User talk:DovidBenAvraham

Hello, DovidBenAvraham, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{Help me}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or or by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. Also, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! SwisterTwister talk 07:17, 7 October 2015 (UTC) Getting started Introduction Contributing to Wikipedia The five pillars of Wikipedia How to edit a page Intuitive guide to Wikipedia Finding your way around Table of contents Department directory Help directory Editing articles How to develop an article Simplified Manual of Style Getting help Frequently asked questions Cheatsheet Where to ask a question Help pages New contributors' help page Article Wizard – a Wizard to help you create articles How you can help Community Portal Join a WikiProject Follow Wikipedia etiquette Practice civility Discover what's going on in the Wikimedia community

SwisterTwister talk 07:17, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

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Wikipedia and copyright

Hello DovidBenAvraham. All or some of your addition(s) to Retrospect (software) has had to be removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder. While we appreciate your contributing to Wikipedia, there are certain things you must keep in mind about using information from your sources to avoid copyright or plagiarism issues here.

• You can only copy/translate a small amount of a source, and you must mark what you take as a direct quotation with double quotation marks (") and cite the source using an inline citation. You can read about this at Wikipedia:Non-free content in the sections on "text". See also Help:Referencing for beginners, for how to cite sources here.
• Aside from limited quotation, you must put all information in your own words and structure, in proper paraphrase. Following the source's words too closely can create copyright problems, so it is not permitted here; see Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing. (There is a college-level introduction to paraphrase, with examples, hosted by the Online Writing Lab of Purdue.) Even when using your own words, you are still, however, asked to cite your sources to verify information and to demonstrate that the content is not original research.
• Our primary policy on using copyrighted content is Wikipedia:Copyrights. You may also want to review Wikipedia:Copy-paste.
• If you own the copyright to the source you want to copy or are a designated agent, you may be able to license that text so that we can publish it here. However, there are steps that must be taken to verify that license before you do. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.
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• Also note that Wikipedia articles may not be copied or translated without attribution. If you want to copy or translate from another Wikipedia project or article, you can, but please follow the steps in Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia.

It's very important that contributors understand and follow these practices, as policy requires that people who persistently do not must be blocked from editing. If you have any questions about this, you are welcome to leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 16:54, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest

Hello, DovidBenAvraham. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places, or things you have written about in the article Retrospect (software), you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic, and it is important when editing Wikipedia articles that such connections be completely transparent. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. In particular, we ask that you please:

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• exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Please take a few moments to read and review Wikipedia's policies regarding conflicts of interest, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing and autobiographies. Thank you. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 13:42, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

October 2016

I have removed your recent additions to the article, as the material appears to have been copied from the copyright web pages http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1306619&start=40 and https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1307101&start=40. Both of these are marked as © 2016 Condé Nast. All rights reserved and © Ars Technica 1998-2016. Please don't add any further copyright material to this wiki. You risk being blocked from editing. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 13:09, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

@Diannaa: There is nothing inherently wrong with works being copyrighted, as long as they are freely licensed to allow Wikipedia to use the work. 80.221.159.67 (talk) 03:20, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Retrospect (software)

You have edited this article recently quite a lot, but also introduced multiple issues to it:

• {{MOS}}
• {{Overly detailed}}
• {{Primary sources}}

Please note that Wikipedia is not for exhaustive logs of software updates. I was about to borderline nominate the article for deletion, but I'll give the article some time if the issues are fixed.

Earwig's Copyvio Detector came up with a result of 39,4% for the article. Unlikely to be a violation so far, but I'd be cautious. 80.221.159.67 (talk) 03:25, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

I'll deal here with the "Primary sources" and "Overly detailed" issues. Please remember that, per this section on Diannaa's talk page, I have no connection with Retrospect Inc. other than as a long-time, fairly-satisfied software customer.

