Wikipediocracy

Kevin

And, of course, to the extent that it will harm The Guardian financially, is Jimmy in the clear? Clearly this was planned while he was a trustee of that newspaper, and privy to information concerning that paper. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales exits Guardian board over conflict of interest with Wi...

Kevin

Randy from Boise wrote:WMF Strategy

1. Raise as much money as possible.

2. Spend as much money as possible, preferably on new hires and junkets.

I think you're being a little unfair. So far the new strategy has also included 'language tweaks', and the addition of a missing apostrophe.

Kevin

Randy from Boise wrote:That's absolutely what they THINK they said.

Surely you don't actually believe that? They are raking in all those millions by knowing exactly what they are doing. And while their engineering might be laughable, their fundraising is first class.

Kevin

RfAs were just as fucked years ago when there were 15 or 20 going at any one time. It just stood out less. No matter what happens though, admins are just random amateurs grinding their own axe. The chance of it being taken off you is so small that there's no incentive to behave decently, although m...

Kevin

RfA is such a clusterfuck precisely because there are so few of them and when the circus is only in town for 24 hours then all the local clowns come out in a hurry to audition. This is the best observation about RfA that I've read in a while. In addition to making it really obvious who has an axe t...

Kevin

Beeblebrox wrote:I don't know why they do this to us again and again.

It is because they are arrogant, incompetent, and do not share any common interest with editors.

Kevin

A business cannot survive, let alone thrive, under such conditions. Given this, I'd say it's absolutely not time for the WMF to branch out into new activities; if anything, it's a call to dramatically scale back current activities or even to consider outsourcing some of them. It isn't a business th...

Kevin

It's going to be interesting seeing the reaction to this news - Monkey selfie case: judge rules animal cannot own his photo copyright.

A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that a macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs cannot be declared the copyright owner of the photos.

Kevin

Wikipedians pay lip service to consensus. I've always understood consensus to be a decision that everyone in a group can live with, i.e. a compromise. How does that work when the possible outcomes are binary? At RFA, you either make someone an admin or not. It's a vote, no matter how you dress it up...

Kevin

Auggie wrote:Is it still possible to buy an admin account from one of these old-timers? What's the going rate?

SB_Johnny wrote:Bidding starts at $1,001,001.

I think I'll put mine up also. It's been tainted by poor behavior though, so I'll take $5.

Kevin

It's a collection of sources that anyone can add. There's no need to be an expert. Anyone can add information on all sorts of subjects, assuming they can google or haven't been banned from their public library, that's how wp became the mostly unreadable pile of crap it is now. Taking the unsorted i...

Kevin

...is available . From the Q&A page : How many people are you planning to hire? We plan to grow the Wikimedia Foundation staff from a projected 240 to 280, an increase of 17% over the prior fiscal year. :picard: It is pretty clear that their only performance metric is staff level. They are at a siz...

Kevin

I've written a few replies to this, but they all boil down to what the fuck are they doing with that money? Is it just a social welfare program for shitty developers?

Kevin

1. An alternate theory would have it that people experienced with editing Wikipedia are too heavily invested in it to make fair and unbiased arbitration decisions. In my view, editing and arbitration are different skill sets, one does not necessarily lead to the other. 2. If you feel that arbitrati...

Kevin

1) What do you suppose the correlation between 'experienced Wikipedians' and 'good at arbitration' is? 2) Why do you suppose that 'volunteers' (read elected in a popularity contest) would be a reasonable way to handle nearly intractable disputes such as Northern Ireland or Israel v Palestine? 3) Wh...

Kevin

I can't wait for the 3D printable cock shots.

Kevin

Wikimedia Foundation Engineering reorganization FAQ Does this have anything to do with Erik Möller resigning? Definitely not. We’ve been rethinking the design of the Engineering organization for nearly a year now, with Erik deeply involved in that process. He’s been a key thought partner in sharing...

Kevin

tarantino wrote:There was a large structural reorganization a few days ago, too.

Is it an encyclopaedia? Or a rehab program for software geeks?

Kevin

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” - Hemingway

I know this predates even Usenet, so probably doesn't count for Wikipedia. Of course he never knew the perils of anonymous editing.

Kevin

I generally agree with Seraphimblade's discussion in his statement. I think we always have jurisdiction to determine our own jurisdiction, including whether Eloquence's actions fall within one of the exceptions to our jurisdiction, and whether we may nonetheless take notice of it in light of the th...

Kevin

The upshot of all this is probably that a template will be created to place on top of all temporarily-audio-only Signpost interviews, asking users to please not post their own transcripts prior to a certain date without advance permission. Or they could make a template asking editors who are Specia...

Kevin

Could a reader here collect it, for later display in Greg's fetid basement?

Kevin

Hopefully it ends up trapped in a seedy sex club, uploading all it sees to Commons.

Kevin

Notvelty wrote:Tell me you don't also think that twitter hashtags help bring back captured enslaved female students?

Kevin

Volunteer Marek wrote:...unless someone invents negative editors.

Surely this describes a large part of the active editing population?

Kevin

There are two things to be done to speed Wikipedia's death. First is to convince the people not involved in Wikipedia of two things: one, that Wikipedia's content is not reliable and two, that contributing to Wikipedia is neither cool nor fun. The second is to come up with viable alternative to Wik...

