Basic advice: Make sure your CONTRACT specifies what they can and can't do.
If they break the contract, they (and anyone they did it on behalf of, including if they sell the info to some competitor later) are in for a world of legal hurt.
You agreed to outsource this rather than hire someone to do it in-house. Either cough up the money on lawyers to make sure your butt is protected legally, or hire someone yourself who works just for you and is directly accountable to you.
Sockpuppetry has always been fairly easy to detect, and meatpuppetry not much more difficult (though meatpuppets aren't always improper.) Likewise, spotting unreasonable accusations of sockpuppetry is pretty easy.
Hardly. The false-positive ratio is horrendous, and gets worse every month. Add to it the fact that there is NO established procedure to prove one's innocence, and only an idiot wouldn't be able to see why false accusations of sockpuppetry are the first thing to come up anytime someone with an axe to grind sees a new user that disagrees with them.
Hell, there's a long tradition of editors falsely accusing their opponents of being sockpuppets of specific people despite ZERO editing relation (not just specific articles, we're talking even general topic space relations) merely because certain editors knew that crying the right name ("EntMootsOfTrolls", "Enviroknot", "Pigsonthewing", "Willy on Wheels", "Amorrow", "BhaiSaab", "Runcorn" etc) would bring certain admins rushing to ban first and never ask questions.
The nice thing about it is, admins don't really have much additional privilige.
You have GOT to be kidding. - The ability to lock an article - The ability to block someone (a big deal when you consider that most of the "decisions" by the corrupt admins of wikipedia are made based on "how many times has X been blocked") - The ability to block someone indefinitely - The ability to lock a user's talkpage and prevent them from even speaking in their own defense.
Admins have, in their hands, the equivalent of an AK-47 while normal users have maybe a butter knife.
I don't see incivility in the general sense delt with using bans.
Then you obviously don't watch the unblock-template patrollers.
I agree, that there can be some catty and underhanded tactics to get an editor to explode, but they are also against policy. WP:CIVIL applies to behavior, not just words.
Which means precisely two things - jack, and crap - when the abused person has been indefblocked, talkpage locked, and their "only option" is the worthless option of trying to send an email to the hopelessly-corrupt Arbcom for an appeal, the deliberations of which (or even STATE OF FILING and statement of grievance) will not ever be made public.
The rules and policies are an attempt to improve the articles in the encyclopedia.
They might once have been. They no longer are.
You're welcome to your opinion, but personally, when I compare Wikipedia to places like 4chan, or Yahoo Chat, I consider the former to be a far cry from a descent into madness.
Funny. When someone posts something wrong, or worse libelous, to 4chan or Yahoo Chat it doesn't have the force of "hey I saw that in an encyclopedia." Wikipedia, on the other hand, keeps deliberate falsehoods about people, places, or events indefinitely as long as a clique and their pet admins stand in the way of correction.
Using terms like "circle jerk" to describe an editing process is very much over the top.
You've obviously never been on wikipedia. Describing that "editing process" as a sequence in which a bunch of self-congratulatory dolts compare penis sizes is about right.
Problem is, the levels were designed to combat trolls and outside concerted influences.
There used to be "wikiprojects" - areas inside wikipedia where people were supposed to collaborate to try to make classes of articles better.
Unfortunately, they turned into clique breeding grounds. You saw someone posting something you didn't like, even if properly sourced? Raise up a rallying cry on the wikiproject.
So the wikiprojects fell into disrepute and are mostly closed off. All the groups did was switch over to using private email or yahoogroup/googlegroup setups. You sound like the person they want on their "team" for edit warring, they send you an email and invite you to the private group. Same difference, only it makes it that much harder to prove (despite the fact that on certain articles, it's always the same people tag-teaming in the same sequence) that it's going on. There's "no soliciting on the wiki", so they just do it privately - stack the article, stack the talkpage, stack the "mediation" page, stack the "request for comment", etc.
Whether that worked or has just instutionalized the outside influences is not clear Nope, it's pretty clear.
I think the main problem is that the concept of all activity being monitored doesn't work if there are ways to get around it (ie, admins can remove comments and edits, and not really have to state reasons). It's just as much a problem that those doing the "monitoring" have every reason to look the other way - after all, they're "monitoring" their friends, and ultimately, if someone ever DID get an admin demoted for rule-breaking behavior, that exposes all of them to the risk of being caught doing something corrupt and actually having to face the consequences.
In all reality, if Wikipedia were to really be more democratic or egalitarian, there would have to be MANY more editors and contributors (like 10x as many as now). Ideally, you'd want none at all, or as few as possible. And back in the older days (when the admin-to-user ratio wasn't so low) it was easier to get problems fixed. Blocked by an abusive admin, you could find an admin somewhere to undo it, and then they could help you file a RFC complaint. Having trouble with a group of serious edit warriors, it could be worked on.
