Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 02:28, 11 April 2011

Userboxes

This editor is a Veteran Editor and is entitled
to display this Iron Editor Star.

This user is one of the 4000 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

It's really pretty simple:
- mind NPOV -
- don't be a dick -
- ignore all rules -

This user has autopatrolled rights on the English Wikipedia. (verify)

This user is a participant in WikiProject Socialism.

This user is a participant in
WikiProject Organized Labour.

This user is a participant in
WikiProject Conservatism.

Talk to me, baby!

Here's my email in case anyone wants to get in touch with me about anything: MutantPop@aol.com Don't be afraid to write if you have a comment or a question — direct contact is probably quicker and easier than the Wikipedia discussion pages.

My website is http://www.marxisthistory.org

I'm also a volunteer with Marxists Internet Archive, whose website is http://www.marxists.org

I collect books, pamphlets, and other radical ephemera and am engaged in book research for a volume on American political radicalism in the early 1920s.

I'm a member of Historians of American Communism and try to stay current with the various academic journals on Soviet history.

I'm a fan of punk rock, the Portland Trailblazers, beer, cigars, and golden retrievers.

best,

tim

Tim Davenport
5010 NW Shasta
Corvallis, OR 97330 (USA)

Some of the pages to which I've made measurable contributions

The 105 pages which I started marked with *

Political biographies

Organizational Histories

Specific histories

Publications and media

Terminology

Macaulayism
Microform
Pamphlet
Paper organization
Public intellectual (merged away)

Sports stuff

Music stuff

Mutant Pop Records

Cigars

Colorado pumpkin farmers and other miscellaneous stuff

Lists

Wikipedia technical pages

WP: AfD Outcomes

This user is a member of the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians.

The motto of the AIW is conservata veritate, which translates to "with the preserved truth".
This motto reflects the inclusionist desire to change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result.

Stolfi on deletionism

Deletionism is not and never was a "consensus", not even a majority opinion. It is the stupid and destructive ideology of a small minority, that prevailed by a combination of robot power and a broken "consensus" mechanism that, in any other context, would be called "ballot fraud". It is stupid, because its goal is to move Wikipedia backwards, towards obsolete standards of paper encyclopedias. It is destructive, because it has led to the loss of tens of thousands of good articles and good editors, and earned Wikipedia some very bad press — which, this time, was quite deserved. In conclusion, Wikipedia will soon change, in spite of all shrugs and so-whats. If it does not change course now, radically and quickly, it will just die in a few years.

To save itself, Wikipedia must set as its top goal the recruiting and keeping of new bona-fide editors. That includes banning deletionism and any other unnecessary practice, rule or feature that may drive those editors away, no matter how dear it may be to its inventors and users. That includes, in particular,

scrap the notability rule,
delete and ban all editorial article-side tags, and
stop the paranoia about usourced BLPs.

All the best (with a bit more hope) --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 18:51, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

The Stolfi Manifesto

Thoroughly disappointed

When the {{tl|unreferenced}} tag was developed, a straw poll was held *among the editors who had designed it* about where it should be placed. There were about 30 votes cast (out of a universe of perhaps 10,000 regular editors). These comprised 9 votes for for "top of article page", 10 votes for "bottom of article page", and 13 votes for "talk page". Needless to say, the obvious fourth alternative "nowhere" was not even in the ballot.

So, if that tag is now showing at the top of hundred of thousands of articles, it is because nine editors wanted it there, twenty-three did *not* want it there, and 9,970 editors did not have a chance to give their opinion.

A similar story applies to the Wikipedia:Notability guidelines. I found a straw poll in the Notability talk page about a dozen or so specific questions. The questions were all in jargon (like "PROD" in this RfC) which I was unable to decipher, so presumably only the people who had been involved in the writing of the guidelines voted. There were less than 200 votes, and some of the items in the ballot passed with a tight majority — that is, less than 1% of the pool of active editors. Unfortunately I could not determine whether the final declared "consensus" honored these votes, or — as in the case of the {{unreferenced}} tag — the minority opinion prevailed anyway.

As for this RfC, I see that 400 editors took part in phase I, 40 took part in phase II. The honest thing to do would be to declare this RfC hopelessly bungled and start all all over, beginning with the basic questions — like "are unrefernced BLPs a real problem?". Instead, it seems that this RfC will follow the same path as the other straw polls: the proposers stubbornly insist with their thesis, ignoring all data and arguments to the contrary, until all oposers get tired and leave; and then they will declare the "consensus" to be whatever they like.