It helps here to know a bit about the recent history of Retrospect, which I've learned from the few articles about it (see the links in the article) and reading between the lines—because Retrospect Inc. won't discuss it publicly. EMC shut down its Insignia division—that included the Retrospect product—in 2007. EMC re-hired some of the Retrospect engineers in 2008 and put them into its newly-acquired Iomega division. Those engineers went against Iomega management and developed a greatly enhanced Retrospect Macintosh version 8 with a changed UI. The new version was shipped in 2009 in a hurry without sufficient testing, and Retrospect Macintosh customer satisfaction slipped because of the changed UI and many bugs. The new version of Retrospect was apparently canceled, and Retrospect was not officially revived until 2011 as Retrospect Mac 9—which was mostly a bug-fixed Retrospect Mac 8 with a few new features.

As a result of this, the WP article on Retrospect that existed in early October 2016 was only a couple of 4-line paragraphs followed by 4 one-line paragraphs, summarized the program as it existed in 2006, and was written in 2009. When I tried to enhance the article, I ran into the fact that there are no modern secondary sources other than one short Macworld review by Stuart Gripman; there are only the primary-source Retrospect Mac User's Guides that are 250+ pages long. In enhancing the article, I've essentially tried to create a secondary source that is longer than that review but much shorter than the User's Guide. At 7 screen pages, exclusive of the references, I think I've done reasonably well. Retrospect is much more sophisticated than Time Machine, whose WP article is only 2.5 pages exclusive of references. My intention is not to create a condensed version of the Mac Version 13 User's Guide, but to explain the basic concepts of Retrospect's many features well enough to allow a potential user to decide whether Retrospect will fulfill his/her requirements.

That's why I decided to adopt a historical approach. After enhancing the original article as the "Concepts prior to Retrospect Macintosh 8" section, I added sections outlining the most-major new features of each release from "Retrospect Macintosh 8" through "Retrospect Macintosh 13 and Retrospect Windows 11". Looking at these, I can now see that some of the paragraphs that begin with the word "Improved" or "Faster" could be considered "exhaustive logs of software updates"; however some of those paragraphs also describe Retrospect features not discussed previously.

I also agree that the "The line columns show ..." sentences in each of the 6 doubly-indented paragraphs following the "All-new, customizable [administrator] interface" paragraph in the "Retrospect Macintosh 8" section are overly detailed, and should be left to the User's Guide. The same is true for all sentences following the first sentence in the "Custom reporting" paragraph later in that same section.

Please respond here if these changes would solve the "Overly detailed" issue. As I've said in my third paragraph above, I can't do much about the "Primary sources" issue because there essentially are no secondary sources.

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 08:11, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

I have now done the deletions I talked about, plus a few others. They reduced the size of the article from about 7.2 screen pages down to about 6.2 screen pages. That's about the most I can do as far as the "Overly detailed" issue is concerned, without cutting real meat instead of fat from the article. However, see below on the "Original research" issue.

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 02:51, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

I'll deal here with the "MOS" issue. I'm puzzled, because I got 98% on the New York State 3-Year English Regents' Exam and I've never been accused of not writing correct American English. The only thing I can think of is that you may be bothered by what you think of as excessive capitalization of certain words in the article. This is actually a case of Retrospect-specific technical language. I have put in the following bolded paragraph as the second un-indented one in the "Concepts prior to Retrospect Macintosh 8" section: "Ever since the software was first released, its UI has made the first letters of certain words upper-case to indicate a specific Retrospect meaning. The remainder of this article preserves that convention." Don't feel embarrassed by your reaction to the Retrospect technical terminology; over many years a lot of people have reacted badly to it.

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 03:55, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

[DBA moved this up in the section to the original "MOS" discussion and indented it for clarity] As for the Manual of Style issue, with that I was primarily referring to pseudo-lists like :• and indentation. 80.221.159.67 (talk) 05:17, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

I've now changed the bulleted lists to WP-style. Thanks. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 04:56, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

@DovidBenAvraham: I am concerned if this is original research or closely paraphrased from a primary source, both which are against Wikipedia's policies. If no reliable and third-party sources exist for a subject, it should not usually have an article.

I think the article needs significant improvements, especially regarding to adding third-party sources. If it's not overly detailed, then it may be {{Very long}}. In that comparison, I think Time Machine has enough detail to be interesting for majority of readers. Another comparison would be Adobe Creative Suite, with summarized changes.

