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What happened to the "open door policy"? Or the general view that your talk page has a special status as quasi village pump (not like any other user talk page), and that excluding people from it needs a pretty damn good reason? Rd232talk19:40, 21 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
If I may; Jimbo has every right to ban anyone he wants to from his talk page. It's his talk page, not a village pump. There are plenty of people watching what Andreas writes here and elsewhere, and I'm sure Jimbo's attention will be drawn to it from time to time. He and Andreas are on the same side, essentially. This is all very regrettable. Jimbo could have, should have, been more practically responsive to many of Andreas's valid concerns. Andreas should have maintained his usual high level of respectfulness. This bridge is broken but not burned, yet. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 03:24, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
RFC/U for Apteva: move to close
I am notifying all participants in Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Apteva that Dicklyon has moved to close the RFC/U, with a summary on the talkpage. Editors may now support or oppose the motion, or add comments:
Your conspiracy theories are frankly ridiculous. If you believe that Google can buy Wikipedia's cooperation (especially with a measly $500,000) you're crazy. And if you think that Jimbo can influence the community to do his bidding, you're even more crazy. Frankly I have a hard time believing that you actually hold either of these views, as you are a generally intelligent person otherwise. Is it really so outlandish to think that Google, Jimbo, and the Wikipedia community could all oppose SOPA independently? I certainly opposed it, and no one even paid me to. Kaldari (talk) 00:12, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
People were told that the survival of Wikipedia was threatened by SOPA: Tim Starling decisively put his boot through that one. It was simply a falsity the community were told. Furthermore, I didn't like it that IP votes were allowed in the SOPA vote and people were told to stop marking single-purpose accounts. We exclude single-purpose accounts even from AfDs, but in the blackout vote, which turned Wikipedia from an NPOV encyclopedia into a political animal, we counted people turning up here for the first time the same as people who had made tens of thousands of edits here? Sorry, that does not feel right. And that decision came from WMF people, not the community. In addition, the vote was canvassed externally. We all know that relations between Google and WMF are "friendly"; Wales has said as much himself. Well, Google is a profit-making enterprise, and Wikipedia has no business being "friendly" with those, or at least no business being more friendly with them than with other profit-making enterprises. Google's astroturfing and the way the company uses its money to buy influence are very well documented. It's how multi-billion dollar businesses work, mate. Season's greetings, AndreasJN46600:24, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No one said "the survival of Wikipedia was threatened by SOPA". The quality of Wikipedia and it ability to operate free from government interference certainly were threatened by SOPA. The reason single-purpose accounts were allowed to vote was obvious: Most Wikipedia community members don't normally edit on meta. Yes the vote was advertized extensively, as was appropriate. It wasn't canvassed. And I know you know the difference. Yes, Google and Wikipedia are on friendly terms. So what? The Foundation is religiously dogmatic about not allowing any corporate influence. You can accuse the Foundation of lots of things, but it's absurd to suggest that it could be controlled by Google, especially with $500,000. That's the amount of money the annual fundraiser raises in 6 hours. Speaking of which, the smoking gun of Sergey Brin's November 18th donation just happens to correspond with the beginning of last year's fundraiser. Is it so implausible to think that he donated on that date because that's when everyone else was donating as well? Kaldari (talk) 00:51, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The vote to black out the English Wikipedia was not on Meta, but here in the English Wikipedia. SPAs really were SPAs (the vote was canvassed on Reddit, here for example – 3878 up votes), and an editor was taken to ANI for tagging them, and told to stop. Philippe expressly said that completely new accounts' votes should have the same weight as those of established editors. Did you read Tim's mail above? Do you disagree with his argument? The rhetoric at the time was quite extreme -- "devastating to the free and open web", "if Wikipedia will be destroyed than we cannot let them destroy the internet", How SOPA will hurt the free web and Wikipedia and so forth. As for amounts, people build cultures of little favours to keep each other sweet: and half a million is not an insignificant amount: Philippe was only just saying that donations like that take months of work for him and his colleagues. There is no question that Google took a leading role in planning SOPA action and that Wikipedia collaborated with one set of commercial interests against another. As far as I am concerned, Wikipedia lost its neutrality that day. AndreasJN46601:55, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You're right, it was on en.wiki, but the same argument still applies. Most Wikipedians don't edit primarily on en.wiki, but lots of non-English Wikipedians had a strong interest in participating, especially since SOPA would have mainly effected access to websites outside the U.S. This was also a matter of interest to Wikipedia readers, many of whom wanted to participate even if they had never edited Wikipedia. Regardless, the results were a landslide, so I don't even see how this nitpicking is relevant. I read Tim's email and agree with most of it. He was debunking 2 statements:
The strawman that SOPA would threaten the existence of Wikipedia (which no one had actually argued)
Geoff's claim that compliance with court orders would be technically difficult
Let's look at number 1 first. Here is Geoff's blog post that David Gerard characterized as being the opinion that SOPA will threaten the existence of Wikipedia. If you read the blog post, you'll see that Geoff says no such thing. David Gerard's characterization of Geoff's post is a misleading strawman. Geoff said that it was possible that Wikipedia could be considered a search engine and be forced to remove external links, which seems reasonable given the broad definition in the statute. Personally, I agree with Geoff on this one, but even if I didn't, it's immaterial. If foreign websites start disappearing from the internet, it won't matter if we are forced to remove the links or not.
