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Latest Wikipedia Uproar Over 'Superprotection'
metasonix writes: As if the problems brought up during the recent 2014 Wikimania conference weren't enough, now Wikipedia is having an outright battle between its editor and administrator communities, especially on the German-language Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, currently flush with cash from its donors, keeps trying to force flawed new software systems onto the editor community, who has repeatedly responded by disabling the software. This time, however, Foundation Deputy Director Erik Moeller had the bright idea to create a new level of page protection to prevent the new software from being disabled. "Superprotection" has resulted in an outright revolt on the German Wikipedia. There has been subsequent coverage in the German press, and people have issued demands that Moeller, one of Wikipedia's oldest insiders, be removed from his job. One English Wikipedia insider started a change.org petition demanding the removal of superprotection."
bigger is better and all that.
> Superprotection mandate
Call it Ex Cathedra and get it over with.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's almost like the idea of letting everyone edit something actually does in fact turn into a crooked, biased shitstorm and wikipedia was wrong and everyone else in the world was right.
Let's not get the Germans angry.
We know how well that worked out last time.
The censors don't like being censored, eh? I'll have to cry myself to sleep tonight, weeping over their plight.
A petition with 13 signatures is not worth mentioning. Any idiot can set one up.
Expect the censors and revisionist to continue controlling the narrative. They hate factual information and want to see if all controlled to their narrative or destroyed.
Slashdot [Superprotection needed].
Silence is a state of mime.
The summary doesn't describe the "flawed system" or what superprotection means. Here it is from the change petition
The "superprotect" page status introduced to keep the Media Viewer enabled is even more extreme: for the first time, a software feature has been designed to take the ability to edit pages away from Wikimedia project communities, giving that ability exclusively to unelected Wikimedia staff members.
Good God, Wikipedia used to be something worthwhile to contribute to. But those days are long, long gone.
We've seen this happen to a lot of these open community-based projects or websites lately. All it takes is a few bad apples, and the entire project or site can be derailed and destroyed by their stupid ideas, petty squabbling and raging hard-ons for authoritarianism.
Like Wikipedia, Hacker News and Stack Overflow are particularly bad for this, and reddit isn't far behind them. Any sort of original thought is thoroughly crushed at those sites. If you dare question the established religiously-held beliefs or order of things at those sites, at best you'll be shunned, but most likely you'll be censored by way of downmodding and banning.
I'll give Slashdot some credit, it has actually managed to avoid crap like that comparatively well. Maybe it's the liberal use of anonymous posting here, or the more limited moderation system. Regardless, Slashdot is a clean and friendly place to have open discussion, at least compared to Hacker News, reddit, Wikipedia and Stack Overflow.
I stopped following what goes on with wikipedia and editing a few years ago. I was not as much annoyed that my edits would not survive long, it just started feeling a useless endeavor when I saw so many topics I would search to read about were deleted. I mean, if I and a few others search for something without having any connection to it, it is "notable" by definition isn't it? Otherwise I can just delete "Nigeria". Sure, a lot of people would like to look it up, but I, as a wikipedia editor and supreme being, think that country is not notable.
The Wikimedia Foundation, currently flush with cash from its donors, keeps trying to force flawed new software systems onto the editor community, who has repeatedly responded by disabling the software.
Dice. Beta. Enough said.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
FTFA: a little pain was just part of the “Agile” way of doing things
Agile is now infecting the open-source world? Fuck it, I'm out. It's bad enough having to put up with all the "agile" bullshit at work, from their utterly pointless daily stand-up meetings to their fucking little cards on the wall everywhere (managers of the world: WE USE ELECTRONIC TRACKING SYSTEMS NOW). Add to that the unbearable Friday "retrospective" meetings (yeah, the last fucking thing I want to do on a Friday is sit in another pointless meeting talking about our problems) and then the Monday three hour meetings where we waste time voting on how long it should take other people to do their job instead of just fucking doing it.