I appreciate your efforts on attempting to improve the article. 80.221.159.67 (talk) 09:03, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

There is no original research in the article, except that I got the "The line columns show ..." sentences—which I am about to delete—from looking at my own running "Retrospect backup server" because it was easier than finding screen shots of them in 250+ pages of the Retrospect Macintosh 13 User's Guide. I have tried to avoid close paraphrasing, but—as this says—that is difficult to do in an technical article. As for Time Machine, whose link BTW you should have written as "Time Machine (macOS)|Time Machine" inside the double square brackets to make it go to the article you wanted, take a look at the indented paragraph after the first paragraph in the "Overview" in that article. In brief, Retrospect is all the things that the first sentence in the indented paragraph says TM is not. Most Retrospect administrators employ it for multiple users on a LAN as either an archival utility or for offline storage; that is why it has a lot of features that take pages to describe. And, if you want third-party sources to verify that Retrospect Macintosh versions 9 through 13 have the features briefly described in the article, please use the search box in the upper-right corner of this Retrospect user forum—where you can find posts discussing all of the features (and their bugs) including a number of posts by me under my real name that are alluded to in the "Documentation" section of the article.

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 20:56, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Thinking further, I've started wondering about whether some Retrospect problems mentioned in the second paragraph in the "Documentation" section of the article may be "Original research". Problem (2) with the How-To Video Tutorials is definitely not "Original research". As a result of a post that I wrote in early March 2016, a thread in the Retrospect user forums became wildly popular (962 views as of early this morning) because I was the first person who had dealt with the problem that "certain tricky key concepts, such as how to do 'seeding' in 'Changing paths Cloud Mac', go by so quickly that many users have not been able to grasp them without multiple viewings." However I'm not so sure about problem (1). If—in the course of researching the WP article—I noticed an obvious massive discrepancy between two sections in the Retrospect Mac 13 User's Guide discussing the "Dashboard", does that constitute "Synthesis of published material"? I'm also not so sure about problem (3). If—in the course of trying to figure out in mid-September 2016 how the newly-announced Retrospect Mac 13.5 handled Dropbox—I noticed an obvious missing UI step in the "Cloud Backup - How to Set Up Dropbox for Cloud Backup" Retrospect Knowledge Base article, does that constitute "Synthesis of published material"? If both of them do, then deleting them would cut the article by another 0.3 screen pages.

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 04:48, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Oh joy, today I found another third-party secondary source: A 2012 review of Retrospect Mac 10 in the 29-year-old highly-respected "Apple news for the rest of us" online publication TidBITS.com. Its first paragraph says Retrospect is "primarily used for backup by small and medium-sized businesses with mixed-platform networks", which I have now quoted (with a footnote) in the first sentence of the WP article. Its second paragraph contains an excellent explanation of why the "Instant Scan technology" feature added in Retrospect Mac 10 is of real benefit to "larger networks, or installations with very large amounts of data to back up"; I have now also footnoted that source in the appropriate paragraph of the "Retrospect Macintosh 10 and Retrospect Windows 8" section of the WP article. The same author also wrote a TidBITS article in 2016 on Retrospect Mac 13; it merely repeats Retrospect Inc.'s announcement of new "Cloud Backup" and "Performance-Optimized Grooming" features, so I won't bother to footnote it in the WP article—I'm awaiting a further TidBITS review that will really dig into the practical usefulness of those two features.

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 03:56, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

I was eventually able to revise the article so that a full 50% (13 out of 26) of references are to third-party secondary sources, because I belatedly found 3 reviews of Retrospect on the venerable and respected TitBITS.com. Those reviews, although not as detailed as the corresponding Retrospect Mac User's Guides, contained information that was detailed enough to serve as substitutes for those UGs as references in the WP article.

@DovidBenAvraham: Sorry, I've lost you a long time ago. I don't understand the insides of Retrospect, and I have never used the software. Your questions are more fitted to the article talk page or Wikipedia:Help desk? I'll also point you to WP:RS and WP:IAR. Good luck to you. 80.221.159.67 (talk) 05:15, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Yesterday I posted my questions about whether I have done original research in the "Documentation" section to Wikipedia:Help desk. As yet I have seen no answers.

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 04:06, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Still no answers to "Original research question. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 04:56, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Revisiting the issue

Hi, it's "me" again.