At some point, the rules changed. Now, nobody can be unblocked without "consultation" to avoid "wheel warring." Unblock requests are handled by a group of abusive, foul-mouthed gits who see getting people angry enough to justify a "hey you just insulted an admin that's a permaban" drop as a fun game. Even trying to file a complaint is viewed as a hostile, "personal attack" style violation.
That's all it takes. They're sitting on "Recent Changes" patrol, reverting everything in sight. They don't give a rat's ass what they revert, because when it comes time for the RFA level-up procedure in the Wikipedia MMORPG, all the entrenched group running RFA cares about is how many edits you have, not whether any of them were worth anything at all.
Making an edit that screws up the grammar and spelling in an article (doing damage), or making an edit that fixes it and makes the article better (an improvement) mean precisely the same thing as far as the MMORPG goes: one more tick in your edit count.
The power consumption profile is no different between the two machines I spec'ed two weeks ago.
And you can save far more on your electric bill by keeping your A/C on a reasonable temperature, doing heavy-duty things on off-cycle hours with a smart meter, not leaving lights on everywhere, switching to CFL bulbs (LED's are still a tad expensive), and making sure that your windows/doors are properly sealed.
Oh, and let's not forget: invest in some proper rechargeable batteries for your Wiimote.
In his case it's his wife, who (due to circumstances of medical education) was forced to be in one place until a couple months ago. Rest assured, moving to a different state and getting medical licensing transferred/re-done is NOT easy.
In the case of another friend I know who can't move easily, it relates to kids (divorce + joint custody order = no way in hell to move).
In the case of my father, it's taking care of my elderly mother who's showing signs of memory issues along with her other health issues.
Pick your poison. There are dozens of reasons someone couldn't move easily. Unless you don't have family.
I can understand you dubbing me a troll, the sarcasm I invoked is indeed a trite and overused tactic. I hope you'll forgive it.
[[WP:DUCK]].
I can wikilawyer with the best of them, I can link to nearly any guideline/policy as needed off the top of my head; the others, I can find within a few clicks. However, when I do so in discussions, I try to follow the policy Wikipedia:Assume Good Faith. There are, admittedly quite a lot of things to read, so it is of no fault of the editor if they were unaware of some policy or another. I'm happy to work with them to get the desired content included.
If you actually believe that, you're the first wikipedian I have ever met who assumes good faith and understands, even partially, how ridiculous and ill-considered the "policy" structure of wikipedia is.
Let's face it. One of the "rules" of wikipedia is NO WIKILAWYERING. What happens almost constantly? Wikilawyering! The "no wikilawyering" clause is only pulled out to beat up on new users, period. One of the other policies states that contentious topics will always attract new users, and yet what happens whenever anyone shows up and edits on something remotely contentious? That's right, they are accused of being a sockpuppet/meatpuppet, tarred, feathered, branded with a big scarlet letter "S" for "Sockpuppet" and then banned by the pet admin of whatever clique is currently ruling (or fighting on the opposite side of) that particular topic.
Look at RFA. How many users are told that their conduct is good, but that they lack the "edit count" to make admin?
Look at AN/I. Or rather, don't if you don't have a strong stomach to deal with the lies, abusive language towards anyone who's not an admin or an admin's friend, and constant taunting.
Grab a random user from the list of recent blocks/bans. Look at the standard responses of those who respond to the [[unblock]] template. I assure you it is disgusting the way they behave, and that every one of them is deliberately designing their responses not to end conflict, but to try to taunt and provoke an already-aggravated user into doing something "banworthy" (as simple as calling an admin names in anger).
The "rules" and "policies" of wikipedia don't mean anything except as weapons for the entrenched, and there is no oversight. That, right there, is a main reason the Wikipedia MMORPG has descended so far into madness.
Speccing systems over the years, I'm amazed that people don't go more in-depth.
Every time I spec, I find that I can get an equivalently-performing AMD chip (plus motherboard and RAM and a nice, gigantic Zalman 9700-style heatsink) for ~$50 less than an equivalent Intel rig.
The Intel rig uses a stock HSF (meaning higher running temps and more risk) and still tends to cost ~$40 more each for the motherboard and processor. I've tried to see what I could do to get it to equal out, but there just aren't Intel boards from companies with anything approaching a decent reputation for cheaper.
Yes, Intel's been pushing the high-end scale in recent years. If you want to blow upwards of $400 on a processor, go ahead. In my price/performance range, I get more out of my money going AMD.
