User talk:Jimbo Wales

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Dealing with stress

Things to ponder. It is troubling to see people get very upset and "stuck" when focusing on particular wiki-disputes. Perhaps even worse, in comparison, is knowing that there are many thousands of articles and project pages which need to be updated, and could use the help of clever people who are very busy trying to "be right" about some other, specific frustrating issues. Seeing those users having a melt-down, going ballistic, is like watching a person having an all-out conniption fit about locking the keys in their car, when the passenger door is still unlocked. Please, folks, remember: "The passenger door is not locked" - there are many, many thousands of other articles which need to be improved, or written from scratch. If nothing else, hit "Special:Random" 20x times, until an interesting article suggests some new avenues.

We need more ways to re-focus the many frustrated users into all the other important areas, but meanwhile, remind them:

• m:Wikistress - Meta's essay with 150 suggestions by users (starting in 2003)
• "Agree to disagree" - article about compromise phrase dating to 1770.

I realize that Wikipedia is not funded to provide therapy for mental anguish, but many of the frustrated users seem to fall into the common trap of fighting over a puddle, while they are actually at the edge of a vast ocean of opportunities. I am thinking about more ways to get editors to see the "big picture" and reduce the current stress levels. -Wikid77 05:12, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Interestingly enough, I wrote WP:YANI just now as the product of my own musings resulting from dealing with difficult editors who believe themselves indispensable to the project. It takes a different tack, based on my particular perspective. Jclemens (talk) 06:36, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I was thinking the opposite approach, as "Some people might be indispensible" so ask them to, please, avoid getting burnout or banned from the project. The idea is to get them to realize the danger if they escalate fights and, instead, recommend they just "agree to disagree" for a longer time. Many people imagine they can take a dispute to "wiki-court" and magically, they will get cosmic fairness, as if cleverly discerned by part-time volunteers who have free time because no one pays them to be busy doing clever valuable work elsewhere. Meanwhile, many people report the horrors of 5-minute, hollow reviews of their plight, so more people should know to expect that escalating a confrontation to be judged by part-time, idle, volunteer committee members is unlikely to result in profound, fair justice. Unstructured committees are notorious for making capable people seem slow and unable to solve the simplest of problems. We need to guide more people away from the pitfalls in the current system. -Wikid77 05:36, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Question regarding Wikipedia and ancient browsers.

Hello Mister Wales. You most likely don't have the time to answer this, but I am curious as to if you have a stance on people using ancient browsing software such as Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape to view and edit Wikipedia? Do you think that the Wikimedia Foundation and the MediaWiki team should discontinue supporting old browsers from viewing the site in order to save time from creating special code to make the website appear better for older browsers? Thanks, your most likely first encounter of a brony, Rainbow Dash (WikiBrony!) 19:01, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps be more specific: I'll leave space for Mr. Wales to reply above, but you might want to expand your question, in the writing above, with specific instances where the old browsers are a problem. In computer software, everything continues running fine for years (and decades), until someone adds "special code" which kills the old programs (browsers), not the other way round. I have seen too many computer people who eagerly install new technology (the "new toys") where little is gained (and vast areas are lost or mangled). Formerly, when new releases of software were installed on a computer, the result could be, sometimes, a smaller or faster use of total computer resources. However, for the past 10 years, almost any new software release has had a 99.999% chance of being much larger and much slower than the prior version. The trick is to focus computer technology on the efficient, core minimum, needed to meet a project's goals, and avoid all the bizarre wiz-bang techno-toys that come along from year-to-year, while only changing the fundamental computer components which need to be kept current. With that strategy, each user's end-computer will "die of old age" before the system forces them to be obsolete. Beware of software vendors who artifically "decree" the death of old browsers, as perhaps, a form of planned obsolescence to force the sales of new products where really not needed. There is a rare term, "crapnology" for what is happening: laptop computers dying after 1 year (need 3-yr warranty). For those reasons, old computers (Windows XP) are found in hospitals, or other life-critical areas, where they avoid the new wiz-bang technology, until they are forced to plan a careful upgrade which still meets the critical needs of their users. In small town libraries or third-world countries, the older browsers are likely still in use. That is an area for WP:ACCESS to continually support. -Wikid77 06:16, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

I think we should make a bigger effort that most sites do to support older browsers, primarily due to the fact that we are a charity with an aim to give free knowledge to everyone, and thus we should care a lot about computing in the developing world, and we know that many people in the developing world are using older computers that can't upgrade to the latest browser technology.

However, our support should not be infinite, and decisions should be made by the technical staff based on actual empirical data, difficulty of support of old browsers, etc. It's not really something for me to decide.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:24, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Mark Halperin

There is a discussion to merge "I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday" into Mark Halperin. As you were were the last one on the talk page before, you may be interested...or not.Smallman12q (talk) 22:08, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

• Comment: I made the merge request, but Jimbo, who knows a lot more than I do about how to do stuff, speedy-deleted it. Sharktopus ^talk 13:55, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

The content was already "merged" (or duplicated in short summary form), but Jimbo just marked the page for WP:CSD G10 with courtesy-blanking, and another person did the speedy-delete 3 hours later. So, the page was then soon replaced in Google as merely the G10 warning, with no longer a collection of POV insults or name slurs. When the page was actually deleted, hours later, then Google still had the prior phrases indexed, but they pointed to the final short courtesy-blanked G10 page, without the POV-text left to go viral for 3 weeks, as is typically the case. Hence, the POV-text was "speedily" removed from both WP and the Google display. -Wikid77 14:42, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

A cookie?

Would you like a cookie, Jimbo Fails Wales? LikeLakers2 (talk) 04:25, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

hello need some help

hello Mr. Wales,

Well i have a problem actually something that is still secret. You may hear about illyrian language and only few things left of it because that language is dead and forgoten. I got it and i have it in my posation, i want to give it to world but ofcourse i cant do that for free. Because was held in our familly over 800 years and more. The illyrian language proofs and dicovers things like Maya Calendar, Pyramids, Stonehange and many other things that people never going to know about. And many things who are they from and what are they. Ive reading many things from Wikipedia and there are so many things wrong for that History that i had to write you this letter to let you know that illyrian language is not dead but was protected till write time comes.

If you are interested and ofcourse you got maybe many massages from other users and visitors please contact me ( i live in The Netherlands and my origin is Illyrian )

Thank you

Tet101 (talk) 13:42, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Ta-da. — Waterfox ^~talk~ 13:49, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not going to publish original discoveries, no matter how important they are. That is not its function. Once your work has been published in some appropriate place and accepted as legitimate by the community, a Wikipedia article about it will be possible. Looie496 (talk) 15:34, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Without justifying conspiracy theories and what-not, for what it's worth technically the Illyrian language didn't "die" it evolved into Albanian (according to some scholars), similar to how Latin evolved into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romansch, Romanian, Galician, Catalan, and Provence. Dead languages can be revived, Hebrew was just like Latin and only used for religious purposes until the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel. So Tet101, good luck to you.Camelbinky (talk) 22:49, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Well, you could write up articles about it for www.wikialpha.org ... Wnt (talk) 00:03, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Grawp's ongoing accounts

It has been confirmed that Grawp is still using accounts to vandalize Wikipedia. Someone described this on AN3, and it is certain that this user is active. I would need help for the blocking process. If you have any concerns, contact me on my talk page. Thank you. StormContent (talk) 03:01, 1 August 2011 (UTC)