In the summary to Phase 1 it was stated that all participants were concerned with the welfare of Wikipedia. I beg to differ. People who really care about Wikipedia should want to know, first, whether the unsourced BLPs are a real problem, and second, whether the proposed solution will do more good than harm. I don't see this worry among the proposers of the RfC. Indeed, it seems that the surest way to end a thread in this discussion is to post concrete numbers and examples. Instead of debating that data and what it means, the proposers merely shift to other threads.

It is clear to me that the original purpose of this RfC was not to find the best way to deal with the "problem" (or to find out whether the "problem" was real), but merely to obtain some legitimacy for what was a predetermined decision, namely that unsourced BLPs are to be deleted. If there is one thing that is clear from this discussion, is that unsourced BLPs are harmless and deleting them solely for being unsourced is extremely harmful.

The only explanation that I can find for the persistent wish to delete unsourced BLPs is psychological, namely the "lust for power" of editors who are tired of being just "workers" and want to be "bosses". In academia, were I work, this sort of thing happens all the time: people get tired of being just ordinary professors or researchers, and try to move to a position where, insted of working, they direct and control the work of other people.

One just has to look at the pages in the "User talk:", "Wikipedia talk:", and "Template talk:" to realize that most Wikipedia decisions are being made by a small minority of "bosses" who seem to derive more pleasure out of social interaction (and, in particular, the sense of power that comes from "bossing" over other members) than on making real substantial contributions to Wikipedia.

Jorge Stolfi

How can one rise to be a "boss" in Wikipedia? Certainly not by editing contents: even if you edit 10,000 articles over several years and create a handful of "featured" ones, you will be just a "worker" like any of the other 10,000 regular editors. The same applies to any work (such as sourcing) that requires reading each article and thinking about its contents: no one can do that on more that 50-100 articles per day, the same top rate as for contents editing. Moreover, in that sort of work you often have to justify your edits to other "workers", and that puts you in the same "social level" as them.

A "boss" must do something that affects hundreds of thousands of articles, and does not require interacting with "workers" at their same level. It must be something definitive that an ordinary "worker" cannot stop or undo. It must be something that clearly put the "boss" on a higher level than the "workers".

That is the only explanation I can find for why we got the editorial tags at the top of articles. Robot-assisted tagging does not require thinking, so one can easily tag 1000 articles a day. The tagger is clearly "boss" because the tags are not "work", but "comands": every editorial tag says "I want this to be done, so some worker had better do it". A tagger is clearly above ordinary editors, because (by definition) the only way these can remove a tag is by complying with the wish of the tagger. Article tags have also the "advantage" that they violate the basic rule, "all editorial comments must go in the talk page": that is an advantage because (as in real life) one's social status is measured by the rules one can violate with impunity.

And that is also the only explanation I can think for this RfC and the way it was carried out. The real "problem" of the unsourced BLPs is that the "bosses, after sticking hundreds of thousands of {{unreferenced}} tags, realized that they had been largely ignored — that is, the "workers" did not rush out to comply to their commands. That was doubly frustrating: not only it negated the authority of the "bosses", but made them look silly for wasting all that tagging work for nothing.

Enter then the idea of deleting all unsourced BLPs. Like tagging, deleting is something that can be done very quickly en masse, without having to read the articles. Like tagging, deletion cannot be undone by ordinary editors. Even if each deletion has to be voted in the AfD, the place and timing of the vote ensures that voters will be mostly "bosses", and the final decision is made by a "boss": if one or two "workers" happen to see the AfD all in time and cast their vote, they can be just ignored.

That explains why no one here seems interested in statistics that prove that unsourced BLPs are harmless, or in the damage that deleting them might do. That explains why the proposers adamantly refuse to allow an editor other than the tagger to remove a tag without complying with its command. That is why they adamantly refuse to extend the AfD voting period beyond 7 days: for, if more "workers" get a chance to vote, they may out-vote the "bosses". After all, a Master of a thousand Slaves is not a Master at all if he lets even one Slave disobey his commands, or lets Slaves vote on whether to obey them.

Five years ago, Wikipedia could be defined as "three million encyclopedia articles which anyone can edit". I am afraid that today it has become "a decadent social networking site with 10,000 members who have three million articles to play with". One just has to look at the pages in the "User talk:", "Wikipedia talk:", and "Template talk:" to realize that most Wikipedia decisions are being made by a small minority of "bosses" who seem to derive more pleasure out of social interaction (and, in particular, the sense of power that comes from "bossing" over other members) than on making real substantial contributions to Wikipedia.

At the root of the problem is that Wikipedia's decision-making mechanism is thoroughly broken. As we saw here, and in countless other cases, any clique of ten editors can write a rule or standard, vote it among themselves, and declare it "consensus". Almost every guideline in Wikipedia:* was decided in this way. No country could survive more than a few years with such a "randomcratic" government; and it seems that Wikipedia cannot either.