China's industry and information technology minister
Why do I see the words "information minister" in there and shudder?
Seriously - they say this now, then they'll make it compulsory again (if the official CHINESE-LANGUAGE documentation has even been changed) once it blows over and they think nobody's watching.
I really hope the rest of your post was a joke, too. Chinese society is fucked up enough as it is.
Look at the "top echelon" - the elites, the "friends of jimbo" clique. Most of them have been around forever (in relative terms to wikipedia's age). Look at the next level - the bureaucrats and laughably corrupt "Arbitration Committee". Same thing. Look at the ranks of the admins. What do you have? For the most part, a circle-jerk of backslapping nerds who congratulate each other on being abusive and rude in the exercise of their powers. Look at the next rank down - the "longtime respected users." How do they get there? By having admin friends to protect them during disputes. Why are they not on the next rank? Well, they're either just sockpuppet accounts for the admins, or they're the "enforcers" of one of the various cliques, designated to wade in and be as disruptive as possible to newcomers in order to provoke "ban-worthy" conduct while their friend the admin keeps them from getting banned.
How do you get to be an admin? Not by proving you can handle a job of watching for legitimate disruption. No, you prove it by "level grinding" using automated tools on the "Recent Changes Patrol", looking for "vandalism" and amassing an edit count that rises higher and higher. You prove it by keeping your personal head down and letting someone else from whatever clique you connect with do the dirty work of "enforcing", so that your name is not connected with a block or ban. You get it by brown-nosing your way around certain known-quantity administrators and agreeing with whatever they do, especially when they're involved in clique behavior. You get it by submitting your RFA at the right time, so that people who would have something to say against your POV-pushing ways "happen" to not be around because they have a real life to work on.
Wikipedia is illegitimate. Someone else pointed out that Wikipedia is like a game - most of the people who have admin bits or better have "leveled up". People who don't make RFA routinely are told it's because they haven't passed a certain edit-count threshold, whether or not they can keep a level head and use their tools sparingly as they should. It's a game, nothing more, and the behavior we see from them is "cyber nerds is defending it's territory" in the worst way.
Actually, you're incorrect... true "redheads" don't have the structures to produce it, they have a genetic anomaly that causes them to produce excessive quantities of pheomelanin rather than the normal, brownish eumelanin that everyone else produces. There are studies on this, as the genetic anomaly also seems to relate to pain sensitivity.
His situation is, he had no choice but to live where he did (family reasons). He is solidly skilled, but without the large years of experience to command major negotiation for a single-person contract. His hiring went direct through a temp agency which specifically sets those setups in order to prevent as many employees as possible from meeting the requirements for various seniority, retention, and group policy (vesting in retirement packages for example) benefits.
In his building, everybody but the MS "management" group was working this way.
If you'd ever actually tried to read and follow the byzantine maze of wikipedia "policies", "essays", "proposals", and everything-in-between (including just random "stuff I remember Jimbo saying once here's the diff" crap that you'd never find till you were beaten over the head with it by somebody wikilawyering) you wouldn't be saying that.
How dare I be able to become one of those less than 1% revert people in a matter of weeks just by doing so!
How do you do that? #1 - edit something nobody cares about. #2 - make minor changes (typo fixes, grammar, etc) letter by letter rather than making real, meaningful edits. #3 - Set yourself on the myriad of automated "tools" and go "rep grinding" in the "recent changes patrol" zone of the Wikipedia MMORPG
How dare one be able to discuss and change policies through logical argument!
I have yet to see a logical argument regarding wikipedia policy. You're certainly not supplying one.
How dare it be free!
I have no objection to free.
How dare there be bad editors and administrators, it should be perfect!
Did I say it should be perfect? No. Did I say it sucks currently, due to the entrenchment of bad editors and administrators that actively prevent improvement? Yes. I believe Wikipedia can be fixed, but I'm also realistic on what it will take to fix it, and on the chance of those needed reforms happening anytime soon.
Seriously. Look at Microsoft - they've been pushing outsourced (e.g. "revolving temp agency hiring") and overseas-sourced (how many times did Bill Gates lie his ass off claiming he "couldn't find" people trained to do things here while pushing for H1-B increases?) for years now. I have a friend who just spent three years "working for Microsoft", but he was actually hired by a temp agency (along with 80% of the people in his building) and forced to work "Shifts" with 90-day breaks in between "hirings" to avoid MS or the temp agency having to pay out certain benefits.
Of course we should be making it better on taxes to hire American workers than foreign workers, and that doesn't just go for visa holders; we should be taxing companies that use outsourced labor overseas, too. If they don't want to pay the tax, they can move their factories and resources back to the States.
