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Feinstein's next attack on Wikipedia

As I'm sure most here are aware, several aspect of the Stop Online Piracy Act, against which Wikipedia mobilized in 2012, are reflected^[1] in the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that was passed as part of the omnibus spending bill. Now the next step in Senator Dianne Feinstein's unwavering decades-long crusade against freedom of speech is underway.^[2]

As described by its sponsor, the bill would require "an electronic communication service or a remote computing service" to report any "terrorist activity" it knows about. The trick is that, while "terrorist activity" is required to include sharing any information about explosives or weapons of mass destruction under various circumstances, it is not limited to that: it permits the United States Attorney General, an appointed executive official, to define the phrase as he sees fit. Thus the bill is an enabling act granting the executive branch an open-ended authority to punish sites like Wikipedia if they do not report their users for making whatever kind of informative editing the appointee doesn't approve of.

In response to this threat, Wikipedia needs to take certain actions.

1. The WMF must either sign or issue a concurring opinion with the industry coalition against the bill.

2. The WMF must have its legal staff provide editors with specific advice pertaining to 18 U.S. Code para 842, the specific existing law, potential violations of which must be reported if Feinstein's proposed law is heeded.

3. One issue with which I am particularly concerned is the definition of "knowing that such person intends to use the teaching, demonstration, or information for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence" and the related provision from the previous part. Past enforcement of this has followed a terroristic pattern, going after rare soft targets like Sherman Austin. Nonetheless, Jimmy Wales has a famous slogan, "...every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." Well, is that already illegal under U.S. law? And if so, is Wales criminally culpable if he edits, or hosts, an article about a nuclear bomb, knowing and indeed intending that the Caliph or one of his men, who doubtless would love to own one, might choose to read it?

4. Any report of "terrorist activity" may land editors on the no-fly list, which is part of a Terrorist Screening Database used by some countries as a reason for denial of travel, and by others for indefinite detention and torture.^[3] Obama recently proposed to use this list – in which no due process is ever used – to deny gun purchases (but why stop there? Can't a car be used for multiple murder?). Wikipedia will need to canvass contributors to see if they are subjected to such measures regardless of their country of residence or "citizenship", whether there is formal reporting mandated or data is harvested from public article history records.

5. The WMF needs to understand exactly how much information about a user it is going to be required to turn over if Feinstein's bill passes. It is hard to picture it will be required to make a report, yet be allowed to insist on a warrant if asked for details. It is time for Wikipedia to start sanitizing any non-public records now, while it is legal to do so, and to advise users on what actions they may be able to take to protect themselves.

6. If expert legal opinion occurs that this bill is an existential threat to its educational mission, the WMF should campaign against this bill with more vigor than it opposed SOPA. It is worth making this fight, in the hope that injustice delayed is injustice denied. Wnt (talk) 15:42, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

I wouldn't be worried about Wikipedia's article on nuclear bomb. It's the articles on acetone peroxide, ANFO, nitroglycerine, nitrogen triiodide, etc. that would be problematic. --Carnildo (talk) 01:20, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

@Carnildo: I chose that article for two reasons. The first is that if there is a terrorist in ISIS working on a nuclear bomb, wherever he came from, whether he trained in Islamabad or in Berkeley, it is a near certainty that he will actually have looked up nuclear weapon and its sub-articles at some point in his life, and made that a part of his education. The issue is whether we go by the standard of looking only at whether terrorists might access the data, or instead consider that an educated populace has many effects, some positive, some negative, and have faith that the positives of a free society outweigh the negatives.

The second reason is that these articles, like nuclear weapon design and Pit (nuclear weapon), are useful in understanding, for example, the role of breeder reactors and nuclear reprocessing in generating plutonium to make the bombs. So if our society were not committed, fully, to preserving the availability of such information that has become known to the world, we would be giving up the ability of the public to make informed decisions about some of the more controversial facilities required for nuclear weapons production. It follows, logically, that in a Feinstein America, it would be a threat to national security to allow this public to have any say in such decisions – so any pretense of democracy must be put aside to ensure that military specialists would have total control over them. I think this is the case for the lesser explosives you mention – for example, plants like this have been exploding periodically for more than a hundred years. But the public policy implications are most obvious with the nuclear example. Wnt (talk) 03:28, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