Regarding claim #2, I think Tim is completely right about this, and Geoff was just mistaken (as he has little technical knowledge of Wikipedia's databases). I find it ironic that you accept Tim's technical opinion (which is clearly his domain of expertise), but you reject Geoff's legal opinion (which is his area of expertise).
Regardless, I think most of the information in Geoff's blog post was accurate. You can attack other people's version of what he said all you want, but his actual statements were far from scaremongering. He even pointed out examples of how the bill had improved recently. Personally, I don't think his post went far enough. SOPA was a clear danger to Wikipedia (not to its existence, but to its ability to cite information). If you doubt that, ask yourself how likely it would have been for the U.S. government to use SOPA to make the Wikileaks memos disappear off the internet (which are widely cited on Wikipedia)? You might call that a conspiracy theory, but I think it's more likely than the one you've offered :) Kaldari (talk) 02:58, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Here are my 2 challenges to you:
Show me one example of the Wikimedia Foundation stating that SOPA threatened the existence of Wikipedia. You've pointed out several examples of people saying this, but none were representatives of WMF.
Show me one concrete piece of evidence that the WMF's actions were influenced by Google.
Look, Reddit threads with literally thousands of upvotes and a link to the page are far more likely to have attracted a lot of new accounts voting a particular way, given that Reddit was already campaigning against SOPA, than anything else. If you think what we got was a representative cross-section of our readership then I would strongly disagree with that estimation. David Gerard is an official Wikimedia spokesman, and I reckon he would have made the same sorts of statements at the time. I agree Geoff was quite careful in what he said, but some of his detail was lost in translation, and rank-and-file Wikipedians understood something rather different. No time right now for more. AndreasJN46605:51, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
"David Gerard is an official Wikimedia spokesman". If by "official" you mean "volunteer" who disagrees with pretty much everything the WMF ever does or says. You may have a point about Reddit, but I think this requires some scientific investigation before anyone can make claims one way or the other. It would be interesting to see how the votes would have turned out if new users were, in fact, excluded. Kaldari (talk) 06:33, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
"Official" as in the Press room page on meta, "Other regional contacts by language". Kaldari, if you are denying such easily documented and indisputable facts as this, just how reasonable can one expect you to be regarding the WMF political actions? (i.e. situations where there may be very strong circumstantial evidence, but not a "smoking gun"). -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 09:37, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Did you bother reading the disclaimer right above his name? It says The following individuals are long time Wikipedians. Some speak officially for the Wikimedia Foundation, others do not. David Gerard certainly does not. Kaldari (talk) 10:04, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
If we are going to play legalistic parsing games, note my point was to "official". If you want to say that to be precise, he's an official Wikimedia regional contact, not spokesman, that's true, but not refuting the substance of the point that he is given an official status, as documented on the Wikimedia Foundation press room page. Again, why are we wasting time with this? I'm all for absolute accuracy, so if you wanted to observe in passing that he's a regional contact, not spokesman, as a matter of keeping terminology clear, fine. But using that as any implication of no official status is far more inaccurate than the confusion of the terms. Once more, look at how much tedium we have to grind through over this little detail. Now project this to analysis of possible undue influence of a major donor. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 10:37, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I ran a script on the votes and manually spot checked it. Here's what I came up with:
Option
Total Votes
Registered Users
Autoconfirmed Users
1. Blackout US only, global banner
479 (39.6%)
443 (39.1%)
395 (38.9%)
2. Global blackout and banner
591 (48.9%)
558 (49.3%)
497 (49.0%)
3. Blackout and banner both US only
24 (2.0%)
24 (2.1%)
22 (2.2%)
4. No blackout, global banner
20 (1.7%)
18 (1.6%)
18 (1.8%)
5. No blackout, banner US only
19 (1.6%)
17 (1.5%)
16 (1.6%)
6. No blackout and no banner
76 (6.3%)
72 (6.4%)
67 (6.6%)
It looks like there was some inflation from IPs and single-use accounts, but it's spread out pretty evenly between all the different options. Even if all the non-autoconfirmed users are excluded from the tally, it changes the blackout-vs.-no-blackout result by less than half of 1 percent. In other words, the results are virtually the same. Let me know if you want the raw user lists so you can verify for yourself. Also, it should be mentioned that there was a straw poll before this vote that showed 89.9% support for doing something about SOPA. It's extremely rare that any proposal on Wikipedia gets that kind of overwhelming support. Kaldari (talk) 09:27, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
What do you find so hard to understand? SOPA affected ad-networks, search engines, and payment processors, that were dealing with non US based websites whose primary purpose was the distribution of pirate and counterfeit goods. Wikipedia falls into none of those categories. A small group 'Fight for the Future' was formed and given $300,000 through a front organisation, this small group, of essentially nobodies, is then flying from one coast to another to a strategy meeting at Mozilla HQ (worth $300 million a year to Google) with Google and the great and the good in Silicon Valley. Google at the same time is splashing out on Washington lobbyists, spending something in the region of $10 million above there usual budget. Their other front organisations such as Public Knowledge are also out shouting "The WOLF is coming, the WOLF is coming". I don't recall a single statement from the time that was balanced, perhaps you can find one that was not full of bullshit.
