Nice guy

Good thing I'm not a candidate at RfA then, eh?

A beautiful kline

There is an ops meeting next week in #wikimedia-ops on freenode. I'd suggest as many people attend it as possible, if not just to see what they have to say about the current issues, so that they can paste to me a bloody log. I won't be there unless my kline is redacted, but I would be very interested to see what they have to say for incidents like this, which until this point I didn't fully believe were abusive or necessarily related to power hunger at all. Well done, Christel, you have convinced me that I was wrong. Have a medal.

So it goes down like this. Roux is not too happy with the way the ops have been acting as of recent, and the rest of the channel (sans Ryan, the only op responding to what he was saying at the time) agrees with Roux that something must be done. Basically, regulars have been getting gunned down because they call a spade a spade when they see a blatant troll in a channel. We are nice guys, we are tolerant and the rest, but most of the IRC regulars don't expect to put up with bullshit from trolls - and even less should they have to expect that they are directed against because they have called a spade a spade. I won't mention the name of the user at hand, and I wasn't there when the alleged incident which caused the conversation actually happened, but I have seen plenty of trolls in freenode, especially in #wikipedia-en-help, and a lot of the time the people that have ended up being sanctioned or 'talked to' by the ops have been the regulars - the people who try and keep the channel under control, who aren't afraid to say stop when something is wrong (this goes for most of the regulars, although admittedly not all). This conversation was going on in #wikipedia-en, which was probably not the most appropriate place for the discussion, but either way, it did not warrant a %+b (quiet) without any warning for Roux, who was expressing a valid point. Now, up until this point there had been about five or six people defending roux and concurring with his core points, myself included. I don't think anyone in channel agreed with the quiet, or at least, nobody who wished to defended it spoke out if it, but there were a lot of vocal critics - again, myself included.

So, we went into #wikimedia-ops to contest the +q. This conversation was getting somewhere (except between Martin's and Roux's definitions of 'calm'). Basically, Roux was asking to be dequieted from -en, and Martin was saying that he wanted to see evidence that Roux was calm before doing so. Fair enough. The conversation was all about powerhungry and rude ops (of which there are a good few), which is ironic, considering what happened next.

Roux was then told by Christel that she would have in fact banned him by this point. Saying "well I would have done it like this" was not, and is not a constructive comment to make, especially when things are being resolved. Noting that all this comment would serve to do would be to inflame an already large issue, I told Christel that her comment was unconstructive. She then told me in response that I was "asking for one [a ban]", and I was subsequently klined.

Now, I don't know about you, but I think a kline was not only unwarranted, it was downright abusive and rude - especially with a block reason as untrue as "please do not harass channels or users on freenode".

As an aside, I have found, just by typing "site:pastebin.ca klines@freenode.net" into google, more evidence of unwarranted klining by Christel - right here.

So yes, attend that ops meeting. It's on the 23rd. Be there, and see what they have to say.

Warning: Google may harm your computer

In other news, someone pressed the big red button at StopBadware. This is why you shouldn't rely on a third-party list, Google.

Mathias Schindler on Europe Today (BBC World Service)

Download

Transcript:

Host: Now, within hours of Barack Obama being inaugurated as President of the United States last week, a Wikipedia website that the veteran Irish-American senator Ted Kennedy had died, shortly after suffering a seizure at the inaugural lunch - but Senator Kennedy was, and is, still alive. A similar error was made with Senator Robert Bird, who is 91. He may be old, but he's still alive. The Wikipedia websites for both men were corrected within minutes, but the founder of the online encyclopedia, does not want a repeat of this. Jimmy Wales wants any changes made by users of the site to be approved by an editor first, something which critics say will undermine its reputation for speed. Well Germany already has such a system in place, and earlier I spoke to one of their administrators, Mathias Schindler. Is the concern for speed justified?

Mathias: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it's not a news portal, so we don't do original research, and whether it's a research in microbiology, or in politics, we are not the first to break a story. It's basically your job as journalists to do research to, um, write articles, and the moment they are published, Wikipedia is free to reference them as a source.

Host: But where would those stories that Senator Kennedy and Senator Bird were dead... where would they have come from; because no news channel that I am aware of reported that either man was dead?

Mathias: Wikipedia is a so called 'Wiki', it operates under the assumption that anyone who is able to read an article should also be able to edit it. In this case the edit was not constructive, and it was against the policies, usually if you report the death of a person, you have to name a source. The edit did not include a source, and was quickly reverted. If you came to the site at the wrong time, you would have seen the information that they were no longer alive. In the system we introduced in the German language Wikipedia, it would have required some kind of approval from well respected Wikipedians for this information to be fully acceptable to the public to view, and this is where the system would have performed better than in Wikipedia editions such as the English language one.