Agile has killed any enjoyment there was in the IT field. If people are trying to pollute the open-source world with it, they can fuck off.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
Join the Simple English Wikipedia community. We are fun. We don't have the doodie heads like the other Wikipedia communities. We don't have big words or hard sentences. We are all one big happy potato.
Yay, Simple English!
So I recently heard about a programming language called Nimrod. It's relatively new, but it's very capable and even the venerable Dr. Dobb's Journal featured it recently.
I wanted to get a broader overview of it, so I thought I'd check out Wikipedia's article about it. After all, it's a language I'd managed to hear about, and I don't keep up to date with developments in the field very much these days. It was even featured by a widely read publication. So that should make it notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, right? Nope.
I quickly found out that the notability idiots over at Wikipedia have repeatedly chosen to target it for elimination.
I tried reading some of their justification for deleting the article, but it made absolutely no sense. It's a perfectly good topic to cover, and clearly I and others want to read about it! Yet these totalitarian shitbags feel the need to censor, censor, censor and then censor some more.
The harm these monsters do by getting rid of useful articles far, far outweighs any harm that could ever be done by having allegedly "non-notable" articles exist uncensored. I'd totally rather than the article about Nimrod stay, and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off and visit some other web site.
ayy lmao
Haven't noticed it on SO proper. If you mean meta, well yeah. That's what meta is all about. Protecting the party line.
I know all of those words but still have no idea WTF the summary is talking about. Does this boil down to "Wikipedia teens with infinite free time are trying to build fiefdoms", which is the usual explanation for Wikidrama?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I really don't get the uproar. The crux of the issue seems to be that an update to the software running all the various instances of Wikipedia enabled a new slideshow viewer by default, and removed the ability for site admins to disable it by default (but users still can individually choose their preference).
Tempest in a teapot?
At least they are objective about destroying information. The mergists simply want to unify all of Wikipedia into a single article that everybody can simultaneously edit and admins can edit protect to admin-only.
Expect the deletionists to continue destroying information. They hate information and want to see it all destroyed.
Oh grow the fuck up Lois Lerner.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I know change.org petitions are mostly worthless from the point of view of getting a meaningful response back from the government, but if you EVER want the government to take them seriously, quit using it for shit like this.
I'd have more respect for a 1st-grader using it to get his school to serve chocolate milk, than I do for this idiot wikipedia editor who thinks it's the proper venue for something like this.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hard drives just quit. Anyone that says they don't doesn't have enough experience with them to know better. That's why you have backups. If hard drives didn't just quit, you wouldn't need them.
I'd totally rather than the article about Nimrod stay, and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off and visit some other web site.
I can't tell if the people who modded you insightful were being sarcastic... :)
Okay, joke aside... Statements like everybody else can just **** of because something you wanted to read about was marked for deletion. Is part of the problem.
Wikipedia editors and can't get every decision right... If nimrod (which btw, think I've heard about before) continues it's growth, then I'm sure it'll eventually be featured on wikipedia.
Note, I didn't say the current decision is right, but give them a break. But give it time, and bring up again (don't be an edit warrior)
Also drop the " censor, censor, censor" rhetoric... You are free to publish this anywhere else. Why don't you just make a site with rejected wikipedia articles, where people can work on them till wikipedia is ready to accept them.
I just don't understand why is it so stinking hard to tell "or god forbid ask" your users you have a new feature and to give it a try instead they force feed it down peoples throats. Just like the Beta here. IMO they were copying what other sites are doing which IMO makes them all ugly over sized images and too many images. Why not ask? geeze Just my 2 cents
Jack of all trades,master of none
this sort of thing is like bitching to the manager of a Walmart about how the McDonalds in another town screwed up your order, and you expect him to fix it..
change.gov and change.org are two completely different sites. The .gov site is the official petition website for the US government. The .org site is like wordpress for petitions. Anyone can go an create a petition for any reason, and it has about as much weight as a wordpress blog does, which is to say most are completely meaningless, but on occasion once actually gets some momentum, and it is that momentum (not the petition itself) that matters.