Since tagging the article in October 2016 (~10 months ago), there's not been substantial improvement to the issues listed but quite the opposite.

Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Describing every element of the software in detail (their locations, what they're named, not just the core features of the software and what its intended for) is indiscrimate, but maybe also dubious on copyright. Large amounts of sections are based on one or few (primary) sources. Most of the article is still in list format instead of prose.

The article does not describe "every element of the software in detail". If the Finnish editor wants to see that, he/she should try reading http://download.retrospect.com/docs/mac/v14/user_guide/Retrospect_Mac_User_Guide-EN.pdf , which contains 238 pages preceding the Release Notes. The only section of the article that might be accused of that is "Retrospect Macintosh 8", but that greatly condenses a discussion whose overview in the User's Guide runs from the bottom of page 18 through the top of page 21 plus from the bottom of page 29 through all of page 34—although the latter UG pages include some concepts that the article discusses in "Concepts prior to Retrospect Windows 7". I've condensed those 7 UG pages to 1.25 screen pages, and I'm mighty proud of it. If the Finnish editor wants to know why I made the effort, he/she should read the second paragraph in the Talk page's "Retrospect Windows 'backup server' GUI" section—and think about "confused the heck out of many Retrospect installation administrators" and why I felt "Retrospect Macintosh 8" needed just enough detail to counter that. It's true that I've re-inserted the "The line columns show ..." sentences in each of the 6 doubly-indented paragraphs following the "All-new, customizable [administrator] interface" paragraph in the "Retrospect Macintosh 8" section, but all except one of those sentences was less than one line long—and IMHO they make it clearer "what it [the GUI] is intended for".

The article has expanded from 7.5 to 10 pages—exclusive of References—since October 2016, but most of that expansion resulted from: (1) expansion of the prose lead section—as requested by another editor, (2) further expansion of "Concepts prior to Retrospect Windows 7"—which is totally prose except for 3 tiny bulleted items at the beginning, (3) addition of the new "Retrospect Windows 7" section, (4) substantial prose expansion of "Retrospect Macintosh 10 and Retrospect Windows 8", (5) addition of the new "Retrospect Macintosh 14 and Retrospect Windows 12" section, and (6) further expansion of "Documentation"—which is prose divided into 3 big bulleted items corresponding to types of problems outlined in the first paragraph of the section.

As for "dubious on copyright", I haven't heard a peep from User talk:Diannaa since October 2016. As for "Large amounts of sections are based on one or few (primary) sources", 17 out of the 33 references in the article as of today are to third-party sources—which was a major effort of Googling considering the scarcity of recent reviews of Retrospect.DovidBenAvraham (talk) 22:15, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

If you are being paid to edit on Wikipedia, you must disclose your paid relationship per Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use before editing any further or you may be blocked from editing here.

I am not and have never been an employee or contractor of Retrospect Inc., or of its predecessor corporations. I have paid for every new major release of the Retrospect software I have ever used, either at the new-purchase price or at the upgrade price, including most recently in spring 2017 for Retrospect Macintosh 14. I'm a 76-year-old retiree who looked at the Retrospect(software) article in early October 2016, saw that it was truly a stub that IIRC was at best current as of 2005, and decided to expand it in hopes of getting other people to buy it—so that Retrospect Inc. could stay in business and add new bug-fixes and features I could use. That expansion has proved to be much more extensive than I expected, for reasons I'll discuss above.DovidBenAvraham (talk) 20:47, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm going to bring up the article to attention of other contributors. I'm not sure yet how or what will be done about it, but I'll try to find out. 2001:2003:54FA:2F79:0:0:0:1 (talk) 18:06, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

For comparison:

• Before (3 October 2016)
• Then (23 October 2016)
• Now (20 August 2017)

2001:2003:54FA:2F79:0:0:0:1 (talk) 18:26, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for the recent cleanups. 2001:2003:54FA:2751:0:0:0:1 (talk) 02:18, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident with which you may be involved. Thank you. 2001:2003:54FA:2F79:0:0:0:1 (talk) 18:19, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Retrospect