Michael Dell is too cheap to pay for labor in the country that made him rich. I think the government owes him a reality check on behalf of US.
The problem is the incestuous "culture" - or more to the point, the haves-and-have-nots attitude of the majority of their administrators and so-called "respected users" - that works on the basis of gaming the system.
Words by a former wikipedia administrator that showed me how their system really works. And then of course there's scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal (the last one is incredible fun, too... if you think that's the only secret organizing list for abusive wikipedians, admin or no, you're delusional).
Wikipedia doesn't work. It hasn't worked for a long time and I don't think it ever really did. It has horrible bias against anyone who is a verifiable expert in their field. It has MASSIVE problems with cliques going around pushing their agendas and claiming that anyone new coming to an article or set of articles on their favorite topic (global warming, middle eastern conflict/culture, scientology, etc). If you show up with well-researched refutals to the crap that is 99% of wikipedia, you are labeled a "troll", or abused, or targeted by one of their throwaway accounts so that a friendly behind-the-scenes admin can slap an indefinite ban on you. This is deliberate: 20 newcomers to an article might be able to outweigh the morons pushing bad information, but as long as they can pick them off one at a time, they "win" in the wikipedian system.
A few wikipedians have been there "Forever." They'll never go away. More have been there "A very long time" and have developed incestuous, corrupt relationships with each other and with the "forever" types. Meanwhile, anyone new coming in is instantly accused of being a "sockpuppet", "meatpuppet", or whatever other epithet can be thrown at them.
It's no coincidence that the "Checkuser" tool, which was originally ripped out of David Gerard's corrupt grasp after a series of false-attack incidents (privately hushed up, naturally) has on en.wp been removed from the ability to "prove innocence." The accusation of "sockpuppetry" is an abuser's tool of force, pure and simple. In the Wikipedia "judge, jury, and executioner" administrator zone, any tool that could prove someone is innocent is to be neutered as soon as possible.
The statistics on blockings/bannings and responses to them are likewise hidden. Why? Because analysis of these shows what really goes on. Most administrators don't bother to communicate with users when placing a block. They drop indefinites immediately with no remorse, using wikispeak code rather than plain language. The "appeal" process is a laughable joke as well, with maybe 5-8 active "reviewers" who basically use it as a stress-relief tool, beating up on people who are helpless (because they don't have the admin bit) to begin with.
Face it. Wikipedia is worthless with the current "leadership." All the good editors and conscientious administrators were driven away long ago.
There was a REASON the "poor" were kept out of the voting process.
The stupider the populace, the worse and more uninformed the decisions they make. Thomas Jefferson said, point-blank, "a democracy cannot function for long save that it has a well-educated and well-informed population."
Thus, the original requirements on voting were restricted to those who (a) paid taxes and (b) could demonstrate a level of intelligence (ownership of land/business or educational level).
It wasn't found to be "illegal", it was simply repealed. And every time it was backed down a level further, the vote got less and less informed. You want to know what the "Average Voter" knows today? I'll give you a hint - Winston Churchill's greatest argument AGAINST democracy was "a five minute conversation with the average voter." And he said THAT over 70 years ago.
Just because you cannot read, don't own land, or don't know the "platform" (what a fucking retarded concept, btw) of the particular party you are voting for does not mean you don't have a vested interest in the political system and the right to vote for who you see fit.
No, the fact that you can't read, paid no taxes, and don't know the issues and candidates for SHIT means that you are going to do precisely what happened in the last election - a bunch of dumb shits who had no fucking clue what was going on voted for the guy with the skin color most like theirs, or who promised them more government handouts while "taxing the other guy" to pay for it all.
The problem being, of course, when a politician talks about "taxing the other guy", he's really talking about fucking you over.
Minimum requirements are all about excluding people who don't fit your idea of who should be running the government,
Hmm. We already exclude the mentally retarded. I say minimum requirements are a way of ensuring that dumb shits who don't know their heads from their asses aren't fooled into doing something suicidal.
Slashdot Mirror
not saying the Dems are better, just they haven't catered to any demographic quite so stupid yet, not that they are beyond it
You obviously haven't been around their illegal-alien amnesty rallies recently. That'll be the NEXT round of stupidity.
Ahh, the joys of outsourcing... and people wonder why I dislike it so.
Sounds like someone is improperly prepared to start up their business then...
So, ahh... how are you impressed with Obama's promise of "transparency in government" so far?
I mean, seriously - rushing bills through faster than anyone can read them and check them for problems, and now this?
I wonder where the $18M is really going.
Basic advice: Make sure your CONTRACT specifies what they can and can't do.
If they break the contract, they (and anyone they did it on behalf of, including if they sell the info to some competitor later) are in for a world of legal hurt.