The WMF should move all its data to servers located in Switzerland. Count Iblis (talk) 18:18, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

That's an easy idea, but it doesn't really reflect what this bill portends, nor what life may be like in a post-legal society. I mean, consider three Google properties: the Google+ online social media site, the Google search engine, and the Chrome browser. If a bill can coerce the company into reporting online "terrorist activity", i.e. the posting of bomb manuals or ISIS videos, why would I expect that to be limited only to the social media site, rather than requiring them to report everyone who looks up such things, or even everyone who uses their browser to go to sites on a list? The bill says "while engaged in providing an electronic communication service or a remote computing service to the public" … these actually have definitions, which can be traced to "any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications" and " the provision to the public of computer storage or processing services by means of an electronic communications system" respectively. I have no idea whether they could include browsers and search engines this way, but with Feinstein, I am never sufficiently pessimistic. (To clarify, the bill does not require companies to look for terrorist activity, but if the Attorney General writes them a letter and says that anyone who reads X, Y, or Z is engaging in it, and they have access to know who that is, I expect that's "actual knowledge") It has been as much as admitted that spies are looking for end-runs around encryption by going to the user's own system to get decrypted material, so I don't think they are innocent of considering the possibility. Furthermore, remember that all this has to do with reports that, thanks to Feinstein and others, can now be made under CISPA without fear of liability; they can then be integrated directly into no-fly list data, without any trial or even human examination ever taking place. True, by some miracle of coincidental conservatism, Congress rejected using that to deny a right to bear arms, but with events like this I wonder if the 'privilege' of driving will be so fortunate. I really don't see very many potential obstacles left to a model where people who read the wrong Wikipedia page later find out that they're not allowed to drive a car, regardless of where they live or where the servers are. Wnt (talk) 17:37, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

And yet we still don't offer read access (no editing) to Wikipedia as a hidden service through Tor, which would make it impossible for anyone to find out who read what Wikipedia page. :( --Guy Macon (talk) 19:40, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: Trust me – it really doesn't, just makes it harder; Should someone want to find out what you've been up to online, no matter what they do, you will leave a trace that can be tracked. There are some fairly well-known holes in Tor which means it is certainly not 100% secure or anonymous, despite what some people think. Mdann52 (talk) 21:25, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

"Leaving a trace" is not a law of nature though. Each and every person running a machine or writing a program decides what kind of traces to leave and what not to leave. An unfathomable amount of spying has been made possible by techies insisting "well that's just the way you do it", rather than making such decisions carefully. And with Wikipedia now potentially in the cross-hairs of this law, those decisions need to be reevaluated - starting with the absurdly trivial reasons that have been given for Wikipedia to keep IP access data about articles. I don't think demands for direct reporting by Wikipedia are the most effective way to conduct surveillance, but they may have substantial symbolic value for demoralizing the public, and they're easy. All it will take is for one anonymous agent to scan through old edits looking for things they can call reportable, and they can email the WMF emergency contact to put them on notice. Then it's up to the WMF whether to report its own editors at the agent's behest, or to face prosecution for failing to do so. Under those circumstances, it would be far better if WMF doesn't have a lot of surplus data on hand - that way at least they might say that there's really no reason why the agent couldn't email the FBI directly instead of getting them involved, and if they capitulate they can argue that doing so doesn't really matter much. Wnt (talk) 13:57, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Mdann52, Bruce Schneier, Edward Snowden, and the creators of Citizenfour do not agree with your assertion.[4][5][6] --Guy Macon (talk) 00:07, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Creepy. I was online & read about a 'Walking Dead' edisode that mentioned a Bazooka (so I Googled back to to Wikipedia). I read online an article about over armed USA police with BearCats (so I Googled back to wikipedia). I couldn't care less as I know my internet is monitored for less than lawful reasons & I did the above while logged into to my ID (which would demonstrate I wasn't hiding). But for everyone else - what a ridiculous pretext! Will Wikipedia co-operate to persecute anyone Googling TV & news terms? I really hope not. AnonNep (talk) 18:31, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Please help me at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Nocturnalnow

I feel there may be some abuse of process issues arising, e.g. Unwarranted and Publicized ( in the Result section ) use of Checkuser, which are demonstrated in this Request for enforcement which within 8 hours had another Administrator's "Result" recommendation that I, who has never been blocked over 7 years, receive a ban against editing any articles relating to U.S. politics.