Dear DovidBenAvraham, as a WP user I have perfect right to edit any article at any time, anywhere on Wikipedia. The edits your making to the Retrospect article are completely ignoring the consensus that has been built up around what needs to be done to create an article that conforms to WP:MOS. The Lede and History section needed a copyedit, which I did, taking out all these pseudo statements, the "" dashes, which are not standard and don't conform to WP:MOS, put several links to other articles on WP (as the Lede and History section are under-linked), which explain what the tech is, and made some general fixes. That is all. Please don't put the dodgy language back, which is from the manual. As somebody that has written more than 500+ articles, I know how to create a good article. Let the work be completed, and you can create another article somewhere else. scope_creep (talk) 20:40, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

First of all, you probably should read about "Dashes" in the MOS yourself. That gives an example of using the em-dash "We read them in chronological order: Descartes, Locke, Hume—but not his Treatise (it is too complex)—and Kant." It is exactly the way I use the em-dash. The only thing I might be guilty of in that respect is using the standard combination for em-dash on my Mac keyboard, instead of using the Special characters->Symbols—>fifth-character-from-left-in-fourth-row on the WP editing bar. But it seems to work, although I admit I probably use em-dashes—grammatically correctly—more than most writers. Second, BTW, some of the links you put in—such as the one to Dantz Development Corporation—don't work (BTW, this sentence and following in the post used the em-dash from the WP editing bar). Third, would you kindly specify what you mean by "dodgy language"? If you're referring to Retrospect terms such as Media Set, what would be your term for a set of disks or tapes that is treated as a single user-visible entity for the destination for a Backup run? Dantz started using the term Backup Set in the late 1980s, and they still use it in Retrospect Windows. However they decided in 2008 to change it for Retrospect Mac; one backup app (I think it's Arq) actually uses Backup Set as the term for a set of disks that is treated as a single user-visible entity for the input to a backup run. I define any Retrospect term before I use it, which is more than you can say for the writer of the NetBackup article, and after the revision I will only be using four (Source, Media Set, Member, and Grooming). I await your suggestions for substitute terms that are industry-standard, but I don't intend to hold my breath while waiting—because there aren't any. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 21:51, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, your right on that. scope_creep (talk) 00:48, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

By "right on that", did you just mean the m-dash—or did you also mean using the Retrospect terms for the four concepts? BTW Arq doesn't use Backup Set as the term for a set of disks that is treated as a single user-visible entity for the input to a backup run; it is (based on some quick Googling) Mozy, Norton, Symantec, iBackup, and CommVault that do. Veeam uses Backup Set in the Retrospect Windows sense of a single user-visible entity for the destination for a Backup run; CrashPlan uses Backup Set as the term for a combination(!) of the two.

WMF Utilities

Hi DovidBenAvraham. This utility, which is provided by the WMF labs, at [1] turns google book refs into proper WP refs. To make it work, pop in a GBook url at the top, click the Load and a ref pops out. Examing Some locations, which I only discovered myself, are using it for years:

1. Coauthors dont work. First name, last name are standard.
2. Hit the today button to get an access-date in the ref.
3. Page numbers. If it is a single page, which it mostly is, get rid of the dash.
4. Click make citation, at the bottom left, for citation.
5. Copy to WP, and you are left with a much better ref.

Worth a look. To find it, type in: Google Book cite. scope_creep (talk) 21:02, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks scope_creep, I really appreciate that, and tried it. However the citation it came up with—which you also came up with—is for a 2009 version of the Joe Kissell book with a slightly different title (the utility must have done some kind of database lookup, which is why it took so long). In the process of trying to re-Google my original books.google.com URL to get the precise page number which it appeared I needed, I discovered (on page 4 of the search results) that somebody associated with the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences has put up a 2007 version of the book—with the same slightly different title—as a .PDF. I decided to use that version as a ref instead because it is freely searchable (I may use it as a ref for other things in the article), and let Harvard's lawyers sort it out (I assume the person who put it up, in a collection of rather outdated software manuals, had gotten faculty clearance). DovidBenAvraham (talk) 01:50, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

It is certainly possible I grabbed the wrong url. I don't think I even looked at it, at the moment. scope_creep (talk) 05:51, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