You agreed to outsource this rather than hire someone to do it in-house. Either cough up the money on lawyers to make sure your butt is protected legally, or hire someone yourself who works just for you and is directly accountable to you.
Sockpuppetry has always been fairly easy to detect, and meatpuppetry not much more difficult (though meatpuppets aren't always improper.) Likewise, spotting unreasonable accusations of sockpuppetry is pretty easy.
Hardly. The false-positive ratio is horrendous, and gets worse every month. Add to it the fact that there is NO established procedure to prove one's innocence, and only an idiot wouldn't be able to see why false accusations of sockpuppetry are the first thing to come up anytime someone with an axe to grind sees a new user that disagrees with them.
Hell, there's a long tradition of editors falsely accusing their opponents of being sockpuppets of specific people despite ZERO editing relation (not just specific articles, we're talking even general topic space relations) merely because certain editors knew that crying the right name ("EntMootsOfTrolls", "Enviroknot", "Pigsonthewing", "Willy on Wheels", "Amorrow", "BhaiSaab", "Runcorn" etc) would bring certain admins rushing to ban first and never ask questions.
The nice thing about it is, admins don't really have much additional privilige.
You have GOT to be kidding.
- The ability to lock an article
- The ability to block someone (a big deal when you consider that most of the "decisions" by the corrupt admins of wikipedia are made based on "how many times has X been blocked")
- The ability to block someone indefinitely
- The ability to lock a user's talkpage and prevent them from even speaking in their own defense.
Admins have, in their hands, the equivalent of an AK-47 while normal users have maybe a butter knife.
I don't see incivility in the general sense delt with using bans.
Then you obviously don't watch the unblock-template patrollers.
I agree, that there can be some catty and underhanded tactics to get an editor to explode, but they are also against policy. WP:CIVIL applies to behavior, not just words.
Which means precisely two things - jack, and crap - when the abused person has been indefblocked, talkpage locked, and their "only option" is the worthless option of trying to send an email to the hopelessly-corrupt Arbcom for an appeal, the deliberations of which (or even STATE OF FILING and statement of grievance) will not ever be made public.
The rules and policies are an attempt to improve the articles in the encyclopedia.
They might once have been. They no longer are.
You're welcome to your opinion, but personally, when I compare Wikipedia to places like 4chan, or Yahoo Chat, I consider the former to be a far cry from a descent into madness.
Funny. When someone posts something wrong, or worse libelous, to 4chan or Yahoo Chat it doesn't have the force of "hey I saw that in an encyclopedia." Wikipedia, on the other hand, keeps deliberate falsehoods about people, places, or events indefinitely as long as a clique and their pet admins stand in the way of correction.
Using terms like "circle jerk" to describe an editing process is very much over the top.
You've obviously never been on wikipedia. Describing that "editing process" as a sequence in which a bunch of self-congratulatory dolts compare penis sizes is about right.
Actually, it puts a very small (VERY small) increase. But you don't waste the money on AA's. You'll save ~$60/year at least.
You've never been to Louisiana, have you?
Problem is, the levels were designed to combat trolls and outside concerted influences.
There used to be "wikiprojects" - areas inside wikipedia where people were supposed to collaborate to try to make classes of articles better.
Unfortunately, they turned into clique breeding grounds. You saw someone posting something you didn't like, even if properly sourced? Raise up a rallying cry on the wikiproject.
So the wikiprojects fell into disrepute and are mostly closed off. All the groups did was switch over to using private email or yahoogroup/googlegroup setups. You sound like the person they want on their "team" for edit warring, they send you an email and invite you to the private group. Same difference, only it makes it that much harder to prove (despite the fact that on certain articles, it's always the same people tag-teaming in the same sequence) that it's going on. There's "no soliciting on the wiki", so they just do it privately - stack the article, stack the talkpage, stack the "mediation" page, stack the "request for comment", etc.
Whether that worked or has just instutionalized the outside influences is not clear
Nope, it's pretty clear.
I think the main problem is that the concept of all activity being monitored doesn't work if there are ways to get around it (ie, admins can remove comments and edits, and not really have to state reasons).
It's just as much a problem that those doing the "monitoring" have every reason to look the other way - after all, they're "monitoring" their friends, and ultimately, if someone ever DID get an admin demoted for rule-breaking behavior, that exposes all of them to the risk of being caught doing something corrupt and actually having to face the consequences.
In all reality, if Wikipedia were to really be more democratic or egalitarian, there would have to be MANY more editors and contributors (like 10x as many as now).
