If there is lack of advanced flag, probably the best strategy is to make users close to them. I always suggest autopatrolled, mover, sysop flags to a lot of users on the platforms I'm active, there is a lot of people who still can be involved. Sometimes you need some very simple wikimetrics to find them. So the lack of certain classes of users is often a minor problem or a mentality one... if you want to find some, you can find them easily. On itwiki we did with rollbackers, we just selected the users who had more revert edits, scroll the top of the lists, selected those who were active, suggest them to ask for the flag... after 6 months we had increased the number of rollbackers, who later also became sysop after a de facto small ''cursus honorum''. The only reason why this can't be done is that there is always some long-term user who some very generic statement about automatism or whatever, even if nothing of this is automatic. it's just statistics. And it works. The are many known examples.--[[User:Alexmar983|Alexmar983]] ([[User talk:Alexmar983|talk]]) 05:28, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
If there is lack of advanced flag, probably the best strategy is to make users close to them. I always suggest autopatrolled, mover, sysop flags to a lot of users on the platforms I'm active, there is a lot of people who still can be involved. Sometimes you need some very simple wikimetrics to find them. So the lack of certain classes of users is often a minor problem or a mentality one... if you want to find some, you can find them easily. On itwiki we did with rollbackers, we just selected the users who had more revert edits, scroll the top of the lists, selected those who were active, suggest them to ask for the flag... after 6 months we had increased the number of rollbackers, who later also became sysop after a de facto small ''cursus honorum''. The only reason why this can't be done is that there is always some long-term user who some very generic statement about automatism or whatever, even if nothing of this is automatic. it's just statistics. And it works. The are many known examples.--[[User:Alexmar983|Alexmar983]] ([[User talk:Alexmar983|talk]]) 05:28, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
== Yo! ==
Anybody from the ArbCom yet ?<br>[[Special:Contributions/83.30.74.180|83.30.74.180]] ([[User talk:83.30.74.180|talk]]) 12:58, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
Revision as of 12:58, 15 November 2016
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I came here from the thread at WP:ANI about your account being compromised, as evidenced from the flurry of recent edits made on your account that have since been rev deleted. How did this happen? Did someone find out your password somehow? And most importantly, can you ensure it won't happen again? Everymorning(talk)00:50, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't fully know what happened, of course, though I have some ideas. Presently I have a very strong password and also turned on two factor authentication, which I recommend to everyone.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:37, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Jimbo,
I am sorry to take your precious time. I would like just to ask you is that normal for Wikipedia to have such offensive article [1][2] madding "Humor" abuses, offences, and mockery about Macedonians and the stateRepublic of Macedonia, and not only offending Macedonians but Greeks, as well. Can someone, please, delete or remove that harassment site. Can anyone ban creators of that site. Thanks! Regards! 77.234.44.147 (talk) 15:54, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The IP raises an excellent point. This is a "humorous" article in Wikipedia space on the Serbo-Croat Wikipedia, which unless I've missed some incredibly subtle humour (unlikely, knowing the relationship between the countries) is basically an insulting screed against Macedonia and Macedonians. Apparently the country only exists "because of a conspiracy between the United Nations in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation", the inhabitants are mostly overweight, and their most famous athlete is a dog. The article is unsurprisingly regularly vandalised, but is restored and protected by sh.wiki admins. Someone with the appropriate permissions needs to get this gone, and have a wor with the admins involved. Black Kite (talk)17:19, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I agree and I would also add here national symbol insults involved, as on national coat of arms (Greek one), national flag (modified war Japanese flag), national anthem (allegedly "bread and chutney"), national motto(killing), name o the people ("Janevistanians"), than capital of the state (allegedly Greek city of Thessaloniki), etc. For example national macedonian motto contain a threat "You will be killed",and so on. Libertarian Macedonian (talk) 20:47, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I can't read any of it and for some reason Google Translate appears down from here at the moment. So I can only comment on the principle, which is really all the matters here. There is no reason for any offensive humor to exist in any place on any Wikimedia projects at any time. This is always true, but especially true in areas and places that have to to with insults on national cultures in parts of the world where sensitivities due to past and recent conflict is high.