Wikipediocracy

greybeard

This thread is how I learned that there are technically four members of the WPO moderation team, not three. You mean the "admin" account? I assume Mr. Zoloft has the password for that, but we've never used it, AFAIK, except for the first five minutes or so after phpBB was initially installed. Nope....

greybeard

In any environment where "most recent" is a currency, null edits / blank posts / "bumps" will occur. Let's say, for example, that there was an edit war about the page "Freedonia". A bot that brought that page to the top of editors (especially occasional ones) would be helpful, in the WP worldview. T...

greybeard

Thank you, t. Apologies to you, Viggie, Bill and greybeard. I'll try and do better from now on. No apology ever needed to me, but part of being in a community is looking for common ground, not divisiveness. But I'm on my way out, and beside, as you noted, I haven't done as much as I perhaps could h...

greybeard

The only overpowered position is Administrator. Only they can see IPs and email addresses. What about the content of PMs and e-mails sent through the system? They are not available through the phpBB interface. With enough SQL-fu, they *might* be available by direct manipulation of the database (whi...

greybeard

We had an extended discussion of this topic some time ago, with examples and everything, but I can't be bothered to find it. Seems to me it involved birdwatching and earthquakes.

greybeard

I think that there is an important message to propagate here: Wikipedia is actually a really poor example of crowdsourcing. There are many good examples. The good examples (e.g. GalaxyZoo, Folding@Home, many more) have built-in mechanisms to combat false information. Wikipedia, by-and-large, does not.

greybeard

Board Index page still directing me to {redacted} view. I'm assuming it's the same {redacted} as the others above. Clicking into any sub gets me back to my own name and clicking into the ones I shouldn't have access to results in "no access" message. I tried it just for troubleshooting purposes. Cl...

greybeard

All that having been said, I don't think Facebook got Trump elected, but Facebook no doubt contributes to the erosion of faith in the veracity and balance of traditional news and information sources, in favor of echo-chamber sources of information that merely reinforce the inherent biases of the in...

greybeard

Facebook is inherently a personal opinion site. Wikipedia is purportedly an encyclopedia. I see a difference in levels of accountability to truth. Do you? I disagree that Facebook is thought of (or used) as "inherently ... opinion". Facebook is widely considered to be a form of "News", and indeed t...

greybeard

You can test their algorithms ability to judge attacks or agression here OK. I was curious and tried this: You are mistaken in both your facts and the logic on which your conclusions are based. Your statements reflect a pervasive bias and do not reflect any sort of objective reality. Score: aggress...

greybeard

... Wikipedia isn't very valuable. It's "common knowledge", and thus cheaply available ... The data that companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon want is ... information that enable them to predict the behavior of people on the Internet. Kelly is largely correct on these points. Many years ago I...

greybeard

What is wrong is that they have to show off they know more about the topic than everyone else. No, that's not really a good statement of what's wrong. What's wrong is that, on average, Wikipidiots are crappy writers. What's wrong is that there is no agreement, for any given article, on who is the i...

greybeard

This link will show you what your User Agent string reveals to the world. Wikipidiots like to claim these are "fingerprints". They're more like blood types. Most browsers have a plug-in that will allow you to spoof the UA string. And as others have noted, I browse with AdBlock+, Ghostery, Disconnec...

greybeard

Aside from the jokes about masks, it would appear that no one here actually understands what a federated trust model really is. If you'd rather not embarrass yourself at parties in front of your techy friends, it might be wise to read up.

greybeard

I'm curious why "subject" is consistently pluralized with an apostrophe, but nouns like 'numbers', 'looks', 'brains', and the like are not? Probably because it is more commonly used as a possessive ("The subject's history of mental illness") than as a plural ("The subjects of tonight's lecture"). I...

greybeard

AT&T is an Internet company, and it can trace its corporate history back to 1877. AT&T was, during most of its corporate lifetime, a regulated monopoly. Beginning in 1982, it ceased meaningfully being a single business. The AT&T of today is Southwestern Bell having acquired the name "AT&T" for mark...

greybeard

Earthy Astringent wrote:Time wounds all heels.

