Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 21:02, 18 February 2012

Hello, and welcome to my talk page. If I post on a talk page please respond there. I'll be watching it for a while. No need to {{talkback}} me unless you think I missed it. If you start a conversation here, I'll reply here (unless you request otherwise, here or on your talkpage), so please watch this page. ⇒ Start a new Talk topic.

All the best

I'm relieved and glad to hear from you and apologize for my part in your distress during a very stressful time for all; all the best, and please return soon, and refreshed. Kind regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:44, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Amalthea 18:05, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Future of MOTD

I've decided to start a project discussion on this. Please see WT:MOTD. Simply south...... having large explosions for 5 years 17:46, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't think I have any opinion on that. Amalthea 18:05, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Shrikatnv's block

Please see this thread. Was this supposed to be a SOCK block? --Chris (talk) 18:13, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

Replied at your talk page. Amalthea 15:24, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Human rights

We lost Khazar, fighter for Human rights, and I feel guilty because I had told him that DYK is a friendly place again, which he found it isn't. Thank you for reviewing in the PumpkinSky copyvio investigation. As of today, 492 articles have been checked, 237 are open. Flatscan noticed that in the lists on Montana people the text is the same as in Montana. I would not think THAT is copyvio, but learning. One sentence was removed, everything else ok so far. - I lost a friend in real life, PumpkinSky helped with that article and those of relatives. - Taking up the fight for Human rights here: looking at AN threads where you and I are mentioned I miss the respect of living people that we demand in BLPs, and I lack the words to fight it. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:44, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

I too am distressed by how ugly this got, and am sorry that Khazar left; I have stayed away from all related discussions since Friday so I don't know what caused it, but I can guess. I'll try to help out on the CCI page some more later this week. Amalthea 18:05, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

'moreinfo'

FYI, That one used to go in the "Awaiting clerk approval" section since it implies a CU request. T. Canens (talk) 20:05, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Makes sense, fixed & works. Thanks, Amalthea 20:10, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

MSU Interview

Dear Amalthea,

My name is Jonathan Obar user:Jaobar, I'm a professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University and a Teaching Fellow with the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program. This semester I've been running a little experiment at MSU, a class where we teach students about becoming Misplaced Pages administrators. Not a lot is known about your community, and our students (who are fascinated by wiki-culture by the way!) want to learn how you do what you do, and why you do it. A while back I proposed this idea (the class) to the community HERE, were it was met mainly with positive feedback. Anyhow, I'd like my students to speak with a few administrators to get a sense of admin experiences, training, motivations, likes, dislikes, etc. We were wondering if you'd be interested in speaking with one of our students.

So a few things about the interviews:

• Interviews will last between 15 and 30 minutes.
• Interviews can be conducted over skype (preferred), IRC or email. (You choose the form of communication based upon your comfort level, time, etc.)
• All interviews will be completely anonymous, meaning that you (real name and/or pseudonym) will never be identified in any of our materials, unless you give the interviewer permission to do so.
• All interviews will be completely voluntary. You are under no obligation to say yes to an interview, and can say no and stop or leave the interview at any time.
• The entire interview process is being overseen by MSU's institutional review board (ethics review). This means that all questions have been approved by the university and all students have been trained how to conduct interviews ethically and properly.

Bottom line is that we really need your help, and would really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. If interested, please send me an email at obar@msu.edu (to maintain anonymity) and I will add your name to my offline contact list. If you feel comfortable doing so, you can post your name HERE instead.

If you have questions or concerns at any time, feel free to email me at obar@msu.edu. I will be more than happy to speak with you.

Thanks in advance for your help. We have a lot to learn from you.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Obar --Jaobar (talk) 06:25, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Request

Can you please move this page back to the original title? . An user abusively made the move, even if the result of the Req for Move on the talk page was "no consensus". The title from the official site of the organization http://www.sznt.ro/ is Szekler National Council 17:28, 8 February 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by KhantyMansiMagyar (talk • contribs)

Please stop evading your ban. Get yourself unbanned first, and then I will gladly look into whether your request has merit. Amalthea 17:37, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppet investigations/Mbhiii

I think I nailed Mbhiii to Trift to Dawakin. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 16:17, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Iluvrihanna24/Rihannano1fan

So, let me see if I understand this: Rihannano1fan gets blocked for two weeks, creates Iluvrihanna24 to evade the block, makes a complete pain in the ass of himself for nearly a year until getting indefinitely blocked, socks hard enough from his IP address that his IP winds up on a long-term block, and now wants what amounts to an IP exemption? My immediate instinct is to block Rihannano1fan so that when the IP block expires he can't resume use of the account. Having yet another editor that has inserting fan material into Rihanna articles doesn't seem like a result that I'm willing to bend any rules to help see happen.—Kww(talk) 17:45, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, and from the reply I just read I don't think that anything has changed. :/ Amalthea 21:04, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

FYI.—Kww(talk) 01:07, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for helping.

Please note that I have a replacement for SoxBot underway. Your bot operating temporarily on it is helpful for getting it done faster.—cyberpower (Talk to Me)(Contributions) 21:17, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thanks!

That works!

Mistress Selina Kyle has given you a cup of tea. Tea promotes WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day ever so slightly better.

Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a tea, especially if it is someone you have had disagreements with in the past or someone putting up with some stick at this time. Enjoy!