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:16, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikilink is sh:User:Orijentolog/Janevistan; it's a user's private subpage. When you think about the magnitude of abuses by administrators on many of the small wikis who block would-be editors and impose bias in article space, I think that it would be absolutely a terrible precedent to go after the Serbo-Croatian Wiki because they don't censor user pages according to American standards of political correctness. Their welcome message to me as a user says that you can post on some of their forums in English, and you are free to mount the bully pulpit if you want, but please, don't go beyond that. Wnt (talk) 22:39, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Wnt, as usual on this and similar issues, you are wrong. Wikipedia need not tolerate nasty behavior, ever. "American standards of political correctness" is a silly thing to say in this context. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, worldwide. The values of Wikipedia are universal.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:42, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In may opinion, Wikipedia should apply some universally accepted standards. Insults on national symbols are prohibited in every state in the world and in the International Law. At least Wiki rules should apply [3]. Furthermore, there were threats such as "You will be killed" (Geslo: "Bićeš ubijen!")that were absolutely unacceptable. I should also mention that after protest of Macedonian administrator [4]] Ehrlich91, that hate speach was clearly insult to the all Macedonians, nothing happened. Regards. Libertarian Macedonian (talk) 23:30, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
"Insults on national symbols are prohibited in every state in the world and in the international law" - this is 100% false and 100% irrelevant.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:40, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Dear Jimmy, whatever you decide is fine with me. If this admins. on sh.wiki think that Macedonians are fat and stupid or primitive its ok. Thank you for your precious time. Forgive me for any inconvenience. Best wishes!Libertarian Macedonian (talk) 23:48, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Nope. Burning is considered the appropriate mechanism for disposal of old and damaged flags. The Boy Scouts of America burn more flags than all the Muslims in the world combined. Guy (Help!) 00:52, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Flag desecration in the United States was formerly banned by unconstitutional legislation. The Supreme Court has upheld not merely the physical act of burning a flag but the right to deface and destroy it as an expression of personal contempt or for any other reason. This wise ruling has, incidentally, caused flag desecration to go from being frequent national news to something that is almost unheard of, because without the prosecutions, people simply don't care - and if they don't care, there is little reason to bother. Wnt (talk) 12:42, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Still, US is well-known for large percentage of cases involving personal offences. But to say: country only exists "because of a conspiracy between the United Nations in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation" is a more serious situation. At least in Balkan countries you may not go with these defamations, unless you are prepared to pay a large amount of money. Libertarian Macedonian (talk) 01:13, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Mr. Wales, I frankly don't see much meaning in your statement that "Wikipedia need not ever tolerate nasty behavior." There are a wide range of things that go on here that can be considered "nasty", but what do you take action against? I would suggest that admins on small wikis who ban people without explanation or for writing contrary to the Official POV would be far "nastier" than someone who has some rude national humor on a user page. I think that Polish jokes and Russian reversals and even more mean-spirited efforts like Life of Brian or the 'fatface' actors in Austin Powers have some legitimate place in culture. When you act to say that small wikis must never permit users to transgress your boundaries of politeness while failing to take such invasive action where substantive article content bias issues are concerned, you send a powerful message that Wikipedia is an entertainment product meant not to offend rather than one whose educational agenda is foremost. Wnt (talk) 12:32, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Mr. Wnt, have you read that article? Please do so. You will see unseen offences with the death threats and defamations in each sentence of Janevistan. It shows the pattern of nasty and unlawful behavior, contrary to the rules of conduct for internet media. If you read conversation between Mac. admin. and SH. admin. you will see that SH.Wiki admin (O.C.Riper) admits wrongdoing but is reluctant to do anything abuot it! Still, I am glad to report that one of co-creators of Janevistan was finally banned from editing by Wikimedia Foundation [5], for other reasons (Wikimedia Foundation Block: Disruptive and superfluous edits).5.45.62.131 (talk) 14:41, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If I may add here that the banned user of SH.Wiki Kolega2357 was also involved in fabrication of famous "Hoax" META story about Igor Janev, claiming that he does not exist [6]. That was accepted as a "truth" somewhere. But facts apparently speak for themselves [7].77.234.45.133 (talk) 15:41, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
So, we should keep an eye on the user page of User:Donald Trump? :) .