Indeed. The older formulation of this is solace to me as I age: "If you sit by the river long enough, the bodies of all of your enemies will float by."

greybeard

I think that in this context a "long period" is one that spans multiple market shifts. Apple, Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco (at least) probably qualify in addition to the ones you note. One might argue that none of them has been run well over their entire lifetime, but several have been run well throu...

greybeard

OK. I'm not trying to get get back onto WP because I've never left. I've just changed my status from legitimate editor to multiple sockpuppeteer. I'm not a vandal. I'm trying to rescue Wikipedia from the tinpot dictators who are currently running it. We have no problem here with serious sockpuppetr...

greybeard

What you're seeing (and I suppose you know this) is simply bad writing, or to be more specific, conversational tone rather than more precise terminology. It's perfectly fine to say "over the wire" in a conversational context with people who know what you're talking about. Especially because you can ...

greybeard

It's a big company problem. A persons value and status is defined and determined by how far they plan. The newly hired plan 1 week to 1 month. First line managers look at monthly to quarterly. Second line is quarterly to yearly, etc, etc. If the companies depth and span means the CEO is 5 to 10 yea...

greybeard

The Wikipedia cabal are monitoring this thread on Wikipediocracy so I have a message for them. Heavyplantcrossing is one of my sockpuppets but it has no connection with Clarawood123. They should therefore unblock Clarawood123 and give him an apology for finding him guilty without a shred of evidenc...

greybeard

I once decided to try getting involved in a controversial subject on which I truly had no strong opinion one way or the other ... I expect that both sides assumed that you were just a slightly more subtle proponent of the other side. Perhaps. It also highlights the fact that it isn't easy being obj...

greybeard

I've been thinking about the apparently oversized influence of the non-English Wikipedias out there. Sure, WMF wishes to style itself as an international organization for all of the obvious donor-influence reasons, but I think it's interesting that a new Board member has made only 175 edits to en.wp...

greybeard

I once decided to try getting involved in a controversial subject on which I truly had no strong opinion one way or the other (I won't say which one, but it wasn't current-events related), just as an experiment. I quickly had both sides vilifying me and calling me names and reverting my edits wholes...

greybeard

It's valuable to document and highlight the problem (and the players) in a new area, but it seems unlikely that more light will diminish the heat. While I understand the light/heat metaphor in many uses, can you tell me what you mean in this instance? Exposing the partisan editors ("shining a light...

greybeard

One of the defenders of Wikipedia's pro-gun editing is Miguel Escopeta . ... This is entirely consistent with partisan editing on controversial topics elsewhere on WP -- from India/Pakistan to Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine to vaccines to alternative health, and on and on. Wikipedia's utter l...

greybeard

Is there a straightforward migration path from phpBB to XenForo? Loss of our existing content would be a non-starter.

greybeard

I seem to recall ideas of using a large inflatable kevlar type balloon to lesson the impact of things going to Mars Maybe that would work, but I doubt it. I haven't done the math, but the Mars landing system relied on initial parachute-based aero-braking before the air-bags were deployed. I don't t...

greybeard

I had envisioned a conventional lander similar in size to the Chinese one, with unfolding solar cells for long term power, redundant radio links for updates, and the ability to host a few University experiments based on communicating with the 'Wikipedia Lunar Station.' I would have had SpaceX and t...

greybeard

Its hard to explain, but it's a real thing. You use the gravity of the planet to build up speed to to target destination. It is a real thing, but probably not what you'd want to use. The Moon's gravity is so much less than the Earth's you'd have trouble stopping once you got there. Obviously, there...

greybeard

I'll gladly handle the project development if I can pick my own team and vendors. I can have this done by 2020. I need 'bout US$100-150 million depending on customer requirements. I will underbid you. It currently costs about $1000/lb to get to Earth orbit, and it takes a smaller amount of delta-v ...