So do so-called 'progressive's. The real delineation is one of ideological conflict with reality. The more the defended ideology conflicts, the more often its defenders justify censorship to keep it afloat. The last 100 years of politics should've taught us all this.
What's become clear here (see also following section) is that the Wikimedia Foundation is afraid it will lose readers to sites like WikiWand that offer Wikipedia content as a pure consumable with a much more aesthetically pleasing interface. The moment Wikipedia page views go down, the Alexa rank will go down and donations will go down, as fewer people will see the fundraising banners. The problem is that the Foundation's own efforts to create a more pleasing interface have been unsuccessful; they have the money, but simply seem to lack the talent and experience. Partly they are also hampered by the underlying coding chaos of Wikipedia – underneath the Wikipedia text, there are thousands of ad-hoc templates created in a very inconsistent manner by volunteers over the years. This is the main reason the VisualEditor failed.
This story was also covered by The Register.
I thought this article was about wearing three condoms for superprotection. My mistake.
Since no one answered this question, I did a simple google search which threw up these results :-
Nimrod: A New Systems Programming Language
Category:Nimrod
Consider the Nimrod Programming Language
What I like about the Nimrod programming language
Araq/Nimrod
Nimrod: A New Approach to Metaprogramming
Nimrod: A new statically typed, compiled programming language which supports metaprogramming
I am just a layman when it comes to Wikipedia editing, but it looks pretty substantial to me. It would appear that the complaint that notability requirements are too strict has just cause.
Wiktionary is just as bad. They have a whole category devoted to words that exist but seemingly don't. If you want to put the kangamangus on those dotnoses, ozay; head to urban dictionary instead.
I'll give Slashdot some credit, it has actually managed to avoid crap like that comparatively well. Maybe it's the liberal use of anonymous posting here, or the more limited moderation system. Regardless, Slashdot is a clean and friendly place to have open discussion, at least compared to Hacker News, reddit, Wikipedia and Stack Overflow.
I find this comment amusing, since every time I mention Microsoft in any form of positive light I'm downmodded. I mentioned the MS Surface the other day and commented that it was proving a very nice tool for developing online learning materials. Downmodded instantly as "Troll"
Slashdot has serious groupthink issues and always has.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Yes. Because everyone in the same department's hard drives quit ALL AT ONCE!
Yep!
Dream on.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There are too many people here not understanding what is happening here.
What is happening, is that a large community has done a lot of great work creating Wikipedia. The project has needed and attracted a lot of money, which caused an administrative office to be created. This office is now trying to make itself more important, and tries to lead the project into a 'grand future'.
The truth is, they may be well-intentioned, but they are terribly misguided, and incompetent. There are no capable leaders, and.or managers there, they seem to have no understanding of what the project is about, and have spent a lot of money on software projects that failed. They are misguided in that they think they should steer the project, while in fact they should be serving the community.
In short, they are incompetent, and should be replaced. If they aren't, they will kill Wikipedia.
A bunch of favorite playing fagots run that site. Hopefully it dies a quick death.
never ever give money to wikipedia
If you didn't provide any specific background information as to *why* it was good for developing online learning, it's no wonder you got a troll tag. Contextuality kicked in and your comment was seen as an attempt to start big flames.
Merges are a pain when you understand more than one langage since mediawiki thinks every article can have only one translation.
Imagine some article name X in langage A is redirected to Y, while langage B has X and Y as separate articles. From A, where the portion about X is most likely a stub since it was merged, you'll have a hard time accessing B.X without searching B.wikipedia.org for it yourself. From B.X, the redirection to A.Y makes finding the relevant information a pain, since it is included in a context that skew the point of view around how X is usefull for Y.