It appears on sh.wiki like a regular article [8] not just a subpage, when you press search button. I find interesting that the actual creator of the page consider that person as his fan[9]. See list of fans in Orjentolog list (left in Babylon).Looks to me like a stalker.5.45.62.130 (talk) 12:13, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
SH.Wikipedia is a minor small Wiki with a really bad reputation. It only makes copies from Serbian and Croatian Wikipedia. In many occasions there were formal actions from both Serbian and Croatian Wikies to close that "Serbo-Croatian Wiki", but unfortunately with no success. People there are completely incompetent and irresponsible. Actually, Serbo-Croatian language doesn't really exist any more. So all editors expelled from Serbian and Croatian Wikipedia are now there. In one word so called "Serbo-Croatian Wiki", is the embarrassment for Wikipedia in general.77.234.40.180 (talk) 13:42, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, there is quite a funny joke there. Looking at the Google Translate for the page I saw nothing but harmless drollery (to use, nostalgically, the word now rendered as "trolling", from a more civilized time when creative expression was valued). But one of their big jokes is that every major feat in Macedonian culture was performed by Igor Janev. I found an article about him at hr:Igor_Janev, which lists 13 other Wikis, including the Macedonian and the Serbian, which have similar articles; but our article on en.wikipedia has been deleted as a "blatant hoax", and 'salted' so that no one can restart it.
If Wikipedia wants to work on improving its reputation, it'd be nice to have a better way of spreading the word (or debating the issue) about hoaxes, especially BLP hoaxes, between the different language Wikipedias. Wnt (talk) 15:37, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In my opinion, the Hoax or spam story was a fake and manipulation at META and even stupid. Particularly to report on META "It was recently discovered in dewp that the article about "Igor Janev" was a fake. They could saw Google Scholar [10]. If article about him was a "blatant hoax" it would had been immediately removed on Macedonian Wikipedia and Serbian Wikipedia. But that was not the case.77.234.45.133 (talk) 15:53, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
As for trolling, I don't see anything funny by describing Macedonians as a wild primitive savages constantly attacking other people and countries with shadow "Tsar" Igor Janev, an extremist, nationalist and expansionist. Maybe he is not an A. Einstein, but he gave some notable contribution to the Macedonian science.77.234.45.133 (talk) 16:38, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The way you describe this user subpage makes me wonder if Google Translate cuts out all the good stuff. Meanwhile, I notice that Commons deleted a number of illustrations that were once part of it, on the rationale that they were posted without permission of their true author -- Igor Janev. :) [11]Wnt (talk) 17:18, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know details, but I presume that these illustrations would require that I.J. personally send approvals for OTRS, and I don't think he would ever act personally on such matters. Actually what I learned observing net, he never uses Twitter, Facebook, or any other social nets.77.234.45.133 (talk) 17:36, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, now I found it. These illustrations are photo's of I.J. fighting dog, that is, according to sh.wiki the only "Fauna" in Macedonia. The only sport in Janevistan or Macedonia is dog fighting, and the winner in dog fights is always his dog, and so on.. (never-ending nonsenses). The good stuff? Under label "Government" (sh./mk. "Vlada") goes "Tsar (in exile)" (sh. Car- Igor Janev (u izgnanstvu)), basically suggesting that person from another country rules and runs the government in Macedonia. And so on... 77.234.45.151 (talk) 22:27, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Finlay, and very provocative to the Greek state is the catastrophic suggestion that "temporary occupied" Greek city of Thessaloniki (sh. "Solun" (under Capital label)) the "capital" of Janevistan should be retaken - liberated (presumably by Macedonian army, implied by sh. editors) and that it was allegedly plan of Janevistanian or Macedonian government! These inflammatory crazy nonsenses are of very sensitive nature in Balkans and should not be tolerated on any Wikipedia, regardless of the tipe of the site. Balkan countries had enough wars in the past, and to post such diabolic suggestion for war between Greece and Macedonia is not a joke, not a humor at all, nor ordinary trolling. That site should definitely be deleted and sh. admins. blocked.77.234.45.151 (talk) 23:54, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Active adminstrators