Host: So if this extra editorial layer is introduced across the Wikipedia language sites, and if I spot something on a site, and I think it's wrong, and I change it; but then I'm wrong, how long does it take then for an editor to have seen what I have written and change it back again? How long does that process take?

Mathias: You could see the edit instantly. The only difference between the two models we are discussing right now is whether an unregistered user should see the most recent version instantly or whether he should see the most recent approved version, or the most recent version that has been checked by the volunteers.

Host: That was Mathias Schindler, one of Wikipedia's administrators in Germany. Well Rachid in Morocco has said:

"I was reading a very interesting article on Wikipedia, I trusted all the information, until I reached the bottom, and it asked, 'Do you have anything to add? If so, click here.'"

World, have your say at bbc.com.

David Gerard on Chris Evans (BBC Radio 2, 6:30pm UTC, 27th Jan 09)

I noticed the following message in my inbox today, from the Wikimediauk-l mailing list. (thanks to George for the link to the iPlayer upload of the programme, where I grabbed this from - I'm uploading it for three reasons:- both because iPlayer is horribly bloated, uses Kontiki, uses DRM and is about as buggy as a bug orgy, secondly, because people outside of the UK cannot access iPlayer content, and thirdly, because of the aforementioned DRM, the iPlayer version will expire at the beginning of February. Silly Beeb.)

Call from the BBC. I'll be doing a short spot on Chris Evans'
drivetime show on Radio 2 this evening about flagged revisions.


- d.

You can either download the audio, or you can have the transcript. Here's the transcript:

Well spoken woman: Well, Wikipedia has proved the surprising wisdom of crowds, but the downside is that some people in most crowds just love a practical joke - so the people behind the online encyclopaedia are considering are considering tightening the rules on who can edit the entries. David Gerard is one of Wikipedia's many volunteers, and is on the phone to explain why [flagged revisions are being considered]; hello David.

David: Hello.

Well spoken woman: Before we go any further, can you just explain what you do as a volunteer for Wikipedia?

David: Um, I'm an editor on the English Wikipedia and one of the administrators - there's about a thousand of them, they're like, um, messageboard moderators. Um, basica- and I do a lot of answering the phone for the Foundation in the UK. I work a day job as well, it's just a volunteer thing.

Well spoken woman: Okay, and what prompted this change to the editing rules - what happened?

David: Um, well, it was proposed a couple of years ago, when we decided we could, uh, make things better by allowing ed- 'cause we have a lot of articles that - because the internet's part of the real world, this means that there are a certain number of idiots. And so they come on and they write rubbish.

Well spoken woman: Mm-hmm.

David: And we kick them off and we change their stuff back. Now, um, the trouble is when this happens on articles about things like living people, 'cause if it's about a chemical element or a piece of history no-one really worries that much, but if it's the first hit on your name, that - something really defamatory then that's a problem; and what we had to do in the past is lock these entries from editing, and we don't want to do that, so, the new change is to make it so that people can edit them, but the changes don't always appear live unless you've been around the encyclopaedia for a while, editing.

Well spoken woman: And so people like you would then check these entries, and when they were checked out they would go live?

David: Something like that, yeah.

Well spoken woman: Is that really practical?

David: Well, they've been running it on the German Wikipedia for a while now, um, this change is actually putting it on the English one. The German Wikipedia run it on all their articles, and have had some interesting results, um, sometimes things took a bit long to be fixed; we don't want it to have huge delays, so basically we're just running a trial, only focusing on living biographies, 'cause everyone who's got an article looks it up and sometimes they don't like the rubbish people put there - we want to keep the rubbish down.

Well spoken woman: And generally it went down okay, it's went down ok in Germany, has it?

David: On the German Wikipedia, yeah.

Well spoken woman: A lot of people are up in arms about it here, aren't they?

David: Oh yeah, um, they are worried that it'll be, um, immediately expanded to all articles before it can possibly scale so we cannot keep up with it, which is a fair enough worry. Um, and, so, we're going to do a very short trial to see how it goes.

Well spoken woman: And is this imminent?

David: Um, w- I don't know what [the] time frame is, but we've asked them to switch it on, we're just setting up exactly what's going to happen [and] when, but we hope it'll happen soon, 'cause we've been... this idea's been bouncing around for a couple of years now. The idea is to do something that will actually make it possible for people to just edit articles even if their changes don't appear immediately. Obviously that means that you don't get the joy of participation, but it also means the vandals don't get the immediate joy of leaving rubbish all over the place.

Well spoken woman: Okay, well I guess the only way to find out whether it will work and whether it will be popular is to do it. Thank you very much, David Gerard, one of Wikipedia's many volunteers.

David: Thank you.

A few inaccuracies here and there, but I'll just leave that down to simplifying for the general public.