Kevin

So I'll set the ball rolling. My fundamental thesis is that WP has two basic and intertwined flaws that it will likely never be able to resolve, and are likely to lead to its ultimate demise. And they are the out-dated notion that anyone can edit anything (which is a fiction anyway), and the ridicu...

Kevin

What some people call our society is actually a large scale production of 1984, directed by Rupert Murdoch.

Kevin

... and that would hurt their "participation rate", which they believe is tied to their donation rate, which is (of course) the only metric that matters. Has there ever been a study done to correlate donations with editing? I would have thought most donations come from the large benefactors/adverti...

Kevin

I've got very close friends who used to own a farm outside of Durban. The stories they tell about crime and violence in J'Berg and Durban are chilling. I can just imagine how a flock of pasty, fat, white American wannabe tech wienies would fare. I remember reading a few years ago about a UN officia...

Kevin

Google is different this year. It takes a little work to get to the WP page, the big colorful info box answers a lot of the lite trivia questions without having to sort through WP. For example, picking a name randomly from the sky, Google for "Jeremy Irons" generates in the left column: 1. IMDb 2. ...

Kevin

I'm not sure it's deletable without studying the issue. (I nominate very few things for deletion myself, even though I dwell at AfD.) The question is whether the incident did in fact spur legislation. RfB P.S. This very unspecific: "The child's injury led to federal legislation to make pools safer....

Kevin

Nice summary, Zoloft! I think the first three and the fifth are basically allowed and even called for by policy, but there's a surplus of petty, cheap, and World of Warcraft-style administrators targeting and picking off their victims for fun. In other words, their motive is, for example: why be sa...

Kevin

If the Wikimedia Foundation had some balls and issued a public statement saying it was going to put one attribute above all others, when it comes to Wikipedia, which attribute would you hope and pray that they would place at the top? (Currently, I think we all know their biggest priority is "Partic...

Kevin

It's a little hard to see the navel for all the fluff.

Kevin

Thing is, the article on Buster Gonad has a "See Also" that points to the article on Mr. Warren, which of course should be deleted immediately. Done. For what it's worth, I've been a Viz reader for something like twenty years, and I've chuckled at that incredibly puerile character any number of tim...

Kevin

I generally support identifying Wikipedia editors - when there's a specific reason to do so. A scatter-shot "crowd-sourcing" effort to ID people I don't support. I recommend that "Triptych" host his project somewhere else. I see little upside for what we're trying to do here and a reasonable amount...

Kevin

Hex wrote:LOL.

Category:Wikipedians who have turned off VisualEditor (T-H-L)

Tempted to move that to Category:Whiny narcissistic twats (T-H-L)

Kevin

His bio would be a Gibraltar-solid, ironclad Keep at AfD, if anyone ever tries it. why should that be? Multiple published sources dealing substantially with the subject. So? Why on earth should an encyclopedia have an article about every character on the planet who happens to have a couple of refer...

Kevin

I think you greatly overestimate the amount that the general public knows or cares about Wikipedia's shortcomings. To most people it's just a website that has information handy on whatever subject they care to look up at the moment. So it's 'just a website that has information' yet they don't care ...

Kevin

Wer900 wrote: ...As a consequence, Wikipedia's power players may not even be onsite, but rather drones who take up residence in depraved regions of the Internet, controlling vast networks of editors through fear of harassment or even outright fraud.

You should read fewer comic books.

Kevin

Wer900 wrote:Using real names would result in tremendous off-wiki harassment of editors, their families, and friends.

I don't think so. Maybe for a very small subset of editors it could be true. I think it would result in a vast improvement in quality that would far outweigh any negative aspect.

Kevin

It's a little more than that. Risker has said several times lately that there is a consistent "history" of problematic behavior on my part. What bothers me about this is that, before she was elected to ArbCom the first time, she sent me several emails appearing to support my efforts in trying to fi...

Kevin

For the initially challenged young one

Kevin

I'm still keeping my veneer of anonymity Likewise. Mr fuckwit is still alive and kicking. And I have no intention of having that yapping little dog humping my leg. Damn it all how many get banned from their own blogger and wordpress blogs. Argh that fucker is everywhere. I stopped reading alt.machi...

Kevin

I don't know why the public's view on this is supposed to be determinative - <snip> It is because the public are the intended target for the whole project. There is no useful distinction between Wikipedia and Wikimedia in the context of illuminating the general public about Wikipedia/Wikimedia cont...

Kevin

There must be some DYK hooks in this. Especially the Gibraltarpedia one.

Kevin

EricBarbour wrote:Looks okay to me. Don't like it? Write a follow-up.

My criticism is of Wikidata, not the blog post.

I'll start using the huge font, so it's easier to read.

Edit: I'll help! -Zoloft

Kevin

Data? What data? My 5 random clicks led to these: http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2691942 http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7104463 http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q357625 http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6093575 http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q767175 What attempts have been made to actually organize the supposed...

Kevin

Lol, you have either led a very sheltered life or you just aren't pondering a lot on those questions. Teenagers getting porn from adults is like teenagers getting alcohol from adults. Where you have teenagers who want it badly enough, you have adults who don't care much about helping them get it. T...

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