No, I re-copied the Google Books URL—that I had found a week or so ago—directly into the into the WMF utility from the source code. I got the same 2009 result, a Google Books URL with a "Snippet view" that would not be satisfactory as a ref. for a WP article. What I was experiencing was that Google Books "server" would not permit me more than a certain number of views of the paragraphs I consider applicable to the definition of "client-server backup". So I did a search, and was lucky and persistent enough to find an old version of Joe Kissell's book for which someone at Harvard had placed the unprotected .PDF on a publicly-viewable website. Since Kissell has been writing updated versions of the same book for over 10 years, I'm fine with it. It looks as if the WMF facility, using a database(s) I can't even guess at, tries to find a freely-viewable equivalent of a document in Google Books. Thanks again. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 08:04, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

References

Recent "Retrospect (software)" and "Backup"-related

Hi DovidBenAvraham. I hope to find you working on other articles on Wikipedia. I enjoyed the cut and thrust. Scope creep (talk) 12:13, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

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Please assume good faith

I am foregoing a template message here only because of our long history of interaction. Your suggestion that I might try to "conceal discussion" was completely uncalled for - particularly since in the very same paragraph, you unhelpfully directed Volunteers to a point in the discussion that cuts about half of it off. You need to knock off the insults and insinuations, and take it for granted that I neither have it out for you or am trying to game the system. JohnInDC (talk) 22:58, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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November 2018

Your addition to Backup has been removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material to Wikipedia without evidence of permission from the copyright holder. If you are the copyright holder, please read Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials for more information on uploading your material to Wikipedia. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted material, including text or images from print publications or from other websites, without an appropriate and verifiable license. All such contributions will be deleted. You may use external websites or publications as a source of information, but not as a source of content, such as sentences or images—you must write using your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously and persistent violators of our copyright policy will be blocked from editing. See Wikipedia:Copying text from other sources for more information. ^{[Username Needed]} 15:20, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Copied from User_talk:Username_Needed:

I am totally mystified by your reversion for copyright violation on 15:19, 29 November 2018‎ (UTC) of my edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Backup&diff=871184475&oldid=871052458

I wrote this edit early this morning, as a combination of material that was currently in the subsection, material that had been in the subsection until it was deleted by JohnInDC yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Backup&diff=871018545&oldid=870983323 , and material that I wrote from scratch this morning. AFAICT the subsection was previously basically unchanged since around 2008; much of it appears to have been written based on the notes of a 1997 University of Wisconsin lecture by Nina Boss [2]. If there's a copyright violation, it's likely to be related to that lecture note material—which Ms. Boss may have copied from Oracle Corp.'s 1997 documentation.

Please tell me—or have your bot tell me—where the copyright violation lies, so that I can fix it. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 16:36, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 03:10, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Diff'd in [3], here's User:Username_Needed's 29 November reversion—summarized "Copyvio - pls revdel."—of my 29 November edit: [4]

Also diff'd in [5], here's User:Username_Needed's 30 November reversion—summarized "SelfRev- misidentification."—of his/her 29 November reversion: [6]

Do you see any explanations here? DovidBenAvraham (talk) 02:28, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

• I had misidentified an edit as a copyvio when the actual material was elsewhere. Sorry for the confusion. ^{[Username Needed]} 09:40, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Copied from User_talk:Username_Needed:

What does "elsewhere" mean? In the "Backup" article, but not in the "Live data" subsection? In some other article? Last night I ran Earwig's Copyvio Detector on id 871184475, which is the article after my edit and before your reversion; it got a highest 15.3% probability in the "Enterprise client-server backup" section lead—for which it flagged a properly-quotemarked and ref'd quotation from the late James Pond's (dubbed Pondini by Macintosh users) authoritative Apple Time Machine blog—but no probability in the "Live data" subsection. This morning I ran the same detector on id 871052458, which is the article after your reversion; it got a highest 16.7% probability in the "Live data" subsection—for which it flagged the 1997 Univ. of Wisconsin lecture notes. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 13:06, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

• I was using User:Crow's copypartol tool, which has quite a complicated interface, and I misread it. I have no idea if there ever was any copyvio, whether it has been removed and whether it is still in the revs. ^{[Username Needed]} 14:08, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