All the best (if still possible to hope), --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 22:43, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Stolfi: "Why Uniformity Should Not Be a Goal."

The cost of uniformity

Too much edit-energy is currently spent in trying to make certain groups of articles conform to group-specific standards, such as order and title of sections, level of detail, style of figures and tables, mathematical notation, and so on.

Much of this effort has come to be associated with the Wikipedia 1.0 project and the many WikiProjects that were set up later. Many disputes betwen editors were apparently caused by conflicts between standards of overlapping Wikiprojects, or isolated editors disagreeing with the project standards, or by project standards that turn out to be inadequate for some articles.

The perceived need for uniformity is also responsible for a substantial slice of Wikipedia's complexity. It is one of the main reasons behind the absolutely ridiculous inflation of the Wikipedia style manuals and the creation of hundreds of project-specific guidelines, as well as the invention of infoboxes, the Template:Cite... templates and dozens of other formatting templates, the Wikipedia table syntax, and much more.

The perceived need for uniformity is also responsible for a substantial slice of Wikipedia's complexity. It is one of the main reasons behind the absolutely ridiculous inflation of the Wikipedia style manuals and the creation of hundreds of project-specific guidelines, as well as the invention of infoboxes...

Jorge Stolfi

The notion that uniformity is important is largely a legacy of the printed-paper world. When someone considers buying a paper encyclopedia or subscribing to a paper magazine, he will typically browse through the entire book or issue, and his decision to buy or not will be influenced to a large extent by the purely visual aesthetic quality of the object as a whole. He will hardly notice the quality of the information contained in individual articles. Even if each article, seen in isolation, is nicely and consistently formatted, the variation from article to article will make the whole thing seem ugly and shoddy.

Moreover, uniformity of style and layout across the entire book or issue implies the existence of a tightly-managed editorial body with sufficient human and financial resources; and the buyer will unconsciously assume that the same strict oversight that is evident in the style of all articles was applied also to their content and accuracy.

Uniformity of style, layout, language and notation is also important large works which will be extensively read, either serially (e.g. novels, textbooks, chronicles) or randomly (e.g. dictionaries, manuals, travel guides, catalogs). Uniformity then helps the reader because he has to learn the section structure, notation and terminology only once; and helps the writer because he does not have to redefine terms and notation again in every chapter or section. A uniform layout also helps the reader to quickly find specific information in each section (dates, theorems, part numbers, open hours, etc.)

Wikipedia is not paper

However, Wikipedia is not sold in bookstores. It is not a paper encyclopedia, nor a magazine or scholarly journal; it is not a manual, catalog, textbook, travel guide, etc. etc.; nor a library of such things. Therefore, none of the above reasons apply to it.

Wikipedia does not have to "sell" itself, and readers never have to decide whether they should "buy" it. So Wikipedia does not need to try to look nice to casual browsers.

Most readers will come to Wikipedia in search of very specific information, and therefore will read only one or two articles; and those are the readers Wikipedia is being written for. Some readers may browse Wikipedia for pleasure or general curiosity, but these should not be our primary targets; and, anyway, these "surfers" are likely to jump haphazardly from dinosaur to Dyna-Soar to sore throat, so they will hardly notice whether Dyna-Soar and X15 have a uniform structure or not. Moreover Wikipedia does not have a tightly managed editorial team nor hired editors, and will never have; therefore it should not try to pretend that it has them.

Wikipedia is also not a manual, catalog, textbook, travel guide, etc. etc.; nor a library of such things. It is unlikely that a reader will want to go through all Wikipedia articles on "racing cars" or "christianity" in a single session, much less in any specific order chosen by the editors. Readers who want general information on those topics should (and generally will) read the appropriate master or overview articles, and then perhaps they will read one or two of the subsidiary articles. But they are just as likely to jump instead to related but off-topic articles, such as "gasoline" or "Nero".

As for readers who want to learn calculus or convert to Buddhism, they will find that a Wikibook or a regular book is much more effective, and much more pleasant to read, than any collection of Wikipedia articles.

Finally, the drive for uniformity across all articles of any given theme is both a symptom and a tool of "tribalism", the tendency to fragment the pool of editors into "tribes" of people with similar interests, backgrounds, tastes, etc. Tribalism should be discouraged in Wikipedia, because it runs against the fundamental unity of knowledge, and hence of Wikipedia; and because is encourages biased points of view, and leads to a situation where the larger groups can impose their views on smaller groups and isolated editors by sheer numerical strength, than by the strength of arguments. These costs negate any advantages that the formation of tribes might have. But that problem is the topic of another essay.