Back to blackouts. In October the Italian wikipedia was blacked out to protest some Italian anti-defamation legislation. I note that Jimmy Wales gave luke warm support to that, but thought that similar wouldn't happen elsewhere as there was greater influence with the governments. At the same time there was a tentative anonymous post onto meta calling for action on PIPA. Note the lie there it is repeated throughout the SOPA/PIPA campaigns that the bills would affect YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook etc, all US based websites which the SOPA/PIPA legislation excluded.
One idea out of 9th of November meeting was to blackout the various site logos on the 16th of November, this was chatted about between WMF staff and Fight For the Future. WMF staff were in agreement but couldn't act without community agreement, (see Village Pump for 15th November) there wasn't consensus for that. However WMF put out a statement saying that wikipedia was opposed to the legislation. At the same time negotiations had been proceeding for a $500,000 donation from the Brin's this was announced on the same day as the blog posting (after some 6 months of negotiations). On other sites the Fight for the Future people are attempting to dragoon the communities into supporting a blackout protest, REDDIT is the first to sign up (the management, Conde Nast [another mega-corporation], were at the 9th of November meeting). Jimmy Wales (remember him luke warm Italian supporter in early October, doesn't believe that anything like that would be necessary in the UK etc, is now throwing his weight behind such a protest in the US.
The troops are marshalled and sent into battle to support the advertising revenues of mega tech corporations.
Now which is more believable, that $500,000 was made available by Google to keep one of its friends blind sided, and that in general an anti RIAA sentiment was manipulated for the profit of a mega corporation, or that Congress was planning a constitutional coup, bypassing legal processes all on behalf of the MPAA/RIAA? Kaldari you were bought and sold. As they say: online if you aren't being charged then you are being sold. Accept it or dismiss it any way you can. John lilburne (talk) 10:42, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don't care if Fight for the Future and Google are the devil's own spawn; it's irrelevant to my point. The Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community acted of their own volition due to their own interests. If those interests happened to have coincided with Google's interests, that's not an implication of the Foundation's motives or independence. Lots of organizations and individuals donate money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Some of them donate a lot more than $500,000. Under no circumstances, however, will the Wikimedia Foundation accept any money with corporate strings attached. Think about it for a second. If the Wikimedia Foundation was willing to accept money for favors, do you honestly think they would need to have an annual fundraiser? And as I've pointed out before, Brin's donation was right at the beginning of the fundraiser, so there was nothing fishy about the timing. And although plenty of other organizations may have been crying wolf about SOPA, the Wikimedia Foundation wasn't one of them. The information presented by the Foundation was factual and well-researched. You can try to rewrite history with your house-of-cards conspiracy theory, but I'll keep shooting holes through it because it's a bunch of baloney. So far none of you have presented a single compelling piece of evidence that Google influenced the Wikipedia blackout, or that the Wikimedia Foundation was misleading people with scaremongering. Frankly I don't see how you can be so adamant in your arguments with such a paucity of evidence. Kaldari (talk) 11:27, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No the WMF did not act on their own volition, FFF were in contact with them in early November 2011, immediatly after the strategy meeting with Google. The Community was initially not in favour of making a political statement, that support was garnered and built upon lies, such as SOPA having direct impact on wikipedia. It did not, wikipedia was not affected by SOPA, nor was YouTube, nor Facebook, nor Twitter, all lies put about by Google and its shills. None of the sites that they said were affected were affected, you were manipulated by lies on behalf of tech corporations. Would $500,000 have been given to wikipedia if they had opposed the SOPA boycott or been neutral on the matter, we'll never know. What we do know is that after the $500,000 the WMF did not put to rest the lie that wikipedia would be affected by the legislation. John lilburne (talk) 11:53, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikimedia Foundation is in contact with lots of organizations. For example, we regularly talk to the FBI. Are you going to tell me that the FBI secretly controls the Foundation? Being in contact with the FFF proves absolutely nothing. Why do you believe the contact didn't involve mutual interests, but only the interests of the FFF?