I just used that CopyPatrol tool to discover a "copyright violation", but it's in the reverse direction! [7] is dated 10 April 2013, which by internal evidence is almost 5 years after the existing material I edited in the "Live data" subsection was written. If you use View History for the WP article, and go back to a version before that date, it will become pretty obvious that Sr. Damicelli copied at least that subsection of the WP article without AFAICT crediting Wikipedia. Whether you legally can, or want to, do anything about that "copyright violation" is up to you. In any case, it seems obvious that advancing from Earwig's Copyvio Detector to User:Crow's CopyPatrol tool imposes additional responsibility on you to use the tool with wisdom. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 16:46, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

DovidBenAvraham (talk) 17:02, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

In apparent reaction to a message I (perhaps naively) left on his voicemail the other day, Sr. Damicelli has now removed the copyright-violating material from the current version of his blog—but here it is captured on the Wayback Machine on 18 May 2014. It is visibly obviously a subset of the WP "Backup" article just before the date of his blog post, which he dated 10 April 2013. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 07:52, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

It doesn't violate copyright. He can use it freely. See WP:Copyrights. Probably all he needed to do was to add an attribution somewhere on his blog page - if that. I wonder - is this better, or worse, than making a mistake with an unfamiliar copyvio tool? JohnInDC (talk) 11:56, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Except I didn't say in my voicemail message that Sr. Damicelli should delete the copied WP text. I just stated that there appeared to be a copyright violation, and gave my phone number. By no particular coincidence, yesterday I took a fast look at the appropriate WP article on copyright. I think you're correct that adding an attribution would have been sufficient, probably accompanied by adding back those few citations that were in the WP article as of 10 April 2013. But then that wouldn't have showed off Sr. Damicelli's consultative brilliance to the same extent. Should I have just said nothing?

As far as "making a mistake with an unfamiliar copyvio tool", I've replied to Username Needed's complaint of having been insulted here. I didn't mention my temporary decision to quit editing Wikipedia for at least 3 months, made before Username Needed reverted his/her reversion. Thank the Lord I didn't hit anyone rolling across that lawn in 1956. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 12:55, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Yes, you should have said nothing. Because you don’t know what you are doing, you left a misleading message on a private party’s voicemail claiming a “copyright violation“ on material which with only the most minor of adjustments, he is fully entitled to use, and caused him to take an action that he didn’t need to take. The effect of your dispute here is now rippling outside of Wikipedia. You are making things worse, not better. JohnInDC (talk) 13:12, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

I'll concede that Username Needed's intestinal fortitude may be the equal of that of Luke Skywalker or Lara Croft. But that concession means we would have to find another reason for the 18-hour delay in reverting his/her reversion, and the further 7-day delay in providing an explanation that proved to be inadequate. I hereby propose that, in searching for copyright violations in a great many WP articles, Username Needed is stretching himself/herself too thin. IMHO Username Needed has admitted above that he/she should do less WP editing, and do it more thoroughly.

If JohnInDC works his way through the links in the Wayback Machine version of Sr. Damicelli's Web page, he will find this page that also includes an 18 April 2013 article entitled "Viruses, Trojans and Malware in general". A Google search on the phrase that consists of the first 6 words of that article led me to this page which—in an updated version—still exists on Cisco's website. Truly "The wicked flee when no man pursueth ...", but someone connected with Cisco—which may have insisted on his/her adding more than an attribution—seems to have pursued the Los Angeles County consultant about that part of the Web page. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 18:35, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Revision of Talk page comments

An edit like [8], which you made to Wikipedia talk:Copyright problems, is improper. See Wikipedia:REDACT. You should self-revert. I'm not going to compound the problem by reverting your edits to your own comments. JohnInDC (talk) 17:24, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