If you're trying to prove a point about Wikipedia's bullshit politics, spazzing out about how they keep removing your batshit insane conspiracy theories that defy science, logic and reality is not the way to demonstrate that.
greenwow, you are being stupid again. Crawl back into your Mom's basement you moron.
Project management method "X" methods work great, if you have a good technical project lead and a good team; otherwise it sucks.
You can replace "X" with Agile/Scrum, or you can replace it with any other damned thing - it doesn't matter. A good team with a good project manager will get good results. A bad team, or a teach with a lousy PM, will not. The current love affair with Scrum is driven by PHBs looking for a magic way to get good results out of bad teams. It's really that simple.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Hell if even these are in ASCII why would we ever want Unicode on Slashdot?
petition the government to "help" affect changes as a non-government website....
lol.
idiots
Yeah, a while back someone mentioned Yahoo, and I said that although I never used any of their other services, I liked their webmail client better than gmail. It was modded troll.
For what it's worth, I think the surface tablet is the better products MS has put out in many years, although I dislike Windows 8.
the person from a century ago might not be as notable to people today
That's not how it works. Something becomes notable when unaffiliated reliable sources have covered it. This notability, if established, does not decrease over time. Such a decrease would require the existing reliable sources to stop existing. The reason Wikipedia has a notability requirement in the first place is that an article about a non-notable subject has no reliable sources that it can cite about anything.
Try these steps. First, find sources for a new article on the Internet. There may already be a list of such sources in the entry on the requested articles page. Second, write a new article that site's feeds reliable sources. Third, ask for a history-only undeletion of the previous article "behind" the current one. Finally, integrate the information that was in the last revision of the deleted article.
the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. As long as they kiss the ring and swear fealty to WikiMedia.
Honestly, is anyone surprised? I guess the only wrinkle I can see is the division in the ranks of the fascist editor cabal.
Next up, a wikipedia Night of the Long Knives, where dissident editors are "defensively removed" to prevent their "planned putsch."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
... so Agile can fuck off, yeah?
It's bad enough having to put up with all the "agile" bullshit at work, from their utterly pointless daily stand-up meetings to their fucking little cards on the wall everywhere (managers of the world: WE USE ELECTRONIC TRACKING SYSTEMS NOW). Add to that the unbearable Friday "retrospective" meetings (yeah, the last fucking thing I want to do on a Friday is sit in another pointless meeting talking about our problems) and then the Monday three hour meetings where we waste time voting on how long it should take other people to do their job instead of just fucking doing it.
I suppose you're talking about Scrum. As a Scrum Master, maybe I should give some hints.
Let me fill you in on some details:
1.) You're supposed to stand at dailies, so you are eager to finish them fast and so you're quick to move your cards on the board. That's why Scrums are timeboxed (with me it's 15mins max) and limitied to what you can discuss about. If the team doens't get through, no matter. Scrums over. Move your remaining cards and get coding. Be more brief tomorrow. It's that simple.
2.) After trying various electronic tracking systems we moved to cards on a wall. The crew gets away from their PCs and are forced to communicate with each other. And even the secretary and the sales team can use a pinboard without futher explaination, and when they join a Scrum they don't feel like standing in a room full of antisocial douchebags just typing away at their desks. Plus, when you are using it, everyone is watching, which helps you stick to the method. That's why I advocate pinboards for scrum tasking ever since. For huge amount of tasks managed in backlog software, printing the cards might be an option - we did that once - but a Pinboard it should be. People get their coffee or water and meet at the pinboard, not at the watercooler or the kitchen. Does wonders to project awareness and awareness of what others are doing.
3.) Backlog assembly meeting (BAM) - apparently your Monday 3 hour thing (makes me sleepy just thinking of it) - should be done by those who need to do it you don't need the entire team for BAM, especially if 300 tasks need to be judged. You do need the team for assigning complexitiy points, but that can be done if there's something the BAM team has no clue of. BAM task-complexity is temporary anyway, as is the setup of the team. If there's only editing and no programming to be done for the next 4 weeks, it's beyond pointless having a progger do BAM - unless you've got nobody else to do it and the programmer has some spare time. And only in Sprint Planning is complexity set in stone. And Sprint Planning / Sprint Assembly is a different meeting, also timeboxed (1 hour with me, Fridays (I've got weekly sprints)).