Please read the entire request and comments, if you can make the time, and weigh in if you feel so disposed, even if it is in favour of the ban. Nocturnalnow (talk) 16:05, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

@Nocturnalnow: Mis-use of checkuser should be reported to WP:AUSC – however IMO, checking if an IP is connected to an account within these circumstances is well within WP:CHK (reason #4). Mdann52 (talk) 20:36, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I still hope Jimbo has a look at the discussion as the CheckUser issue is only one of several abuse of process issues, in my opinion, which are occurring at and revealed within the discussion at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Nocturnalnow.Nocturnalnow (talk) 21:01, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

After a quick look, I must say I disagree with your CheckUser assessment since this particular usage was without a valid reason and specifically breaches this part of the policy: "checks must only be made in order to prevent or reduce potential or actual disruption, or to investigate credible, legitimate concerns of bad faith editing.". Nocturnalnow (talk) 21:16, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

...Which is exactly what was done here (any new accounts or IP's that show up may be subject to such checks), especially as this was a sockpuppetry concern – as I said, Jimbo is unlikely to act on this, so any complaints about CU use should go to WP:AUSC. Mdann52 (talk) 21:22, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

I do not understand. Are you a "gatekeeper" here? I did not come here to get your opinion and I think it is in bad form for you to press your opinion here. Regardless of your opinion, I think that the usage was without a valid reason and specifically breaches this part of the policy: "checks must only be made in order to prevent or reduce potential or actual disruption, or to investigate credible, legitimate concerns of bad faith editing.". I now see there is also an Ombudsman commission resource re: CheckUser complaints. Thanks again,Mdann52 and please continue to express your views on my talk page if you wish.Nocturnalnow (talk) 21:16, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

• This is another Canvassing attempt. See this, this, this and this. These attempts, along with the CU accusations and the diffs provided at AE not only justify a topic ban, but probably deserve further sanctions. Unbelievable. Dave Dial (talk) 16:21, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Nonsense: I say above: "Please read the entire request and comments, if you can make the time, and weigh in if you feel so disposed, even if it is in favour of the ban." Alerting Jimbo to possible abuse of Wikipedia process and policy is not the same as canvassing, imo. I doubt Jimbo needs anybody thinking or talking for him on his talk page. There's plenty of negative minutia about me, including exactly what you refer too, at the page I ask Jimbo to have a look at. Nevertheless, Merry Christmas, but please continue speaking with me at my talk page, if you wish. Nocturnalnow (talk) 21:24, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #6—2015

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Did you know?

A new, simpler system for editing will offer a single Edit button. Once the page has opened, you can switch back and forth between visual and wikitext editing.

If you prefer having separate edit buttons, then you can set that option in your preferences, either in a pop-up dialog the next time you open the visual editor, or by going to Special:Preferences and choosing the setting that you want:

The current plan is for the default setting to have the Edit button open the editing environment you used most recently.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs and expanded the mathematics formula tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing.

The LaTeX mathematics formula editor has been significantly expanded. (T118616) You can see the formula as you change the LaTeX code. You can click buttons to insert the correct LaTeX code for many symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, like the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as a cookie for logged-out users and as an account preference for logged-in editors. Logged-in editors will be able to set a default editor in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences in the drop-down menu about "Editing mode:".

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the following Wikipedias in early 2016: Amharic, Buginese, Min Dong, Cree, Manx, Hakka, Armenian, Georgian, Pontic, Serbo-Croatian, Tigrinya, Mingrelian, Zhuang, and Min Nan. (T116523) Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. The developers would like to know how well it works. Please tell them what kind of computer, web browser, and keyboard you are using.

