Revision as of 17:43, 15 March 2008

Essays

It's new! It's exciting! It's an idea whose time came months ago: The Tags and Boxes Player's Guide Continuation: The Demotion Idea. If RFA is "broken," let's not make it FUBAR: The RFA Derby It's newer! It's not exciting! Essay on Wiki Cults of Personality My attempt at impersonating Marshal MacLuhan: IRC considered Blocklogz, A Wikiwebi Comix: My first attempt at hip artwerkx. Oh, more IRC bashing from an IRC hater, etc. You know -- just whining from a luzer.: People are still getting blocked by "unanimous" IRC consent. So You Wanna Be An Edit Warrior? An essay on how to tell if you may already have the qualifications to be an edit warrior and not even know it!

New: User talk:Kosebamse#Current affairs explains pretty well why Misplaced Pages lost three of its most serious content contributors to salve the egos of some few people and save the playtime of those same few people.

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Talk archives

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For Geogre's opinion

So I was doing some reading and it occurred to me...Maybe that wasn't so absurd after all? Risker (talk) 16:13, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Message for Tony Sidaway: If you have something you wish my opinion on, feel free to ask. I may not answer. If there is an urgent matter, please feel free to notify me. I may or may not respond. Otherwise, gainsaying everything is not appropriate, and I'm really not speaking to you or about you, so please do not interline objections everywhere. I am not arguing with you, as I don't believe you believe the things you're saying, and you're proving quite obnoxious to people who want to write with me. Please, Tony, write here sparingly. You promised never to discuss the IRC case, and yet you broke that promise. You promised to avoid bad language prior to the last outbreak, too. You have made many promises, and there is a limit for most of us. Geogre (talk) 22:06, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Again I'm going to have to correct you on a statement of fact, but as I've done so before I'll refer you to my earlier edit here. There is a difference in meaning, which I'm sure you appreciate, between the words "gainsaying" and "refutation". If you make a statement concerning another person, and the person refutes it , it's graceful to accept the correction, don't you think? If a person makes a refutation of one's own speculative statements , it's sensible to accept that you may just have to refine your theories a bit. Don't you agree? --Tony Sidaway 05:33, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

CBLANK @ RFAR/IRC

I have replied over on RFAR/IRC, and would appreciate a response from you. Also, based solely on my headline for this Talk section, I hereby WP:TROUT myself for WP:WTF violation. Jouster  (whisper) 20:33, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Apologies

For a rather malicious remark left on your user page. I found your insinuations deeply offensive but retaliated inappropriately. Kalindoscopy (talk) 04:49, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Standardization

There is a debate at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style over standardization of portrait placement in articles that might interest you. Awadewit | talk 07:52, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Finding somewhere to put this link...

A little bird told me about User talk:Kosebamse#Current affairs. It's the first "response" I've seen to the IRC case, but I thought it would be nice to make sure more people saw it. Now, I should get back to the month-long slog of fixing/explaining non-free images (I have a backlog of historical ones to look at). Or maybe not. There are mutterings about an ArbCom case about that, but that would be a monumental affair. <sigh> Carcharoth (talk) 01:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

The first thing is good, and I want to put a link up at the top of this page.

The -bot thing is so fantastically close to the same thing as the last two cases as to beggar imagination. I saw the Nandesuka comment and simply couldn't believe it. "I have private information on why persons of trust do not include several long time users," plus the usual "Only the clueful may know" combined with "It's mine, and so is Misplaced Pages, and those of us protecting the Project from evildoers doing evil evilly do not answer to the community, because the community cannot run Misplaced Pages" arguments, and all in the service of a program, not a person, and one that has run amok and ruined more articles than anyone else has written.

It's the mindset that has been at the root of most of the abuse cases: "I am an asterisk, because the community cannot be trusted, and that's obviously true, since it disagrees with me."

If the community cannot be trusted, then Misplaced Pages failed. Geogre (talk) 07:57, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Which Nandesuka comment is that? It rings a bell, but I can't place it. Carcharoth (talk) 14:34, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Your speedy deletion of Shmuel Alexandrov

Yo, you deleted Shmuel Alexandrov although I had added a {{hangon}} tag and was adding references to the article. Would you mind userfying the deleted text to my userspace at User:Skomorokh/Shmuel Alexandrov so that I may complete establishing notability? Thanks, скоморохъ 22:37, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

A different article on the topic has now been recreated; the deleted text would be most helpful to add so that notability could be established. Regards, скоморохъ 22:45, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

What happened at RfAr IRC

What happened? Let's get history, issues, and "resolutions."

History

1. The admins.irc channel was floated as an idea, and it was defeated. It was not an overwhelming defeat, but it was a defeat, which is quite some distance from "consensus." The idea of BLP did not exist then (this was well before the Siegenthaller mess), and the OFFICE did not exist, and there was no such thing as OTRS. Nevertheless, the channel was created for admins only.
2. Many, many, many bad decisions came out of "discussion on IRC." Specifically, discussion on that one channel.
3. Several instances of talk that would in no way be tolerated at Misplaced Pages were documented at that IRC channel.
   1. This was not penis talk. Penis talk is common on the main IRC channel, and it's annoying, but it's not particularly important.
   2. These cases included users plotting to organize a ban of a user in good standing and encouragement to "look for" reasons to do it.
   3. They included also users agreeing to block users on suspicion of being bad people, despite the fact that they had not violated any Misplaced Pages policies (this was over their being suspected secret agents for users of WikiReview and others).
   4. They included people telling users in good standing that they had no right to speak there.
4. The channel was populated by many administrators, but also by several non-administrators. Some of the abusive speech and action, above, was done by people not actually administrators at en.wikipedia, or any Wikimedia project. This including calling users "arsehole," but this was hardly an issue (the dirty word). The issue was that non-administrators were bullying administrators.
5. Jimbo Wales would go to the admins.irc channel, but rarely to the general channel. This meant that people who spent a great deal of time there could claim fiat, or at least get the chance to be the ones framing issues. This resulted in the illusion or presence of power, and this meant that users had an incentive to spend as much time as possible on admins.irc, rather than, say, Misplaced Pages.
6. The following arbitration cases resulted from misuse of admins.irc: "Giano," Chairboy, Betacommand, Durova (somewhat), and then this case. Cases have occurred since then that also implicate that IRC channel.

