Wikipediocracy

Carcharoth

In case it helps, I got this issue as well yesterday, for a sustained period of time (rather than just a few minutes). From my Android phone. Good luck with getting it all sorted, and please do have backups of all the content if moving provider. (And good luck as well with the longer-term legacy pla...

Carcharoth

I wonder if they have a Bertrand Russell’s Turtles article. No stand-alone article yet. They're covered in Turtles all the way down . Terry Pratchett's Discworld is mentioned, too. An excellent example of how Wikipedia can aggregate the history and commentary on a topic like this. (I had logged in ...

Carcharoth

Because I am too lazy, if any Wikipedia editor is following this thread and wants to correct an error in the Welsh-language Wikipedia, this is a candidate: https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_B._Archbold If you click through, you will see that it is sort-of related to the topic. That is embarrassi...

Carcharoth

I have to try and keep up with who is on ArbCom these days. Any hint here about how the new composition of the committee will see it act over the coming year? Moderates, radicals, sticklers for the rules, disruptors?

Carcharoth

Because I am too lazy, if any Wikipedia editor is following this thread and wants to correct an error in the Welsh-language Wikipedia, this is a candidate:

https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_B._Archbold

If you click through, you will see that it is sort-of related to the topic.

Carcharoth

This thread prompted me to go and look at the admin activity policy and it seems this has changed since I last looked. You have to now have been completely inactive for a year, or have made fewer than 100 edits over a 5-year period. Some established names are seen in the log of notifications here: h...

Carcharoth

A Mr. Russell would like to have a word with you. Bertrand was never Mr. Russell. He was The Honourable Bertrand Russell for much of his life and then became The Earl Russell in his late 50s. He was Prisoner 2917 Russell in 1916 and Prisoner 8078 Russell in 1961. https://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/...

Carcharoth

My vague memory of the most common reasons for delays in this process was either one of the stewards not being as available as the others (I seem to remember all of them need to press a button somewhere at the end) or the actual scrutineering and running of checkuser in some precise way was sometime...

Carcharoth

So recently I have read a fair amount about the dangers of AI, and the warnings from various industry leaders, and wondered what the view was here? The AI threads here appear to be mostly about ChatGPT and so on, but what about the ethics of the underlying datasets used to train AI (these include WI...

Carcharoth

Geonames is interesting. I currently work with a not-well-documented archive that incorporates lots of geographical data of primary origin (fieldwork notes, primarily), and it worries me sometimes that some of this information is being 'corroborated' and codified by drawing on potentially unreliable...

Carcharoth

Or, maybe I'm just bored, I dunno. I get what you are saying, but it probably does need explaining more clearly. I suspect it is a general malaise of our times, not a Wikimedia-specific thing. If it helps, I found this more interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/20/elephant-seals-s...

Carcharoth

This was sad news. I posted on his talk page tribute thread. The draft obituary makes interesting reading, as those writing it have done a good job of covering his activities and his contributions. Makes me wonder how future histories of Wikipedia will be written (the answer being that nothing compr...

Carcharoth

Just caught up on this. I didn't have this on my 2023 en-Wikipedia bingo card either. Thanks to Beeblebrox for pointing out the mailing list change: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AArbitration_Committee&diff=prev&oldid=1088710034&diffmode=source I do like that Jimbo's permissi...

Carcharoth

For those interested, the chess forum thread is still rumbling on. Someone there has written to Panorama (British TV programme) to try and get an investigation started. That was a development I hadn't foreseen! Might not go anywhere, but if it does I have no idea what the end result might be (Panora...

Carcharoth

If ever I am in Amsterdam (I may be in Europe over the summer, but probably not there) then I will make sure that I put this near the top of my list of things to do while there (no, not really). Having said that, I do actually make a habit of photographing graves of those with Wikipedia articles. It...