I have updated both the active adminstrators table and the accompanying chart. ‘Activity is defined as 30 or more edits during the last two months’. This shows a dramatic decline this year, contrasted with the flat experience of 2015, and continuing the steady, almost straight line downward trend. The contrast between the steady rise to the peak in February 2008 and the subsequent decline is remarkable. I don’t know of any generally accepted explanation for this. This month (November 2016) shows a further fall to 511. Peter Damian (talk) 18:52, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for this - an interesting but disturbing trend. Could you please clarify, or point me to a page, that details whether the 30 edits are to any en-WP articles/pages or e.g. only administrative duty-type edits. DrChrissy(talk)19:08, 13 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, JPEG is great for many line drawings beyond photos, with excellent resolution as small thumbnails, where lettering or lines get thicker when reduced and much clearer on many small devices; meanwhile there was a Wikipedia bug which downloaded PNG files in huge megabyte formats for small images, as 5x slower downloads than JPEG thumbnails. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:49, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps there was an event, or series of events on or around early 2008 that we can point to as a possible initiator, if not outright cause of this downward trend? Such as a major policy change? Can anyone around from that time recall anything in particular? I didn't come around until later that year so wouldn't know. -- Ϫ03:33, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
RfA standards have been absurd for a long time. I definitely advocate a "probationary admin" category. The most widely-toted fix for admin promotion problems is mandatory recall, but that never gets consensus for the simple and obvious reason that it is vulnerable to lynch mobs of rebuffed POV-pushers. I think probationary periods might fix the long-term problem of unachievable standards. Guy (Help!) 00:49, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I very strongly support this. I'd like to see us be bold and creative about this, too, in the sense of actually going much further than we are comfortable with in some experiments. I'd be curious to know what would happen, for example, if we simply made 20 busy editors admins randomly but in a probationary way. And I'd be uncomfortable with making 100. But why not try it? Why not make 100 busy people who seem to be quietly editing away into admins for a month, and then assess the results? There would likely be a couple of problems and 98 good people would have the tools.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:23, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
One big obstacle would be the Wikimedia Foundation, specifically the legal dept as they have in the past said they need RFA or an equivalent process before handing out view deleted rights. You of course might be able to resolve that. Another more practical obstacle is that if we handed out the rights to 100 long established Wikipedians it might be a while before many of them make much use of the tools; So it could take a lot more than a couple of months before we can assess what happened when these people started using the tools. Personally I would be OK with such an experiment, even more so if the de facto criteria were a combination of no obvious red flags such as recent blocks and a reasonable amount of tenure and contributions, specifically including having created well cited content. But then I'm not one of those who would oppose an RFA for "no need for the tools" - if anything I think that every new admin is a chance to get someone who might take up some of the admin load. But if you also filtered you 100 by checking if they have made correct AIV tags then you would have appeased the "No need for the tools" brigade. As for deletionism/inclusionism, I'd start by appointing 100 who haven't got involved in deletion. ϢereSpielChequers15:07, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the WMF legal department is any obstacle in any way here. If there is serious movement to do something about the problem, we can consult with them to make sure that everything is OK with them, but I'm pretty sure that's not a problem at all. "No need for the tools" is another point that we can address pretty easily - we can just make it really clear through policy that "no need" is not a valid objection. I'd be happy to have 100 quality volunteers who use the tools only a few times a year than to have those same 100 quality volunteers not have the tools. Some of them will find the tools more useful than they thought, and/or will find a new hobby in admin tasks that they wouldn't have previously considered.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:53, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Well if you can clear it with legal and overrule the "no need" lobby then I think there is a workable solution. We just need to Agree a criteria for adminship and empower some trusted editors such as the crats to appoint people who meet that criteria. I expect things would have to get much worse before we could get consensus for such a solution, but I'd probably support such an RFC. ϢereSpielChequers22:16, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This illustrates part of a point that I've made on Wikipediocracy previously: while the count of core volunteers has stabilized and to some extent recovered from what seemed a death spiral, the tally of active administrators continues to fall unabated. At issue is whether this is a problem: clearly the number of administrators that WP used to have in the days of No Big Deal was excessive; at the moment things are more or less being handled adequately; at some future point the wheels might fall off the train. Carrite (talk) 02:27, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