Ideally, you'd want none at all, or as few as possible. And back in the older days (when the admin-to-user ratio wasn't so low) it was easier to get problems fixed. Blocked by an abusive admin, you could find an admin somewhere to undo it, and then they could help you file a RFC complaint. Having trouble with a group of serious edit warriors, it could be worked on.
At some point, the rules changed. Now, nobody can be unblocked without "consultation" to avoid "wheel warring." Unblock requests are handled by a group of abusive, foul-mouthed gits who see getting people angry enough to justify a "hey you just insulted an admin that's a permaban" drop as a fun game. Even trying to file a complaint is viewed as a hostile, "personal attack" style violation.
In short, the system is a joke.
I can explain why. It's very simple.
Someone was trying to drive their edit count up.
That's all it takes. They're sitting on "Recent Changes" patrol, reverting everything in sight. They don't give a rat's ass what they revert, because when it comes time for the RFA level-up procedure in the Wikipedia MMORPG, all the entrenched group running RFA cares about is how many edits you have, not whether any of them were worth anything at all.
Making an edit that screws up the grammar and spelling in an article (doing damage), or making an edit that fixes it and makes the article better (an improvement) mean precisely the same thing as far as the MMORPG goes: one more tick in your edit count.
The power consumption profile is no different between the two machines I spec'ed two weeks ago.
And you can save far more on your electric bill by keeping your A/C on a reasonable temperature, doing heavy-duty things on off-cycle hours with a smart meter, not leaving lights on everywhere, switching to CFL bulbs (LED's are still a tad expensive), and making sure that your windows/doors are properly sealed.
Oh, and let's not forget: invest in some proper rechargeable batteries for your Wiimote.
In his case it's his wife, who (due to circumstances of medical education) was forced to be in one place until a couple months ago. Rest assured, moving to a different state and getting medical licensing transferred/re-done is NOT easy.
In the case of another friend I know who can't move easily, it relates to kids (divorce + joint custody order = no way in hell to move).
In the case of my father, it's taking care of my elderly mother who's showing signs of memory issues along with her other health issues.
Pick your poison. There are dozens of reasons someone couldn't move easily. Unless you don't have family.
I can understand you dubbing me a troll, the sarcasm I invoked is indeed a trite and overused tactic. I hope you'll forgive it.
[[WP:DUCK]].
I can wikilawyer with the best of them, I can link to nearly any guideline/policy as needed off the top of my head; the others, I can find within a few clicks. However, when I do so in discussions, I try to follow the policy Wikipedia:Assume Good Faith. There are, admittedly quite a lot of things to read, so it is of no fault of the editor if they were unaware of some policy or another. I'm happy to work with them to get the desired content included.
If you actually believe that, you're the first wikipedian I have ever met who assumes good faith and understands, even partially, how ridiculous and ill-considered the "policy" structure of wikipedia is.
Let's face it. One of the "rules" of wikipedia is NO WIKILAWYERING. What happens almost constantly? Wikilawyering! The "no wikilawyering" clause is only pulled out to beat up on new users, period. One of the other policies states that contentious topics will always attract new users, and yet what happens whenever anyone shows up and edits on something remotely contentious? That's right, they are accused of being a sockpuppet/meatpuppet, tarred, feathered, branded with a big scarlet letter "S" for "Sockpuppet" and then banned by the pet admin of whatever clique is currently ruling (or fighting on the opposite side of) that particular topic.
Look at RFA. How many users are told that their conduct is good, but that they lack the "edit count" to make admin?
Look at AN/I. Or rather, don't if you don't have a strong stomach to deal with the lies, abusive language towards anyone who's not an admin or an admin's friend, and constant taunting.
Grab a random user from the list of recent blocks/bans. Look at the standard responses of those who respond to the [[unblock]] template. I assure you it is disgusting the way they behave, and that every one of them is deliberately designing their responses not to end conflict, but to try to taunt and provoke an already-aggravated user into doing something "banworthy" (as simple as calling an admin names in anger).
The "rules" and "policies" of wikipedia don't mean anything except as weapons for the entrenched, and there is no oversight. That, right there, is a main reason the Wikipedia MMORPG has descended so far into madness.
Speccing systems over the years, I'm amazed that people don't go more in-depth.
Every time I spec, I find that I can get an equivalently-performing AMD chip (plus motherboard and RAM and a nice, gigantic Zalman 9700-style heatsink) for ~$50 less than an equivalent Intel rig.
The Intel rig uses a stock HSF (meaning higher running temps and more risk) and still tends to cost ~$40 more each for the motherboard and processor. I've tried to see what I could do to get it to equal out, but there just aren't Intel boards from companies with anything approaching a decent reputation for cheaper.
Yes, Intel's been pushing the high-end scale in recent years. If you want to blow upwards of $400 on a processor, go ahead. In my price/performance range, I get more out of my money going AMD.