greybeard

Add: There are 469 biographies in Category:American pornographic film actresses alone. Compare that to 1,165 in Category:20th-century women scientists . That is a valuable piece of information, and quite an indictment of Wikipedia, IMO. On the other topic, while I understand the association, I thin...

greybeard

I know I've seen a discussion about this on-wiki somewhere. Throwing this out for perusal in the meantime. http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/01/20/wikipedia-or-encyclopaedia-britannica-which-has-more-bias/ There are some links at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjec...

greybeard

It might (or might not) be enlightening to compare the treatment of (for example) Marie Curie, Margaret Sanger, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Margaret Thatcher, and Gloria Steinem -- in tone, depth, and breadth -- between a real encyclopedia and Wikipedia. I suggest this without having walked over to ...

greybeard

Randy from Boise wrote:Wayback Machine is part of Archive.org, which is virtually a sister project to WP.

Huh? I know Brewster, and know of no relationship between Archive.org and any WMF project. Archive.org crawls en.wp just like anyone else.

greybeard

Kingsindian wrote:This seems like a ok block, from what I see.

WTF? For what, thought-crime? More likely because JzG / Guy Chapman is a cabalist with friends in high places.

greybeard

Better to simply remove the "indefinite" option from a block. Max one or two years. Keep the perma-ban only for people who have been through the Arbcom process. But this will never happen, as it interferes with the Mad Max fun of wiki-politics, which is the primary reason most admins have for showin...

greybeard

Perhaps interesting here is the divergent etymology of the word "moot". As a (mostly) American-English speaker, I know "moot" primarily in the context of a "moot court" or a "moot point", i.e "an irrelevant question, a matter of no importance". Many moons ago, I was badly tripped up by an Indian col...

greybeard

By hitting save while logged out you gave your consent. CU's won't divulge the IPs of named accounts caught socking because that person never edited logged out hence never divulged their own IP address. On the other hand if someone socks by simply editing logged out of their account of course you c...

greybeard

While the dysfunctional Wikipedia community will celebrate this, it indicates conclusively the extent of the disarray the WMF is in, largely because of its own Board and that very community.

greybeard

It'll make no never-mind, as the Oirish never tell the truth.

greybeard

First, it's important to point out that the original diaries of Anne Frank were written in Dutch, and it is that version which is allegedly in the public domain, depending on whether one agrees that Otto Frank sufficiently edited the work to become a co-author, in which case the publication date wou...

greybeard

The mutability of these pages is one of the central strengths of Ward's Wiki, and one of the reasons for Wikipedia's failure as an encyclopedia. While there are patches to the bug (such as Flagged Revisions), Wikipedia declines to use even those. Whilst WP is the number one online encyclopaedia and...

greybeard

Wikicomedian editors the list [link]http://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/warriorshtm/lonelyguy.htm[/link], [link]http://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/warriorshtm/netrat.htm[/link], [link]http://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/warriorshtm/enfantprovocateur.htm[/link], [link]http://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/wa...

greybeard

Which categories of editors get the most benefits from an increasing entropy factor on Wikipedia? Not paid editors or POV pushers, who would both want clear, comprehensible articles that unambiguously support their positions. I disagree, and cite the Israel-Palestine battleground as an example. POV...

greybeard

The basic problem, which encapsulates all of your scenarios, is simply entropy , the gradual decline into disorder that virtually every Wikipedia page suffers. Even when local optimizations are done, it often results in degradations elsewhere in the same article or in other articles. Even without ch...

greybeard

At some point the online identity and authentication problem will become largely solved, and the way it will be solved is via a federated, open-standard online identity system. That is inevitable, and it will most likely be noticeably occurring in the next 10 years, and pervasive in the next twenty....

greybeard

Expect more of this. The whole "federated sign-on" regime is a very under-appreciated area of competitiveness among the tech giants. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft dominate (for obvious reasons), but Twitter, Yahoo, PayPal, and many smaller wannabes also strive to participate, as well as dedicated ...

greybeard

It's apropos. The "Gruaniad" doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation for accuracy either.

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