Good uniformity

A standard that aims to achieve uniformity across articles is important only to the extent that it might substantially help the bulk of Wikipedia readers. If most readers generally access Wikipedia sporadiclly and randomly, as I believe, then the only standards worth enforcing are those that can be enforced for all articles, independently of topic; and which can be unconsciously learned by those casual readers after reading two or three random articles.

Very few style standards will pass the above criteria. Examples of good and important standards are the use of bold in the lead section only for the article's topic, and the rule that the first sentence must be a definition of that topic. These rules helps the reader have a clear idea of whether he got to the right page, and also give him the most important information about the topic. Examples of somewhat helpful but not so important rules are the consistent placement and contents of the "See also"/"References"/"External links" sections. These standards are generally desirable, but alternative layouts and section titles should be accepted if they are expected to be substantially more helpful to the readers of a particular article.

Examples of standards that should not be established, even among a small set of related articles, are the level of detail, table layout and colors, the number and arrangement of the other sections, names of variables, style of figures, etc. It would be nice if they were uniform, but the value of such uniformity to readers is insignificant compared to the cost of implementing that standard across 10-20 articles.

Stolfi on the BLP hysteria

Sorry if "wikinazi" was too strong. Is "wikitaliban" better? "Wikihutu" perhaps?

Deletionism is the belief that one can make Wikipedia better by deleting articles that "do not belong", where the definition of "belongs" was made up by the deletionists themselves and passed as law by a "consensus" process that, in any other context, would be called "ballot fraud". It is exactly the same ideology that led the Taliban to blow up those old Buddhas (and to countless other similar incidents all over the world), and that leads a first-grade bully to destroy the homework of other kids.

Implicit in that idelology is the assumption that those who do not accept that particular definition of "belongs" do not themselves "belong", and therefore their opinion counts for nothing. When a certain deletionist refers to tens of thousands of valid but unsourced BLPs as "crap", one must infer that the editors who created them are "crap" too.

Every article that has been deleted because of the notabiliy rule is obviously a vote against the notability rule. But try suggesting to a deletionists that those votes be counted. It is like saying that the nazis should have asked the jews what they they thought of the racial laws, or that the Taliban should have sought the opinion of the rest of the world before deciding what to do with the Buddhas.

I used to think that deletionists did not care for the feelings of those editors who had their work deleted. Now I believe that they *do* care, in the same sense that the Taliban cared for the Buddhists' feelings. In both cases, "deleting what does not belong" may have been the ostensive conscious justification for the act; but the real subconscious motive was to irritate all those who were fond of the thing destroyed. The purpose of the act was to send a message to those who did not recognize the authority of the destroyers: "look, we are the bosses here, we can do this even though you hate it". The feeling of impotent anger that the bulies inflict on their victims is not an incidental side effect, but the very point of bullying. Those Buddhas would not have been destroyed, if they were not dear to anyone.

I know that feeling of frustrated anger quite well. In spite of my years of experience and understanding of the rules, I could not avoid having hours of my work being deleted simply because it did not fit some set of stupid criteria that were unfairly passed and ineptly applied by a handful of lazy and arrogant deletionists. Whatever your opinion on the merit of articles deletions, you must be aware of their effect on the victims. So, hopefully my use of the term "wikinazis" will give you an idea of how I — and tens of thousands of other editors — felt in those cases. And, seeing how the RfC has been handled, it is clear to me that my opinion — and that of all those other offended editors — will not be counted anyway, whatever words I may use. Just for being an "inclusionist", my opinion is automatically irrelevant.

The discussion about unsourced BLPs has made it clear that Wikipedia does not have an "unsourced BLP problem". It has been shown that those articles are no more problematic than any other kind of article; and that a large fraction of them are valid — even by the deletionists' notability criteria. Therefore, simply deleting the unsourced BLPs is not an option. Sure it would be nice if all BLPs had references, just as it would be nice if all stubs were expanded and all badly written articles were cleaned up. But deleting a BLP because it has been sitting there unsourced for years is as absurd as deleting a stub because it has not been expanded in years. The *only* proper way of handling an unsourced BLP (or a stub, or a badly written article) is to look for sources and edit it accordingly. Of course, that takes at least 15 minutes per article, if not several hours. If we have 50,000 unsourced BLPs, it is for the same reason that we have 1,500,000 stubs: no editor had yet the time or motivation to work on them. But that is inevitable. Wikipedia will *always* have millions of "need urgent work" articles that will remain in that state for years. We must either accept that as an essential part of the nature of Wikipedia, or go insane.