China's industry and information technology minister
Why do I see the words "information minister" in there and shudder?
Seriously - they say this now, then they'll make it compulsory again (if the official CHINESE-LANGUAGE documentation has even been changed) once it blows over and they think nobody's watching.
I really hope the rest of your post was a joke, too. Chinese society is fucked up enough as it is.
That, in a nutshell, is wikipedia's problem.
Look at the "top echelon" - the elites, the "friends of jimbo" clique. Most of them have been around forever (in relative terms to wikipedia's age).
Look at the next level - the bureaucrats and laughably corrupt "Arbitration Committee". Same thing.
Look at the ranks of the admins. What do you have? For the most part, a circle-jerk of backslapping nerds who congratulate each other on being abusive and rude in the exercise of their powers.
Look at the next rank down - the "longtime respected users." How do they get there? By having admin friends to protect them during disputes. Why are they not on the next rank? Well, they're either just sockpuppet accounts for the admins, or they're the "enforcers" of one of the various cliques, designated to wade in and be as disruptive as possible to newcomers in order to provoke "ban-worthy" conduct while their friend the admin keeps them from getting banned.
How do you get to be an admin? Not by proving you can handle a job of watching for legitimate disruption. No, you prove it by "level grinding" using automated tools on the "Recent Changes Patrol", looking for "vandalism" and amassing an edit count that rises higher and higher. You prove it by keeping your personal head down and letting someone else from whatever clique you connect with do the dirty work of "enforcing", so that your name is not connected with a block or ban. You get it by brown-nosing your way around certain known-quantity administrators and agreeing with whatever they do, especially when they're involved in clique behavior. You get it by submitting your RFA at the right time, so that people who would have something to say against your POV-pushing ways "happen" to not be around because they have a real life to work on.
Wikipedia is illegitimate. Someone else pointed out that Wikipedia is like a game - most of the people who have admin bits or better have "leveled up". People who don't make RFA routinely are told it's because they haven't passed a certain edit-count threshold, whether or not they can keep a level head and use their tools sparingly as they should. It's a game, nothing more, and the behavior we see from them is "cyber nerds is defending it's territory" in the worst way.
Actually, you're incorrect... true "redheads" don't have the structures to produce it, they have a genetic anomaly that causes them to produce excessive quantities of pheomelanin rather than the normal, brownish eumelanin that everyone else produces. There are studies on this, as the genetic anomaly also seems to relate to pain sensitivity.
If you are in demand enough to do that, great.
His situation is, he had no choice but to live where he did (family reasons). He is solidly skilled, but without the large years of experience to command major negotiation for a single-person contract. His hiring went direct through a temp agency which specifically sets those setups in order to prevent as many employees as possible from meeting the requirements for various seniority, retention, and group policy (vesting in retirement packages for example) benefits.
In his building, everybody but the MS "management" group was working this way.
How dare one need to read and follow policies!
If you'd ever actually tried to read and follow the byzantine maze of wikipedia "policies", "essays", "proposals", and everything-in-between (including just random "stuff I remember Jimbo saying once here's the diff" crap that you'd never find till you were beaten over the head with it by somebody wikilawyering) you wouldn't be saying that.
How dare I be able to become one of those less than 1% revert people in a matter of weeks just by doing so!
How do you do that?
#1 - edit something nobody cares about.
#2 - make minor changes (typo fixes, grammar, etc) letter by letter rather than making real, meaningful edits.
#3 - Set yourself on the myriad of automated "tools" and go "rep grinding" in the "recent changes patrol" zone of the Wikipedia MMORPG
How dare one be able to discuss and change policies through logical argument!
I have yet to see a logical argument regarding wikipedia policy. You're certainly not supplying one.
How dare it be free!
I have no objection to free.
How dare there be bad editors and administrators, it should be perfect!
Did I say it should be perfect? No. Did I say it sucks currently, due to the entrenchment of bad editors and administrators that actively prevent improvement? Yes. I believe Wikipedia can be fixed, but I'm also realistic on what it will take to fix it, and on the chance of those needed reforms happening anytime soon.
This is the Internet damnit, we have standards!!
Yes. And by those standards, I dub thee "troll."
They just did Populous for the DS in 2008 (with XSeed handling a lot of the programming).
I think this is just "renewing in case" and nothing special.
Oh, and no thanks on the Steam. I'll just grab the games, throw them in Dosbox, and not have the SteamDRM problem.
Who said the government ever makes sense?