Carcharoth

There's a long thread about this on an English chess forum . Some of the people commenting knew him or played on a team he captained. One of the interesting links from the thread: When a Man Disappears from an Interpol List: the strange case of Brian Eley . Well spotted! I shouldn't say much more (...

Carcharoth

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ch-tougher

Spotted just now.

Crypto-sceptic Molly White could be the new JK Galbraith… just much tougher

Carcharoth

There are pages concerning bot-like editing that say explicit permission is needed for creating articles without human oversight. By this I mean articles generated using a template, which is clearly what happened here. With the lack of human oversight shown by the egregious errors. Parts of 'Wikiped...

Carcharoth

More attention should be being paid to the 'Eyewitness Wikimedian' reports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-03-27/Eyewitness_Wikimedian_%E2%80%93_Kharkiv,_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-03-27/Eyewitness_Wikimedian_%E2%80%93_Vin...

Carcharoth

Not sure if there is a technical issues sub-forum here, but when I try and load some threads, the loading stalls on posts by Tarantino. The thread loads up to that point, and then refuses to load any more. The spinning wheel of doom. Not sure if is a signature issue? Two examples: Best Oscar moment ...

Carcharoth

Congrats on reaching 10 years, and thanks for the off-topic discussion threads as well (i.e. the threads you have to be logged in to view: I got a huge amount of sensible opinion and information and links from those off-topic threads during the pandemic and the various geopolitical crises, the lates...

Carcharoth

I think this BBC article is the one that 'accompanies' the podcast mentioned above (it is still under the 'BBC Trending' section of BBC News, and it is by a BBC employee with the grand title of 'Climate change disinformation specialist' - who knew that was a thing?). Climate change: Small army of vo...

Carcharoth

Wow,Nick went a wrote a complete guide at the last minute: User:Nick/ACE2021 That's funny. I have until 6 December to vote. Quick question: is there an easy way to work out which past elections I voted in, and is there enough time to judge who to vote for in these elections? (I probably won't end u...

Carcharoth

Despite my best intentions, I failed to watch today's events live, apart from dipping into the 'Open History' one (as that is actually something I have a semi-professional interest in, part of the whole Digital Humanities thing), but disappointingly it was only about 15 mins long. I then skipped the...

Carcharoth

I may have more time today to watch some of the final talks and panel discussions live (the talks are also back in the European afternoon/evening timezone). The keynote starting event is: Reflecting on the Past, Present and the Future A greeting from the WHO: Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director ...

Carcharoth

OK, I was too sweepingly dramatic there with my 'statement'. Of course I recognise those names - what I actually meant was that I wouldn't be able to name any new members of ArbCom. Though I do actually recognise some names now I have gone and looked. I think it is more a feeling that I spent the pa...

Carcharoth

Goodness. You really should write a 'Where They Are Now' book on ArbCom one day... :blink: (I shouldn't really ask what notes you still have on me!) Do you have an upper age limit on the oldest arbs? I had you figured out, but you're kind of boring (in a good way!), so I quit paying attention. Heh....

Carcharoth

I guess I should've checked ahead yesterday, today's entire schedule was in the middle of the night for me. It's barely 9AM here and it's already over for the day. I think there was an assumption that people would be organised and motivated enough to catch up with 'other time zone' events (or stay ...

Carcharoth

I can't think of any arb that was actually a teen (or certainly under the age of majority) when elected arb. There have definitely been plenty of 20-somethings. Sam Korn was 16, but that was a long time ago. He's now a priest at St Mary's, Bourne Street . Edit to add: Ambi (now user Vanished user 5...

Carcharoth

Another entirely amateur outcome even though they had advanced notice. Anybody surprised? To be fair, not as amateur as some organisations I have had to interact with over the past year. And they are very responsive if you ask nicely. Accessibility does need (as someone once told me) to be integrat...

Carcharoth

Remo is usable (just). The interesting thing so far about the opening bit is that the bits from the Wikimedia Italy person (sorry, forgot her name) and Jimmy Wales and Gnagarra (sp?) is that they are clearly reading from an auotcue (or are pre-recorded) as the subtitles (captions) are on screen ahea...

