Slashdot Mirror
Secret Mailing List Rocks Wikipedia
privatemusings writes "Wikipedians are up in arms at the revelations that respected administrators have been discussing blocking and banning editors on a secret mailing list. The tensions have spilled over throughout the 'encyclopedia anyone can edit' and news agencies are sniffing around. The Register has this fantastic writeup — read it here first." The article says that some Wikipedians believe Jimbo Wales has lost face by supporting the in-crowd of administrators and rebuking the whistle blower who leaked the existence of the secret mailing list.
This is the evidence that Durova, self-proclaimed "complex investigations specialist" used to justify banning one of Wikipedia's finest contributors. http://www.wikitruth.info/index.php?title=Durova's_Sekret_Evidence
Here she is on Slashdot. In what appears to be an amazing coincidence, the person she is defending here is the same person who happens to run the mailing list in question.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=256781&cid=20020479
I'd do a mass sign-up of the secret list:
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wpcyberstalking
(as posted in another post, but up here, it'll get more coverage... here goes my karma, watch it slide!)
And your changes are nullified by those same 8'th graders.
There is a clique in Wikipedia that has tried to censor links to sites they think are "evil". Some people don't like this.
--Dan
Web Tips
May the Maths Be with you!
No, those are theories. These are very different to "opinions". And they are not equal - neither holds in all cases, but some hold in more than others, and those are objectively better.
Like I said: I can have the opinion that jumping out from a fifth-story window, I will be able to fly. You will be hard pressed to explain why this is equally as valid as Newton's laws of gravity.
It's funny this article came up today. I've been thinking about how "exclusive" Wikipedia's editing and leadership ever since yesterday, when a page I contributed to (and therefore was watching), got an edit with the following comment: "(RV: per WP:V and WP:RS)". Now, if you're trying to create a system in which people are "free" to edit and feel comfortable doing so, this sort of nonsense has to stop. It doesn't take THAT long to type in English in the comments of the English Wikipedia.
It seems like Wikipedia editors are creating their own little cabal of procedures, language, and rules that if you don't spend all day tracking you can't hope to decode. Unless they do something to make people feel more welcome and understand what's going on a little better, they might as well close Wikipedia editing up and go to a Brittanica paradigm.
E pluribus unum
The only things a good scientist will tell you are incontrovertible are physical observables. Everything else is always subject to question. With this in mind theories are never truly proven though they can be summarily disproved. Further, according to scientific method, the only theories that are truly useful are ones that make testable predictions about what we will observe. The rest are just philosophical discussions.
Unfortunately politics often enters into the discussion of theories. Those politics tend to dismiss any theory which is not popular or 'mainstream' or which may be considered too radical. This happens most often in the general public but even otherwise respectable scientists can fall prey to the censorship because they find the implications of a theory to be distasteful.
A patent clerk once proposed a radical theory that time and space itself were malleable. If scientists had dismissed his ideas as being too fringe to have representation our textbooks would still be discussing the luminescent aether.
"The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic..." - Eric Hoffer
the editorial staff of any large collaboration will suffer the same trevails and useless insider versus outsider drama and cliques and power plays
but of course, the haters will come out of the woodwork trumpeting this scandal as a reason why wikipedia is wrong
this does in fact besmirch wikipedia in general, but it doesn't count as a reason to find wikipedia inferior in quality, as it is a problem that all encyclopedias or any publication with large editorial staff and the drama that comes with
so holding this scandal against wikipedia uniquely is not valid
"context"
it's a valuable concept
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Try editing anything significant on Wikipedia. It's nearly impossible to get something to stick if you haven't read all the rules and policy they've implemented. And it's not like it's just a list of guidelines or something, it's article after article (and these are MASSIVE articles) that people are supposed to read before they edit anything. It's completely ridiculous.
Also, people on Wikipedia are really caught up in the idea of deleting instead of fixing. If something isn't formatted correctly, they don't fix it, they nominate it for deletion. So then the original editor has to go spend time convincing people his article is worthy of keeping before he can do anything to it. And in the meantime the article has a giant MARKED FOR DELETION tag that gives Wikipedia oh-so-much credibility.
I started the Antec page on Wikipedia. I haven't worked on it much, but literally moments after I started it some ill-informed deletion monger marked it for speedy deletion (this is the kind of deletion that people use when they think a page has no place on Wikipedia and doesn't need much debate) because Antec was not notable enough. Not because he actually thought a major computer hardware manufacturer wasn't important for an encyclopedia that includes a massive page on Jedi fighting styles, but because he hadn't ever heard of Antec, and couldn't be bothered to search around for anything. So he decided to delete it. It didn't get deleted, mind you, but it's a pain in the ass to convince people not to, because apparently the fact that there are pages for every other smaller case manufacturer isn't not justification for having a page on Wikipedia (that is an official Wikipedia policy, and is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard; if there are pages for every company LESS notable than Antec, then that is damn good justification for Antec having a page also).