Seriously. Look at Microsoft - they've been pushing outsourced (e.g. "revolving temp agency hiring") and overseas-sourced (how many times did Bill Gates lie his ass off claiming he "couldn't find" people trained to do things here while pushing for H1-B increases?) for years now. I have a friend who just spent three years "working for Microsoft", but he was actually hired by a temp agency (along with 80% of the people in his building) and forced to work "Shifts" with 90-day breaks in between "hirings" to avoid MS or the temp agency having to pay out certain benefits.
Of course we should be making it better on taxes to hire American workers than foreign workers, and that doesn't just go for visa holders; we should be taxing companies that use outsourced labor overseas, too. If they don't want to pay the tax, they can move their factories and resources back to the States.
Michael Dell is too cheap to pay for labor in the country that made him rich. I think the government owes him a reality check on behalf of US.
No kidding.
The problem is the incestuous "culture" - or more to the point, the haves-and-have-nots attitude of the majority of their administrators and so-called "respected users" - that works on the basis of gaming the system.
Words by a former wikipedia administrator that showed me how their system really works. And then of course there's scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal (the last one is incredible fun, too... if you think that's the only secret organizing list for abusive wikipedians, admin or no, you're delusional).
Wikipedia doesn't work. It hasn't worked for a long time and I don't think it ever really did. It has horrible bias against anyone who is a verifiable expert in their field. It has MASSIVE problems with cliques going around pushing their agendas and claiming that anyone new coming to an article or set of articles on their favorite topic (global warming, middle eastern conflict/culture, scientology, etc). If you show up with well-researched refutals to the crap that is 99% of wikipedia, you are labeled a "troll", or abused, or targeted by one of their throwaway accounts so that a friendly behind-the-scenes admin can slap an indefinite ban on you. This is deliberate: 20 newcomers to an article might be able to outweigh the morons pushing bad information, but as long as they can pick them off one at a time, they "win" in the wikipedian system.
A few wikipedians have been there "Forever." They'll never go away. More have been there "A very long time" and have developed incestuous, corrupt relationships with each other and with the "forever" types. Meanwhile, anyone new coming in is instantly accused of being a "sockpuppet", "meatpuppet", or whatever other epithet can be thrown at them.
It's no coincidence that the "Checkuser" tool, which was originally ripped out of David Gerard's corrupt grasp after a series of false-attack incidents (privately hushed up, naturally) has on en.wp been removed from the ability to "prove innocence." The accusation of "sockpuppetry" is an abuser's tool of force, pure and simple. In the Wikipedia "judge, jury, and executioner" administrator zone, any tool that could prove someone is innocent is to be neutered as soon as possible.
The statistics on blockings/bannings and responses to them are likewise hidden. Why? Because analysis of these shows what really goes on. Most administrators don't bother to communicate with users when placing a block. They drop indefinites immediately with no remorse, using wikispeak code rather than plain language. The "appeal" process is a laughable joke as well, with maybe 5-8 active "reviewers" who basically use it as a stress-relief tool, beating up on people who are helpless (because they don't have the admin bit) to begin with.
Face it. Wikipedia is worthless with the current "leadership." All the good editors and conscientious administrators were driven away long ago.
There was a REASON the "poor" were kept out of the voting process.
The stupider the populace, the worse and more uninformed the decisions they make. Thomas Jefferson said, point-blank, "a democracy cannot function for long save that it has a well-educated and well-informed population."
Thus, the original requirements on voting were restricted to those who (a) paid taxes and (b) could demonstrate a level of intelligence (ownership of land/business or educational level).
It wasn't found to be "illegal", it was simply repealed. And every time it was backed down a level further, the vote got less and less informed. You want to know what the "Average Voter" knows today? I'll give you a hint - Winston Churchill's greatest argument AGAINST democracy was "a five minute conversation with the average voter." And he said THAT over 70 years ago.
Just because you cannot read, don't own land, or don't know the "platform" (what a fucking retarded concept, btw) of the particular party you are voting for does not mean you don't have a vested interest in the political system and the right to vote for who you see fit.
No, the fact that you can't read, paid no taxes, and don't know the issues and candidates for SHIT means that you are going to do precisely what happened in the last election - a bunch of dumb shits who had no fucking clue what was going on voted for the guy with the skin color most like theirs, or who promised them more government handouts while "taxing the other guy" to pay for it all.
The problem being, of course, when a politician talks about "taxing the other guy", he's really talking about fucking you over.
Minimum requirements are all about excluding people who don't fit your idea of who should be running the government,
Hmm. We already exclude the mentally retarded. I say minimum requirements are a way of ensuring that dumb shits who don't know their heads from their asses aren't fooled into doing something suicidal.
You mean like Minnesota, where Al Franken mysteriously "won" three counties that had more counted votes than registered voters, right?