In 2016, the feedback pages for the visual editor on many Wikipedias will be redirected to mediawiki.org. (T92661)

Testing opportunities

• Please try the new system for the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You can edit while logged out to see how it works for logged-out editors, or you can create a separate account to be able to set your account's preferences. Please share your thoughts about the single edit tab system at the feedback topic on mediawiki.org or sign up for formal user research (type "single edit tab" in the question about other areas you're interested in). The new system has not been finalized, and your feedback can affect the outcome. The team particularly wants your thoughts about the options in Special:Preferences. The current choices in Special:Preferences are:
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• Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).

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Whatamidoing (WMF), 00:54, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Merry Christmas and happy new year

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Merry Christmas and happy new year. (:

--Pine^✉ 01:00, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

The Guardian picture.

Hello. The day December 23 I uploaded this picture to Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arbol_wikinavide%C3%B1o_2015.png to greet my friends and partners at Spanish Wikipedia. But at December 24 my photomontage went to a Deletion request ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Arbol_wikinavide%C3%B1o_2015.png ) because it wasn't my own work. All pictures used in that photomontage came from Commons except for one. The face of Jimbo Wales used in that photo, came from a The Guardian opinion article: ( http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/03/sharing-photos-freedom-of-panorama ) and I used this picture: ( https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/contributor/2015/7/3/1435910318589/Jimmy-Wales-R.png?w=300&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=cda9c14a6cccfb7a97eabcf042f561d4 ). Is there any ways I can contact the photographer that took you that picture, or you can please tell me what license is this picture so I can use your picture in my tree? Thanks, ElGatoSaez | Meow me 20:15, 24 December 2015 (UTC).

Unfortunately I don't remember where that one is from. It probably was taken at some point by a photographer from The Guardian. I don't know how to help, sorry. :-(--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:56, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

Hello Jimbo Wales: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Philip J Fry / talk 22:07, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

Happy Holidays to you, your family and friends. May you have happy editing!

		Happy Holidays to you and your family and friends!
		May this season bring you joy and happiness and happy editing!.Mark Miller (talk) 02:44, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

Jimbo Wales, I hope you have a Merry Christmas and hope your day is full of the true spirit of the day. Plus, good food, good family and good times. :) Have a Great Day! :) - Neutralhomer • Talk • 06:30, 25 December 2015 (UTC) Spread the joy of Christmas by adding {{subst:User:Neutralhomer/MerryChristmas}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Rubbish computer (Merry Christmas!: ...And a Happy New Year!) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas2}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Rubbish computer (Merry Christmas!: ...And a Happy New Year!) 15:57, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Appeal of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Nocturnalnow ArbCom decision i.e.Topic Ban on U.S. Politics

Merry Christmas from Canada, Jimbo.

I am making an appeal to you regarding the decision made here

I see an editor states above that appeals to you on this talk page must be made within 7 days of the ArbCom decision.

That 7 day time limit is why I am coming here with my appeal right now.

I have nothing to add to the information, comments etc. which are within the request for enforcement link other than I think the ban is too broad even if accepting all of the "evidence" against me.

Also, please note that I have been a productive editor for over 8 years with no blocks, and over 10 thousand problem free edits, most related to U.S. politics including these Usernames[[7]][8] which are noted on my User and talk pages. I am a very old man and I forgot my passwords a couple of times after wikibreaks which is why I had other Usernames

Nocturnalnow (talk) 19:47, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Unless I am mistaken, your topic ban was not imposed by ArbCom, it was imposed by an admin closing a discussion at WP:AE. I am not an expert on these procedures, but I believe your correct route of appeal is to ArbCom, not to Jimbo. Neutron (talk) 01:04, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much, however, the notice put on my talk page says "This sanction is imposed in my capacity as an uninvolved administrator under the authority of the Arbitration Committee's decision at".....thus stating that it was a decision by the Arbitration Committee, or am I misunderstanding some difference in terminology? But I am just plain confused, as I have never even been blocked or sanctioned at all, yet now seem to be the only Editor banned from this broad topic. I would really appreciate any info from anybody as to how to appeal this ban. Nocturnalnow (talk) 03:52, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