The "unsourced BLP problem" was created by the deletionists themselves, who took that non-problem and unilaterally defined it as a "top priority problem". Presumably they picked those articles because they were an easily identified category of Buddhas articles that did not "belong" in their view, and wich could be identified and blown up deleted with very little effort.

If it were only a matter of *my* feelings, I would either put up or give up. But deletionism is not bad *for me*, it is bad *for Wikipedia*, in a big way. Perhaps a million Wikipedia articles are now defaced by stupid article-side tags, inserted by arrogant deletionists who think that their crusade is worth violating the most basic editing principles. Thanks to the people who have actually looked at those BLPs, we know that deletionism has resulted in the destruction of thousands of valid articles. (Unfortuntely we do not know how many, because deletion is so absolute). Worse, taggings and deletions has probably caused thousands of editors to leave: not just lay newbies, but *expert* and *experienced* editors — the kind we desperately need to cleanup articles like Thebes, Egypt or Subroutine. And, worse still, deletonists are giving Wikipedia some very bad press: this time not by lay journalists, but by veteran and net-savy former editors who once loved Wikipedia and are very upset by what the deletionists and taggers are doing to it.

Eighty years ago some Germans decided to "improve" their country by first tagging and then deleting certain people who, in their view, did not "belong" in it. (Again, nothing particular about Germany: this has happened and is happening countless other times, among all nations of the world.) When it was all over, and deaths and damages had been counted, it became clear that the worst enemies that the German people ever had, in all their history, were precisely those who claimed — and perhaps even believed — to be their most genuine members and their most determined saviors. Let's hope that Wikipedia fares better.

All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 04:51, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Stolfi: Wikipedia Is Dying...

Wikipedia Is Dying — and What Can Be Done About It

Comedy Department

Warning template for WP vandalism coming from the IPs of Christian schools

...And for those whose IP addresses indicate that they're editing from a Christian church or parochial school, we would want to display this warning:

Attention

Your IP address 163.150.225.201 will be logged by the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc and disseminated publicly. Violators of our Terms of Use can and will offend THE LORD, who takes defacement, knowingly providing false information, and/or uploading copyrighted material without permission from rights holders very seriously. Ephesians 4:29 commands that you refrain from such corrupt communication. Failure to repent of these sinful actions can result in everlasting destruction (2 Thessalonians 1:9), with the smoke of your torment ascending up for ever and ever (Revelation 14:11), after you are cast into Hell, where your worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched (Matthew 9:44, 46 and 48). Submit to the powers that be (Romans 13:1) and pray that you not be led into such temptation, but be delivered from evil. As irrevocably as your soul may be condemned to eternal punishment for violating the sanctity of this encyclopedia, you agree to release your contributions under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL.

Thanks, Tim, for defending my articles. How did you find them? I believe there is anti-Christian bias at work here. The dedication of those wanting to kill the article is unrelenting. QAnd the one North Louisiana History does not mention religion at all. Thanks again, Billy Hathorn (talk) 02:28, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Tisane (talk) 18:13, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

@@ Line 715: / Line 715: @@
 Your IP address [[User talk:163.150.225.201|163.150.225.201]] will be logged by the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc and disseminated publicly.  Violators of our [[wmf:Terms of Use|Terms of Use]] can and will offend <big>'''[[God|THE LORD]]'''</big>, who takes defacement, knowingly providing false information, and/or uploading copyrighted material without permission from rights holders very seriously. [[Ephesians]] 4:29 commands that you refrain from such corrupt communication. Failure to repent of these sinful actions can result in everlasting destruction ([[2 Thessalonians]] 1:9), with the smoke of your torment ascending up for ever and ever ([[Revelation]] 14:11), after you are cast into [[Hell]], where your worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched ([[Matthew]] 9:44, 46 and 48). Submit to [[the powers that be]] ([[Romans]] 13:1) and [[Lord's prayer|pray that you not be led into such temptation, but be delivered from evil]]. As irrevocably as your soul may be condemned to eternal punishment for violating the sanctity of this encyclopedia, you agree to release your contributions under the [[Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License |CC-BY-SA 3.0]] License and the [[Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License|GFDL]].
 }}
+:Thanks, Tim, for defending my articles. How did you find them? I believe there is anti-Christian bias at work here. The dedication of those wanting to kill the article is unrelenting. QAnd the one [[North Louisiana History]] does not mention religion at all. Thanks again, [[User:Billy Hathorn|Billy Hathorn]] ([[User talk:Billy Hathorn|talk]]) 02:28, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
 [[User:Tisane|Tisane]] ([[User talk:Tisane|talk]]) 18:13, 8 May 2010 (UTC)