Spread the lovely, warm, refreshing goodness of tea by adding {{subst:wikitea}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

I have actually been improving the sockpuppet stuff lately I noticed you were a checkuser tpoo, I hope maybe Misplaced Pages:Template messages/User namespace/Sockpuppets looks usefulish? Misplaced Pages:Template messages/User namespace looked like a giant mess to me so tried to help out a bit make it more human-readable friendly

I actually got told off by an admin for tagging sockpuppets, but all the templates it looked like you are actually meant to tag IPs if you suspect they are sockpuppets, and then someone checks them to see if they are right or not like with {{editprotected}} etc?

I'm interested cos I think you are honestly better having the "early warning system" decentralised rather than relying on only a few people, that makes sense for the actual checks but I don't think it's really constructive for people to be being warned for tagging sockpuppets for investigation?

My user and tak page got vandalised a tonne and the admins blocking didn't even tag most of them, I don't think they were ever investigated by the looks of it since the first one was tagged sockpuppeeteer and the ones after that sockuppets of the first, even though the first one was obviously a sock and not the real sockpuppeteer — I saw that too on the ones I tagged before and tried to help out, it seems to me like it might be the norm though that the templates aren't really being used properly? --Mistress Selina Kyle 12:18, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Lots of points to reply to:

1. While existence of a tag is apparently reason enough to use it in practice, it really shouldn't be. We have lots of article tags in particular that don't really have much purpose or are used way beyond where they make sense.
2. IPs are generally not tagged with sock tags, see WP:SPI/AI#Blocking and tagging. It may make sense to tag an IP if it is was used by only one person and had significant edits, but not otherwise.
3. Risker's note had of course more facets than just tagging an account for investigation.
4. Tagging an account with a sock tag won't actually make anyone look into it, no. If you want an account checked you'll need to start an WP:SPI case, and present evidence why you think abuse of multiple accounts is happening.
5. I don't see why a decentralized system would be better. For one, it's helpful in an investigation to have the archive with all previous investigations handy, including all prior accounts and comments. For another, I'd expect it would lead to much more conflict if editors felt legitimized to tag active accounts as suspected socks without having to present concrete evidence to back it up and "prove" it first.
6. In case of the edits on your user talk page, at least one of the accounts was checked, but apparently nothing came of it.
7. For trivial vandalism or disruption WP:RBI still works well. We don't really have to tag each disruptive account with the name of a sockmaster (and can't anyway), and it's often counterproductive. There are several ways to prevent disruption, and as long as we can keep the nonsense down enough to keep working on the encyclopedia it's enough.

I hope I got everything, feel free to call me out if I missed something or misunderstood you. Amalthea 18:18, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

You're right on a lot of that about the templates etc I guess, having looked at the SPI reporting pages it does seem a more clever way to have the discussion at least decentralised, and yeah, getting anyone to report in if they see stuff as a neighbourhood watch thing, I was putting this off to reply to properly (it's nice to get such a thoughtfully laid out reply to my thrown out points ) but that's probably it really lol

What I was thinking of though as well though is the more long term POV pushing RE stuff like WP:PAIDWATCH it would be useful if tagging was more standardised maybe even done semi-automatically somehow like with the Wikilove button, I had an arbitrator earlier say they found the system confusing too! User_talk:Elen_of_the_Roads#Trollolol I'm not sure if maybe there's some secret page that keeps track of stuff in the longterm though it seems like it would make sense for it to the stnadard to label sockpuppeteersa nd their sockpuppets uniformally so people can recognise stuff easier to report them when they arrive back on articles, this is especially important as they are sometimes quite sneaky about it inventing multiple false identities and even personalities, to continue catching them you need to keep up with them I think. For me it was less concerns about vandalism and nonsense but the more insidious WP:PAIDWATCH style pushing as I saw on Misplaced Pages:Sockpuppet_investigations/Websense,_Inc. --Mistress Selina Kyle 13:54, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Confusing you with someone

There's no need to feel too bad about that. The user in question posts in the spirit of rhetoric not history - that is, his statements are designed purely to produce some kind of effect. Whether they are factually correct or not is beside the point, and it is mistaken to characterize them, as some victims have done, as lies. To call them that would suggest a conscious deviation from truth, but in his case it purely and simply writing what is most likely to achieve a desired result. The statements are not usually grossly false, as then they would fail in their effect, but a plausible veneer of truth is usually enough to achieve a result. The casual onlooker assumes they must be true, and the cognoscenti tolerate them because the person in question is useful for driving away people with a point of view which is considered undesirable but whom for various reasons it is inexpedient to ban directly as odious. This assertion has been described as a delusion (well, they would say that, wouldn't they?), but I think it's an extremely effective way of curbing the activities of civil POV-pushers in the pseudoscience arena. Other amusing little rhetorical tricks include asserting that the edits made by an adversary are nonsense, trolling, mistaken, false, and so forth. Again, no amount of counterevidence is to the point: the assertion are purely about persuading others, such as yourself, that the victim must be guilty, because of course others assume that no-one would deliberately make up such a plethora of falsehoods. And indeed that it true in some sense, as I said. They are neither truth nor falsehood: such categories apply only to statements with pretensions to factuality, not to statements intended solely to compel action. As a little illustration of what I mean, the chances are high that this message will be removed on the pretext that it has been written by a banned user. This is not, of course, actually true (the user with whom I will be associated has never been banned, as you are doubtless well aware), but the logic goes: I want to delete this; posts by a banned user may be deleted; therefore I say this is a post by a banned user. It's that simple: wait and see! 94.197.50.79 (talk) 21:02, 18 February 2012 (UTC)