Carcharoth

You don't have to use Remo. Many of the sessions (hopefully all) are being streamed live on YouTube. The Welcome session starts at 10am UTC (i.e. in just under one hour from now, 11am UK time). Starting from the programme page: https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Program The YouTube link at th...

Carcharoth

I got the email about the platform being used: Remo. It seems to be an attempt to enable networking and social interaction. There are various demos on YouTube. In my experience, these platforms don't really replicate the in-person experience, but maybe this one does it better than other ones I have ...

Carcharoth

I can see why people are objecting to the use of Eventbrite, but probably more to the way it is set up and some of the information it is asking for (I am happy to register this way, as I did the same for Wikimania 2014 when it was held in London). By clicking "Register", I accept the Terms of Servic...

Carcharoth

Thank you. That is very helpful. I needed to know for accessibility reasons. I am attempting to ask the organisers, but might need to register to get proper answers. You would think I would know by now where to ask to get quicker answers to things like this... :D Some objections to the use of Eventb...

Carcharoth

This is confusing...

https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Re ... ticipation

Leads over to:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiPro ... ticipation

Need to find the page where they are actually organising the event...

Carcharoth

Poking around, I have ended up here: https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Submissions/Help_desk And noticed this: "the WMF is paying for multiple audio translations to and from English, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, and German" There is a long list of 'public' submissions here: ht...

Carcharoth

Can anyone tell which online platform it is being hosted on? Zoom or something else? The organisers appear to be using some Google platform to 'meet up'.

Carcharoth

The main problem with the Commons search tool is that if it is set up to search everything, you get far too many hits on the various PD pdfs and OCR documents stored there, to the extent that you have to specify "images" if you want images. Though I may have changed my default search settings in err...

Carcharoth

That is the sort of thing that Wikidata would gladly hoover up, creating a property "In this source" that would be applied to all those family names.

Carcharoth

That's because the USA isn't very old. Not much history...

Carcharoth

Grade II is very freely applied. Grade II* is a bit more exclusive, so that is where I would personally tend to draw the line, but it does change over time.

Carcharoth

Probably not. A pandemic is a good time to make changes like this. People not paying attention, as you said. The thing to watch for would be the actual people on the Board, whether they are just stooges, or if they are people that would do the right thing if needed.

Carcharoth

Ah, yes. Is there no way at all that someone can wrest control back?

Carcharoth

Ooh. Oxbridgians, eh? Are they more or less annoying than Ivy Leagians? (Is that a thing?) Seriously, have there ever been any studies of the demographics of Wikipedia editors in relation to education, academia, and so on? Is the assumption that the typical Wikipedia editor is university-educated (o...

Carcharoth

Do you think the WMF is capable of employee control rather than community control? Serious question. For example, how do Facebook and so on pay for all the people they need to moderate (allegedly) content? If the WMF don't have enough money to moderate everything, they need to be able to maintain a ...

Carcharoth

Forseeable futures don't really exist. Ask the National Geographic, Geocities, MySpace, Enron, and Donald Trump. Wait, what happened to National Geographic ? Circulation is down from its heyday, but those circulation figures are still impressive (maybe they have diversified a tad too much and dilut...

Carcharoth

Agree with the post above. And in the realm of completely pointless trivia, in the current list of former and current arbs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/History#Current_and_former_members There are currently four arbitrators who are grouped together alphabetically (t...

Carcharoth

If I remember correctly, there was at one time a "criticism site" that was run by senior Wikipedia editors. it was pretty pointless, and didn't last very long. Are you thinking of the one set up by UninvitedCompany ? The name was 'WikBack'. It was reported on in The Signpost here in January 2008: h...

Carcharoth

Jimmy looks really old in that article. Maybe lockdown hasn't treated him well?

David Gerard is still clearly in journalists' contacts books.

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