What evidence would you adduce to persuade others that the number of administrators used to be excessive? You say "clearly" but it does not seem clear to me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:17, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at Peter's graph I think the anomaly is that we started this year with 593 admins, 2 up on the year before. Being down to 511 now is in line with the longterm decline. I suspect there was something in late 2015 that brought a bunch of near dormant admins back into temporarily counting as active. Whatever it is only had a short term affect and we are now back on trend. In theory we could reach a stage where an admin shortage tips us into a "death spiral" where being an admin becomes a burden as admins find themselves deluged with requests for admin action whenever they login. I can assure you we aren't there yet. More broadly, I'm not a great fan of RFA and I've seen it reject some good candidates and be unnecessarily rude to many fine editors. But a large proportion of those who do run pass by acclamation or something close to it. I believe there are hundreds of long term established editors who would probably pass RFA if they ran. Especially if they used the three standard questions to demonstrate that they had a need for the tools, had contributed to the pedia as well as protecting it, and any skeletons in their closets were dusty or learned from. ϢereSpielChequers15:27, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Peter Damian: Peter, (or anyone else) do you think it might be possible to create a very similar graph but expressing the number of active admins as a % of total admins at that time. This would give us an impression of whether it is individuals becoming less active or whether this is a population-wide trait. DrChrissy(talk)18:21, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@DrChrissy: I don't have the time to get the data on ratios - however my impression is that the decline matches that of the general population of Wikipedia. There are already graphs about this somewhere. Peter Damian (talk) 18:58, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
One should let these Admins edit from new accounts and also have the same number of the regular Admins do some of their Admin work from a new account. One can then do a blinded test where the people who evaluate the performance of these Admins don't know whether they are looking at the regular Admins or the newly assigned test Admins. Count Iblis (talk) 02:02, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Active editors
Successful RFAs by month
OK just for @DrChrissy: I found the data on active editors, i.e. editors with more than 5 edits per month. It looks similar except the peak is March 2007, not 2008. This is not the same as total admins, however. Peter Damian (talk) 20:10, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks very much for this Peter. Without doing curvilinear analysis on this, it looks to me like the number of active editors has been approximately constant since March 2013. That seems a much healthier state of affairs compared to the straight line decrease of active admins. DrChrissy(talk)20:17, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! Do we know whether this was because the number applying was constant and the failure rate increased massively, or because people simply stopped applying? Peter Damian (talk) 20:30, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I believe a combination of three things; the "bulge" who signed up in 2006-07 when Wikipedia first became high-profile had all either already applied, or had no interest; assorted unpleasant incidents in 2007-08 making people scrutinize candidates more carefully; and knock-on effects of the unbundling of rollback. ‑ Iridescent20:38, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not reading everything but for a balanced analysis I think we need a graph about the total amount of sysop activity, including those actions that were "devolved" to specific subclass of users (including rollbakcers... I suspect also movers, you know the flag system here better than I do). It's a common trend on many platforms to refine the flag system so specific functionalities are spread around. This trend has to be compared with the overall amount of edit (maybe separated by ns0 and non-ns0, patrolled and not patrolled) and check if this two trends are in agreement. If they are, than the reduction in number of sysop is not critical per se. It is just a predictable aspect of a weakening of overall participation, including sysop activity.
But even if the two trends (sysop and sysop-like actions and overall edits) are in agreement, It can be useful to check if the distribution of such actions is more or less balanced. For example if in 2008 top 20 sysop accounted for, I don't know, 30% of the action and now top 20 sysop and rollbackers account for 40%, or something like that, well that could be an issue to fix. Not as important as overall participation, but quite important.
If there is lack of advanced flag, probably the best strategy is to make users close to them. I always suggest autopatrolled, mover, sysop flags to a lot of users on the platforms I'm active, there is a lot of people who still can be involved. Sometimes you need some very simple wikimetrics to find them. So the lack of certain classes of users is often a minor problem or a mentality one... if you want to find some, you can find them easily. On itwiki we did with rollbackers, we just selected the users who had more revert edits, scroll the top of the lists, selected those who were active, suggest them to ask for the flag... after 6 months we had increased the number of rollbackers, who later also became sysop after a de facto small cursus honorum. The only reason why this can't be done is that there is always some long-term user who some very generic statement about automatism or whatever, even if nothing of this is automatic. it's just statistics. And it works. The are many known examples.--Alexmar983 (talk) 05:28, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
