iran by Arabs" (title1) I can explain that title more accurately as "Invasion to Iran by Arab people". Do you assume this as a racist title? This title is for the Farsi version of the article "Muslim conquest of Persia" (title2) which we had to recommend a similar title "Conquest of Persia by Muslims" because the title2 is not so clear when it is translated to Farsi however finally we could find a clear exactly equal title for it same as English (Even Iranicaonline sources are English). I was saying that Arab Conquest means Arabic Conquest such as Islamic Conquest which is Muslim Conquest not ~~Arab invasion~~.

But the problem is when I compared the :

"Invasion to Iran by Arabs" to "Invasion to Iran by Iraqis"
and "Arab Invasion of Iran" to "Iraq Invasion of Iran" similar to "Arabic Invasion of Iran"
and "Rashidun Invasion of Iran" to "Ba'ath Invasion of Iran"

I just said "Muslim conquest of Persia" is a better and impartial title. Then on the opposite side the user Kouhi accused me to WP:NPA (I never accused him to be a racist but he claims this) and noted me in the WikiFa admin noticeboard and complained there AND I'M BANNED NOW by an inactive admin User:Sahehco immediately without any warning. It is wonderful.

Other users were agree with me even Sa.Vakilian (previously he had contrary viewpoint to me about the Criticism of Quran but this time he is agree with me). Previously you know me about the criticism of the Quran (in that subject after many discussions finally I could be successful).

When I pinged other active admin in my discussion to take a third opinion and no answer presented and next I pinged one another active admin then Sahehco accused me to WP:CANVASS and warned me to avoid pinging other admins. (HURRAY he can warn not only ban)

Do you have similar situation in Wiki En and in Wikimedia?

If a translator is needed this is @Darafsh: an admin.

Recently I'm not so active in Wiki and no reaction I ask about this account but I just want to make you aware of the hard situation we have in other language Wikis. From one side I see Muslim users attach partiality template to the articles like the Criticism of Quran having many different impartial sources and you can't remove the template but many articles like the Quran or Muhammad articles themselves with a lot of religious partial claims and sources(sometimes they have no historical source) are Featured and Good articles and from the other side we have articles like the Invasion to Iran by Arabs and the are partial supernationalists like this who only needs to make his lips wet to make other wiki users banned (previously I hadn't use words like this supernationalist but now that I see this situation I use it). Sometimes impartiality itself is a fault and you will be partial because you said this title is a racist title.

HAND --IranianNationalist (talk) 14:15, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I highly doubt Mr. Jimmy Wales is interested in this sort of discussion. Just put it in the talk page of the article and let the editors hash it out in the talk page. Also read Mr.Wales user page which states "If you have a complaint, it's best to start with the help desk. Ask a short, friendly question, and fellow Wikipedians will be happy to help. Contacting me directly with a complaint should be reserved for after you have exhausted all other possible remedies.". Alexis Ivanov (talk) 06:50, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

[2004-2006-1] ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/28/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf

[2] ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikimedia_2007_fs.pdf

[3] ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/4c/Wikimedia_20072008_fs.pdf

[4] ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/4f/FINAL_08_09From_KPMG.pdf

[5] ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/cc/FINAL_09_10From_KPMG.pdf

[6] ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/ac/FINAL_10_11From_KPMG.pdf

[7] ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL_11_12From_KPMG.pdf

[8] ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/6e/FINAL_12_13From_KPMG.pdf

[2014-15-9] ttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/0b/Audit_Report_-_FY_14-15_-_Final.PDF

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 209

Admins couldn't stop partial vandalism in Wiki Fa

Conclusion

Animal self-photographs

Remember Wikimania 2016 - June 22-28

Prior Wikimania 2015 videos

Fair use images

GMO Myths and Truths

Article about TPO

russia uses this site for anti ukranian propaganda

Related page links

Grants for projects related to harassment?

Day of protest against law enforcement undisclosed remote searches

Problem not Jimbo but RfAs blocked good admins

Admin actions at Islamic calendar

If Wikipedia forked to try new policies

Editing News #2—2016

Recent changes

Future changes

Let's work together

Article about TPO

Censored from Wikipedia

Philosophical question; how was Italy?

The Signpost: 04 July 2016

Request for resources to search recent changes and for a unified ranked backlog

To expand WikiBlame tool for recent changes

Restore user/talk pages

Thoughts about Russian and Ukrainian

Template:Globalize for worldwide coverage

Other source bias beyond national news

Perspective bias and Clinton emails

Terminology bias as cables or emails

Moderator proposal

Hi

A kitten for you!

Gerald Walpin undeleted after killed by SUV

Pages about concrete barriers and barricades

A few problems with Wikipedia

Need WMF voter judgment tools

Need edit-limit tools

Why U.S. police kill more whites than others

Articles on controversial topics

The Signpost: 21 July 2016

Ban question

Electronic surveillance in Russia

Still unanswered FRS question

Endowment fundraising brainstorming

The elephant in the room

Endowment return and investment asset allocation questions

Addressing the philanthropically inclined wealthy in a systematic way

Work for you

Wikimail doesn't work

Interesting copyfraud lawsuit

Monsanto must be pleased

Retaliatory filing for shedding light on this issue

Appeal

Towards resolution

Copyright Office and libraries

Topic banning mildly problematic editors

A cupcake for you!

Racist title or not?