You are not the only editor under this topic ban. The appeals process is outlined here. Gamaliel (talk) 03:52, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Gamaliel, your statement at the request for enforcement (somewhat misrepresentative as pointed out by another editor's comment), adding of additional negative minutia, and 2 times [9][10]rebuttal of Vesuvius Dogg's statement against such a wide ban, made me wonder why you appear within seconds here? Since you came here, maybe you can clarify whether I was banned by ArbCom as stated on the notice on my talk page or not? Also, the link you provide was already on my talk page but says nothing about an appeal to ArbCom. Please clarify exactly where I go to appeal to ArbCom. Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:00, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

I am not stalking you. I am one of 3,344 editors who have this page on their watchlist, and many of them use this space to discuss issues important to the community or to provide assistance to others, as I attempted to do here. Please take my message in the spirit it was intended. The link I provided does in fact provide instructions on how to appeal to the Arbitration Committee, specifically in step 3 of "Appeals by sanctioned editors". Gamaliel (talk) 04:13, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Apologies,Gamaliel, I am upset as you might be under similar circumstances. I will try the step 3 you refer to. Best wishes, Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:20, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Appeal of ArbCom decision at GMO (2)

Dear Jimbo, I believe I am allowed to appeal an ArbCom decision on your Talk page. My request for an amendment by ArbCom regarding a previous decision of theirs has just been archived, which I guess is their way of saying they have rejected my request. This means my posting here to you is my last avenue of appeal. This request is not based on any intricate wiki-lawyering or tortuous argument, rather, it is based on a simple matter of principle. I have been topic banned from an area in which I have never edited. Despite my asking for evidence of such editing, none has been produced by any user or arbitrator. I feel it is a very dangerous precedent for ArbCom to ban editors from places they have not even edited, let alone disrupted. My original posting here for you to look at my request was piggy-backed by numerous other editors making diverse (often unrelated) points, which I am sure would have made reading my request rather tedious. I will therefore re-post my request on my talk page which I will keep clean of other edits in the relevant thread (other editors please note). I hope this is OK. Please feel free to comment either there, or here. I thank you in advance for considering my request.DrChrissy ^(talk) 18:05, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

You are making a fool of yourself, Doc. -Roxy the dog™ woof 18:26, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Since you've just been caught intervening in discussions about GMOs and human health at Precautionary principle[11] these protestations ring rather hollow. This excessively shrill & legalistic rebellion against your sanctions will, I suggest, shortly exhaust the patience of the community and result in a permanent ban. Alexbrn (talk) 19:34, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

This is a legitimate request made according to an accepted and recommended process. Please stop bullying.DrChrissy ^(talk) 20:09, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Agree with DrChrissy. Bullies, begone. Jusdafax 05:38, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Agree with DrChrissy and Jusdafax. The first two comments after the OP do indeed look like bullying to me. One is a plain gaslighting "You're stupid, doc, just go home" comment and the other is an attempt to poison the well by introducing the flavor of a bad character reputation to the OP by calling this request an "excessively shrill & legalistic rebellion against your sanctions" for a very civil appeal. SageRad (talk) 22:24, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

DrChrissy, the problem here is that wherever you edit, you consider that your opinion, and only yours, is correct and valid. That's why you got topic-banned over your promotion of quackery, and it's why you got topic-banned from GMOs. You are the very embodiment of WP:IDHT, and your response to any answer you don't like is simply to ignore it and ask again. Guy (Help!) 14:21, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

I am following a legitimate and accepted process of appeal. Your bullying attempts to discredit me and poison the well for a totally acceptable action are extremely unwelcome here - especially considering you are an admin. Please stop following me around and leaving inflammatory and highly inaccurate statements about me.DrChrissy ^(talk) 16:50, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Regardless of what it might say in da rulez, Jimbo has never overruled an Arbcom decision and most probably he never will. Really, his name should be stricken from the policy as a valid course of appeal IMO. I don't agree with the decision myself either and its been my experience that Arbcom decisions are generally negative in their outcome. But the Arbcom has established themselves so that once they have made their decision there is no way to appeal it, change it or revoke it. Even a community RFC or discussion with consensus cannot revoke it. Good luck! Maj Turmoil (talk) 20:26, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