The edit I made to my 04:27, 14 December 2018 (UTC) comment was the preliminary to a new comment I intend to make dealing with Hut 8.5's complaints in his/her 07:57, 14 December 2018 (UTC) comment. My comment will say that Hut 8.5 misunderstood my "wall of text" comment in several ways, one of which was that I am advocating the formation of an official WP Copyvio Detection Squad. My originally initial-uppercasing that phrase, rather than putting the phrase in quotes, was a joke that apparently went over Hut 8.5's head. My forthcoming comment will say that the "WP copyvio detection squad" already exists as a de-facto group, and that Hut 8.5 and Username_Needed are members of the group—a point which I preliminarily made by lower-casing and putting in quotes the phrase and by adding "which is my term ...". Other than that, my only other substantive edits to my 04:27, 14 December 2018 (UTC) comment were adding "(at least more often ...)" and "(which CopyPatrol will detect a lot of)" as parenthetical clarifications, and deleting "Having added ..., and having started edits ...,,"—which I realized were unnecessary clauses that contributed to the "wall of text" impression Hut 8.5 complained of. Hut 8.5 is the only reader who has substantively discussed that post, and he has complained about it and misunderstood it; what's wrong with my improving it to meet his/her objections?

In furtherance of that, the new comment I intend to make will recap the entire section in a much-shorter fashion than my "wall of text" comment, and will emphasize my recent realization that the primary cause of the "bungle" was the current deficiencies—deficiencies that will cause future problems for the "squad"—of CopyPatrol rather than the way Username_Needed used the facility. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 19:01, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

I don't care about your explanations. They don't matter. If you misfire on a Talk page, add a new comment. Don't revise history. (Oh and PS. Don't take this as an invitation to drag that sad discussion on even further.) JohnInDC (talk) 19:05, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

If you want to revert my edits to my comment, please feel free to do so. However please be aware that your doing so will simply result in my making my forthcoming comment longer, by causing me to add a new paragraph saying "When I wrote this in my 04:27, 14 December 2018 (UTC) comment I should have omitted it as superfluous or added that". Don't worry, I fully intend to deal with the switch from the ... Squad to the "... squad". I think the result will be better if you leave my revisions intact, because as I said above they are innocuous. DovidBenAvraham (talk) 19:22, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

I moved some material

Hello DovidBenAvraham. I hope you don't mind, but I've moved some material from Talk:Ronny Lee to your sandbox (User:DovidBenAvraham/sandbox). It's not appropriate to collect diffs on an unrelated topic on an article talk page. That's what user sandboxes are for. Cheers, — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 14:04, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Backup

Hi DovidBenAvraham, thanks for working with me on the article. Just a comment on the section you added back here, the issue I have is that it introduces a bunch of terms that have not been used or explained (and maybe don't need to be?) such as 'granularities', 'restorable objects', 'crash-consistent' and 'logical objects'. Is there a simpler way of saying this so that the average reader can make sense of it? Does it need to be there in this particular article? Thanks Melcous (talk) 04:08, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Personal request (Pi314m)

The wisest person of all time taught that a Chut HaMeShuLash (the latter can mean triple strength) will not quickly be undone. (source: KoHeLes/Proverbs, 4:12). Your "being a third-generation Reformed Jew" is MeShuLash. These words are to ask forgiveness regarding aggravation you felt attributable to my actions. Pi314m (talk) 19:46, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

"Concocted"

As I have pointed out several times, the policy is WP:RS. The Wikipedia sourcing trifecta: reliable, independent and secondary. We make limited exceptions (e.g. we commonly use an About page for a founding date for a website) but we do not write whole articles mainly from primary and affiliated sources. The second problem you have is what Wikipedia is not: Wikipedia is not a manual or a marketing brochure. You are now into WP:IDHT territory on this. The solution is extremely simple: find reliable independent secondary sources, or the material will be removed. If there are no reliable independent secondary sources than it is not Wikipedia content, it is something else - perhaps for Wikibooks or some related project. You should also be aware that "explaining" policy to admins, based on your limited editing history, is arrogant and rude. At least have the courtesy to frame it as your opinion, because it absolutely is not the case that your self-serving interpretation is the One True Interpretation Of Policy™. Keep chanting the mantra: reliable, independent, secondary. Not press releases (they aren't independent). Not knowledge bases (they aren't secondary or independent). Not forums (they aren't reliable). If you don't understand whether a particular source meets the requirements you can ask at WP:RSN. Guy (help!) 07:06, 12 September 2019 (UTC)