Secondly, when was the community not in favor of making a political statement? You're going to have to show some evidence for that one, and more than just an exchange between 2 people on the village pump.
Finally, your assertion that SOPA would not have affected Wikipedia is absurd. Wikipedia depends on unfettered access to information spread throughout the internet. Do you have any idea how often law enforcement agencies inadvertently takes down innocent websites because they happen to be on the same rack or IP address as an illegal site? Now imagine that times 1000 and without any recourse or oversight. Kaldari (talk) 12:14, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Firstly no one is talking about legitimate sites, but prove me wrong list links from wikipedia to sites and pages whose primary purpose is the distribution of pirate and counterfeit goods. Lets see what the extent of the issue is for wikipedia. Just much does wikipedia rely upon pirate and counterfeit sites?
Secondly, 'golf course' agreements and chats in bars amongst friends to help a bro out, and crony capitalism and $500K to oil the wheels what is the difference? John lilburne (talk) 13:27, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Re challenge 1, Sue Gardner's letter announcing the ban said the legislation "if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia". She quotes "devastating to the free and open web." "We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it. But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to." "We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States, don’t advance the interests of the general public ..." "hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone."
This is not a neutral, encyclopedic, NPOV description of the legislation and its effects, but a piece of propaganda. The language is dripping with emotiveness and calculated to create the impression that Wikipedia and other sites like it were threatened with "devastation". In fact, what would have happened is that instead of having http://thepiratebay.se/ at the bottom of the Pirate Bay article it would have been http://thepiratebay.se/. Wow. That really would have compromised Wikipedia's educational mission!
And if you agree with Tim's technical argument, why weren't people like him consulted before describing the effects on Wikipedia to the community? The WMF loaded the dice right from the beginning: through the way it described the problem, which was calculated to panic people, and through the way it suspended ordinary limits on participation in an RfC to allow externally canvassed votes in. How many Redditors have Wikipedia accounts that are more than four days old, or have made more than ten edits? As it was, the result was preordained. Moral: to generate a stampede, just shout "fire" in a cinema. --AndreasJN46612:08, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, Sue said that SOPA would damage Wikipedia, which is likely true. She didn't say it would threaten Wikipedia's existence. We seem to have very different opinions on what effects SOPA actually could have had on Wikipedia and the rest of the internet. Thus your view that the WMF was scaremongering and my view that they weren't being proactive enough. As it's about 5 hours past my bedtime, I'm not going to devote another hour to elaborating on the dangers of SOPA. You can start with reading the Stop Online Piracy Act article (which Google paid me handsomely to write). If you really think SOPA was basically harmless, you're keeping your head in the sand. Yes, there was lots of misinformation being spread at the time (from both sides of the debate), but there were also lots of people legitimately and rightly worried about the effects of this legislation. You're welcome to argue with those concerns, but there's no need to resort to far-flung conspiracy theories. Kaldari (talk) 12:45, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sue said the legislation would be "devastating to the free and open web." "We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. The message is quite clear, i.e. that it would become impossible for Wikipedia to operate, and that is indeed the understanding many Wikipedians took away from it.
But more importantly, Wikimedia is premised on the principle of the neutral point of view. It's a fundamental pillar of what this site has always said it stands for. There is much that is wrong with Wikipedia, but this principle is not one of those things. It is laudable. I believed in that principle when I started participating here, and adding value to this site. This principle of neutrality was jettisoned in the SOPA affair. You do not tell people that you are above politics and invite their participation on that basis, only to then turn around and take sides in a political dispute. It was a breach of trust, and a violation of the covenant underlying people's participation here. Information on SOPA given to the community should have been encyclopedic, and presented both sides of the argument neutrally, as would befit a neutral encyclopedia. We tell our contributors to "write for the enemy". In not doing so themselves, the WMF was exposed as a hypocrite. I am no friend of SOPA, but I considered the value of the NPOV principle a higher one. AndreasJN46613:28, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Conspiracy pish. The SOPA boycott was orchestrated by a criminal, tax avoiding, company of scofflaws and their cohorts. Hardly a conspiracy given the number of them that are bragging about it. Also hardly a political awakening of the masses as those congressmen that supported SOPA suffered no backlash 9 months later when they came up for election. Just a flash mob shepherded to the stockyards, cajoled along by lies. John lilburne (talk) 13:42, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Irrespective of our different viewpoints on this, Kaldari, I appreciate your honestly held perspective, and your coming here to let me know about it. It's quite possible for a critic to become too jaundiced, and dialogue is useful. You are always welcome here. AndreasJN46616:59, 26 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