I see no bullying. I see other editors advising User:DrChrissy that the continuing efforts to appeal the ArbCom decision to Jimbo (when Jimbo has not overruled an ArbCom decision in a very long time) is tendentious. I have in the past seen editors who tend to see disagreement and advice not to oppose consensus as bulllying, and I am beginning to think that User:DrChrissy is another such editor who sees bullying when there is disagreement. In particular, heed the comment of User:Alexbrn, which is not bullying, but a good-faith reminder that continuing to protest at such length may exhaust the patience of the community and result either in an expanded topic-ban from discussing topic-bans or even in a site ban. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:40, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

I do agree that the policy that states that there is an option to appeal to Jimbo should be either deleted or replaced with instructions on how to appeal to the WMF, if there is a privilege to appeal to the WMF. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:40, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

What then is the point of imposing a topic ban on an editor who has never edited the topic? This seems to me to be a gross overreach of the Arbcom's power and frankly a waste of time. If anyone were given a topic ban on a topic they hadn't edited with broadly construed discretion to block them on sight, they would be understandably annoyed. In this case, DrChrissy is topic banned from editing GMO's but the topic ban explicitly exempts genetically modified animals. I didn't know that and I suspect others won't either. So its only a matter of time before some well meaning admin blocks her using broadly construed discretion because they modified an article that appeared to be related to a GMO. Then, that block is on record and right or wrong, its a hit for life and will be continuously used against them. So why even topic ban them if they have never edited the topic area and are exempted from the topic they do participate in? Its a setup for future failure. Maj Turmoil (talk) 21:09, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Information suppression on Wikipedia

I have come to you before regarding this topic and after a year of suppression still I am unable to bring the subject to main space. The topic is Involuntary celibacy, the ongoing DRV can be found here Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2015 December 21.

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Involuntary celibacy
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Involuntary celibacy (2nd nomination)
• First DRV
• Second DRV
• RfC request
• Third DRV
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Involuntary celibacy (3rd nomination)

I have provided the full history for any page stalker wishing to participate. There is an overabundance of sources which shows the concept has over a century of research and study. This is certainly not fringe nor WP:NEO. The reason for this concept's suppression may be political because as far as I can tell it passes every GNG and NPOV guideline. There was also a great deal of of wikicanvassing in favor of deletion all of which I provided in the DRV including your comment from March 16th of this year. I hoping for your input for or against, so far not one editor endorsing deletion as provided reasons based on the most recent AfD. I feel this is the prime example for what happens when editors mobbed together and vote WP:IDONTLIKEIT. If administrator can supervote and override both consensus and policy then editing Wikipedia becomes difficult. I really hoped to rectify this issue before the year's end. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 13:43, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

You are unable to bring it as it is a neologism that reifies a complex and sad phenomenon that has diverse aspects to it. Pages like this serve to lead suffering people down wrong paths rather than seeking proper professional help or reading about conditions and causes that have been studied and validated. What you are doing is extremely ignorant and potentially harmful to others. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:48, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

e.g. pages such as Social isolation, Social anxiety, Avoidant personality disorder, Adjustment disorder, Sexual frustration, Human sexual activity, Sexual orientation, Intimate relationship and Mood disorder (and related aritcles) among many others are areas that should have more pertinent material that relates to the subject. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:53, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Are you saying involuntary celibacy is the same thing as those conditions? It is clear that people that have those conditions may be involuntary celibates, but the term is obviously its own thing the job of an encyclopedia is to document this. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 22:06, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

In cases like this I think it is clear that editors are attempted to ensure their views prevail rather than being here to build an encyclopedia. It is human nature to become defensive when proven wrong sometimes to the point of violence. In the case of Wikipedia, it becomes impossible to edit when those in power mob together maintain status quo. I fear that this current DRV will be closed as no consensus to overturn when there clearly is solid reasons to overturn, the only way to combat this it override incorrect closures when editors fail to bring reasoning to retain deletion. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 23:27, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

@Valoem: And you expect Jimbo to do what exactly? Smells like a bit of WP:FORUMSHOP to me... Mdann52 (talk) 06:55, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Valoem, I am saying what you believe to be involuntary celibacy is a misconception of a complex scenario that encompasses many subjects - those I have listed are a partial list. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:05, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