Issues

David Gerard had written a page, directly in name space, "describing" the admins.irc page. It encouraged administrators to use the channel for conducting business. The tone of the page was self-congratulatory, but the words were also lies. I use that term carefully: the page said that the channel had been created by user:Danny out of WP:OFFICE to deal with BLP concerns. This was both misleading (the idea that the channel "was created" by any official of WikiMedia) and a flat out lie. The page was also written almost exclusively in passive voice. Over the Summer of 2007, user:Giano II, user:Bishonen, and I had edited the page to satirize its fulsomeness and to test David Gerard's convictions. A person who believes in Misplaced Pages's policies knows that no page is sacred. This editing was playful and an expression of exasperation with what seemed to me, at least, to be fatuous self-love. This period of editing lasted about a week and then ceased.

At Christmas, 2007, user:Tony Sidaway (who has changed his account now), who is not and was not then an administrator at Misplaced Pages or any Misplaced Pages project was on the admins.irc channel. He was deriding a user who did not use IRC, and Bishonen objected. She said that a person should have the right to face his accuser. Tony told Bishonen, who is an administrator, that "this is the admins channel" and not the "problem user channel" and that she should go be an "arsehole" somewhere else. So, a non-admin (who had lost his administrative status due to insulting behavior and conspiring with Kelly Martin to block users) was lecturing and hectoring an administrator that she should not bother important people like himself with requirements to be fair. Bishonen was outraged. When I heard about it, I was, too. Giano was outraged as well.

I, and by report Giano, felt that, if anything had put the lie to David Gerard's loving description of the Eden of the channel, that did, and so we began to edit that page again. David Gerard issued page protection and threatened to take the page to Meta, where he could control it. That, to me, was as horrendous an illustration of his attitudes toward Misplaced Pages as possible. Giano II took logs of the insulting exchange and e-mailed them to users who said that the admins.irc channel had no bad behavior. N.b. he did not post them. He did not convey their contents by paraphrase. He used private e-mail.

The irrational lodging of a complaint

Oddly, a user who had never been involved with any of these users or that page lodged an RFAR that Giano was not using proper dispute resolution for IRC matters. Given the fact that there were no dispute resolution mechanisms for IRC and given the fact that ArbCom had ruled that IRC is not Misplaced Pages, then it seemed simply obvious to me that the case would be rejected. After all, a sin against IRC cannot be prosecuted on Misplaced Pages, if a sin on IRC cannot be redressed on Misplaced Pages.

In addition to the fact that we have never before been able to use ArbCom to redress such problems and that there are no dispute resolution mechanisms for misuse of IRC, it occurred to me that the case could not be accepted because cases require, first and foremost, previous attempts at resolution. This previously unheard of user had never spoken to any of the parties in the edit war, that I know of, nor parties to the IRC dispute, unless he had been recruited from IRC to lodge the case at some convenient time.

How could ArbCom accept a case without a complaint? What was it that Giano or I was supposed to have done? In the edit war, David Gerard had violated policy after policy. Beyond that, what, on Misplaced Pages, was there to speak of?

Well, wonder of wonders, the new ArbCom accepted, although they never specified what they had accepted.

Issues (the real ones)

The real issues are, of course, not reflected in anything ArbCom said or "John1234," or whoever he was, said.

The issue is that the admins.irc channel not only has non-administrators on it, but it has always had non-administrators on it. However, it purports itself (in the voice of the users) as official. For it to be official, it would need to have some regulations of its uses and misuses, and yet none exist, and none can exist if, as David Gerard said, it's David Forester's channel, and he doesn't need to listen to anything ArbCom says about it. The non-administrators on the channel are "trusted users," but no one knows who is doing the trusting. RFA is an assessment of trust, or is supposed to be, and when a person loses that status, one would have a hard time asserting that the person "is trusted." However, the semi-direct rule of Jimbo, where what Jimbo says either is law or gets treated as if it were, has meant that people have gained power by being on admins.irc. They may not be conscious of it, and it may be simply a side effect: be where Jimbo is, and rise. Once risen, you are one of the people devoted to this passtime.

Ever since the channel was created, it has had some critics. I am assumed to "hate IRC," when I have used it quite a bit and do not hate IRC, as few can understand that a person can have no problem with IRC but think that the admins channel is a disaster. I do not support oligarchies at Misplaced Pages. I do not support self-selected ones, most of all. Many users think that the admins channel is a bad idea (as I said, it failed when it was proposed), many more simply don't use IRC out of indifference. This one toy, this geek gadget, has moved steadily up in importance, and it is now such a case that those who keep pointing out the bad behavior of the "trusted others" or the fact that this pastime has flaws, or people who want to make it uncomfortable by asking for fairness (like Bishonen did when she asked that Tony not malign people who weren't there to defend themselves) are considered painful.

I was named as a party. Giano was named. Bishonen was named. Other than all of us thinking that people need to behave properly on that channel, we have nothing in common. However, it was "time" to "deal with" Giano (who embarrasses users of the channel by documenting their disgrace).

More when I feel like it