Complexity assignment should be done with planning poker, and shouldn't cover microtasking. It should only cover sellable features and one tasklayer below that. Also, BAMs should take place when you need them, not on a fixed date. That's a recipe for timewasting. That aside, planning poker is fun and lets you walk through droves of tasks in no time. You get to judge effort and requirements and *everybody* on the team has an impression of what's coming up in the next few weeks. That is *very* important. ... This should happen in sprint planning the latest. Very often people of a certain field notice things that have been forgotten by management, long before the task is even due. Also very helpful and a big plus of a formalised method such as scrum.
4.) Yes, Scrum has an overhead, just like any other method. Quit whining. The job of Scrum is to keep the overhead to an *absolute* minimum while keeping everything else tightly organised and flexible on a sprint to sprint basis at the same time. If that doesn't happen, you or your Scrum Master is doing it wrong.
5.) Scrum gives your Scrum Master the power to tell you boss "Leave my guy alone, we're full up with tasks, unless you want me to bust this sprint and push every
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
HA. i had seen the new javascripty media viewer and was annoyed, but did not research it.
luckily, you can disable it. if you are logged in, go to your preferences, appearance tab and unmark "Enable Media Viewer".
yay :)
Rich
Notability on Wikipedia requires a non-dedicated source to notice it.
Where does that appear in policy? All I see is "independent of the subject". In your example, so long as Fountain Pen has developed a reputation for fact-checking in the field of fountain pens, and Fountain Pen's publisher isn't owned by the maker of Nemosine's pens, this counts as an independent reliable source. Two more of those and you have notability.
it's a fountain pen magazine; it's dedicated to the topic, thus not notable.
I haven't seen that. Articles in scholarly journals and in other specialist periodicals get cited all the time.
If you can find two other authoritative sources that have reviewed it, then go ahead and write the article citing these sources. Are these sources pointed out by Camael any good?
Back in the days when Slashdot was actually somewhat relevant, the bias was well known and the source of much amusement at other sites. Now it's just sad.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The problem is that Wikipedia editors require "published" references, which typically means "published on paper"
What Wikipedia guideline page says that? The page I see says "The term published is most commonly associated with text materials, either in traditional printed format or online."
The subject of [[Nemosine]] is Nemosine pens, not fountain pens in general. The author of a review of Nemosine pens in Fountain Pen isn't independent of fountain pens in general but is independent of Nemosine pens.
This is called poisoning the well.
Notability is important for preventing a potentially slippery slope towards Wikipedia being expected to have an article on every shop, every street, every apartment complex, every popular teacher, and every creative work ever appreciated by more than 10 people.
What is wrong with that?
Sources. There are no secondary, independent sources about every shop, street, apartment complex, popular teacher, creative work, or the fact that there is a pencil lying on my desk right now. No matter how true it is, it is not verifiable in any reasonable sense of the word.
This is what people don't understand when they complain that things are deleted from Wikipedia. If Wikipedia's ambition is to create a credible encyclopaedia of all human knowledge, then it cannot be filled with speculation and half-truths. Even primary sources are suspect. I could easily create a blog or web site that claims something, then create a Wikipedia article that uses my web page as the main source. THAT is the slippery slope that is so often talked about.
If credibility is the measure by which an article may be deleted, then you have a way to measure credibility of an article. Why hide that? Make credibility a visible metric assignable by the deletionists or anyone else. Articles don't need to be deleted for lack of credibility. It works the same here on SlashDot with scores. Give users the choice of seeing only highly-credible articles if they want.
It's "an" when the implication is that one might kill oneself, like "an hero". One who hunts unsafely, for instance, is "an Nimrod".