• A good rule of thumb on Wikipedia is: if someone's main argument against deleting a topic is "suppression", the article probably should not exist. Nobody is suppressing anything, the problem is (and always has been) your attempts to use Wikipedia to blaze the trail in getting this term accepted. Do we really have to explain, yet again, why we don't do that? Guy (Help!) 14:24, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

That's a good rule of thumb, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. The main argument against deleting the topic is that it is notable. The main argument for deleting the topic appears to be variants of IDONTLIKEIT. Take another look. If a term is used in the media on a regular basis in major publications, and if the subculture of "incel" is written up by major publications, then people will turn to Wikipedia to learn more. It's like "homeopathy" - we may not like it, but we know the best thing to do is write about it neutrally and fairly.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:06, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Guy I am not the type of editor to recklessly apply information suppression if you've seen the offwiki harassment message you will know this suppression is indeed political. I've avoided mentioning what the message pertained to for the sake of neutrality. I just listed the sources on the page, they were provided as links during the AfD, however it is unlikely those in favor of deletion have read those links so I listed them plainly if this is not suppression then what is it? Cas Liber I agree that the subject is complex and many types of involuntary celibacy may exist, our job here is to document them and I've never heard of this as a reason to delete, in fact if this was a deletion rationale we would not have an encyclopedia at all. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 18:34, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

The policy-related reason to delete is that is not notable - it was concocted by a single team of researchers, was not generally taken up, except by some web-based people with some bare circulation. My opinion is that its subject matter is enmeshed in medical and psychological (as well as sociological) topics and hence should abide by sourcing for medical articles - i.e. reliable peer-reviewed secondary sources - as we are talking about peoples' health and livelihood here. My ethical reason for getting rid of it is that it is misleading and potentially harmful. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:29, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Cas Liber based on your edits, I believe you have a science background. Nearly all studies begin with a single group if not a singular individual this, however, has not. The concept began, based on my research in 1916, the source termed it involuntary abstinence, before the teetotal movement when abstinence referred to sexual activity over substance abuse. It was among the first serious sexology studies and thus notable. The argument that we should ignore this is inherently flawed not only for an encyclopedia, but for research itself. I assume your fear is not based on GNG policy, but social protection. This is the same ideology applied by dictatorships and is naturally dangerous. I've highlighted a century of sources covering this topic we are progressive our only hope is NPOV so that an uneducated viewer understands the depth of the concept he or she is reading. Please reconsider. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 04:09, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia reflects sources - it doesn't do original research. You wanna research it? Fine, go write a paper and get it submitted to a journal. Seriously, you're missing the point about this whole schmozzle and reifying something that is warping understanding of it. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:15, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

But Cas Liber, there appear to be a great many sources. You seem to be making the error of assuming that there need to be academic sources, but this is a social movement / social phenomenon sufficiently covered in mainstream high quality magazines and newspapers, not a scientific concept. A good article would note exactly what you've said above - that this is a concept that has not been taken up by professional medical researchers in any serious way. Compare: homeopathy and other such pseudo-science - we don't say "this subject matter is enmeshed in medical and psychological topics" and refuse to have an article if those don't support the concept. Instead, we provide a public service by explaining to people that a term they heard about in the media or floating around on the web is not a scientific term.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:27, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Frankly, I'm shocked by the response I've provided sources which clearly show this not OR. Anything wrong with the sources I provided? We can discuss this by email if you'd like I don't see any benefit on flooding Jimbo's page at this point. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 04:17, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

• Considering what enormous impact Wikipedia has, no wonder that this neologism is fought for. I don't have Casliber's medical and science background, but I do have all the other background to be able to dicern a little here - philosophy, the term celibacy and a lot of confusion in defining the subject. Wikipedia is nowadays the number one for acknowledging any term, so - one must be careful. This is a WP:NEO that has some severe definition problems. If we do publish this article - it will blow - because these articles are often created in an attempt to use Wikipedia to increase usage of the term. It needs to be written - if it should be written with great care, and not the way it is suggested now. that would not be proper and cautious... Hafspajen (talk) 09:47, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Arbitration Committee aka "ArbCom", is now officially changing its role to Rubber Stamp.

Arbcom has decided it will now only seriously entertain Amendment Request cases where "abuse of (administrator's) discretion" is provable and agreed upon by Arbitration Committee consensus

Hi User:Jimbo Wales,

fyi

Please see, particularly: "Kevin: "Yes, "abuse of discretion" would be a good way to describe the standard. That's really the standard when we review any administrative actions—...." Seraphimblade

User:Jimbo Wales, I can not imagine you expected the Arbitration Committee to unilaterally change its mandate wherein it now takes on the characteristics of some Southern U.S. State Appeals Courts; i.e., no matter how wrong headed the decision and/or cruel and unusual the punishment decision meted out to an individual by a lower authority,i.e. Administrator(s), the higher authority, i.e. the [[Arbitration Committee] will not entertain an appeal unless there is extreme and undeniable evidence, and a consensus reached by the Arbitration Committee, of what the ArbCom members are labeling as "abuse of discretion" by one or more Administrators who meted out the punishment.

I am wondering "why" the Arbitration Committee would make such a drastic reduction in its authority and remedial effect upon the checks and balances within Wikipedia. The change obviously makes it much easier to quickly discharge appeals without much time spent with thought or reading, by simply browsing to see if there are any glaring evidence of Administrator "abuse of discretion". However, from a democratic process perspective, few initiators would even think of framing an appeal as an "abuse of discretion" appeal; even I had to go back and add to my statement once the ArbCom members specified that "abuse of discretion" is now the impossibly high standard ( especially by consensus ) that must be proved by the initiator.

Kevin, A brave(imo) and concerned Arbcom Clerk, bravely recused himself to make a statement in the middle of this Request for Amendment to bring this concern to all our attention

Kevin in his recusal and statement first brings up this change in ArbCom policy i.e. to only change an Administrator's discretionary decision when there is a determination by consensus, by ArbCom, that an obvious "abuse of discretion" has occurred, so perhaps Kevin's edit is more credible for you to read than my own view of the importance of what is happening on Arbitration Committee.

Worse of all, from a common sense viewpoint, this change in mandate presents a non-climbable conundrum, imo, since we must all AGF with whatever the Administrator has done or decided. Nocturnalnow (talk) 13:27, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

All I see at that request, is that Kevin simply wanted to ask a few questions and offer his opinion on the matter, and thus rightly recused himself from further clerking. There was no "brave recusal to bring this concern to all our attention", nor is there any reduction of authority to a rubber stamp. This was a clarification of which you don't like the outcome. Everthing you have written here is either false, or hyperbole.--Atlan (talk) 14:12, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

No,Atlan, your lack of AGF re: I "don't like the outcome" is wrong and, although perhaps unintentionally on your part, has the effect of being simply an ad hominem(see "motive") and strawman deflection of thought and discussion of this important matter to the lowly ad-hominem level. Only I know what my motivation is for trying to bring this to User:Jimbo Wales's attention, and, believe me, it is not solely or even mostly in relation to my own case before Arbcom. Also, what I have written here is not false, as a review of the edits I link to will show any who wish to see the reality of what I am saying. Your dismissive use of the word "Hyperbole", although common in online discourse, does not fit here as I have exaggerated nothing, as interested editors can see for themselves. I suggest you read thoroughly the Arbitrators' discussion here and think about what the words actually are meaning. Also, Kevin,L235, imo, had a real and valid concern to raise, a similar concern to what I bring up here, in fact, I am only repeating, albeit in a more wordy way, what he said. You can not diminish his action and words to simply "a few questions and offer an opinion" as he could have easily done that after this Amendment request was dealt with and/or in private or talk page discussions with Arbitration Committee members. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:18, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

What Atlan said. You're not a Brave Warrior Against The Forces Of Corruption, you're someone kvetching over a decision you didn't agree with. Arbcom's standard, with regards to allegations of admin abuse, has always been "Is this decision defensible within Wikipedia policy?", not "Would I have made the same decision?". ‑ Iridescent 20:09, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

The decision is not defensible within Wikipedia policy; and those are not the words being applied today; the words today are "abuse of discretion", which, in my English, is a much higher bar to reach. Your other assumptions about my point of view are, as with most assumptions, dead wrong. I am a very old man just trying to fight what I see as being a destructive and/or stupid abuse of discretion and authority within our community; no bravery and no corruption are involved at all.Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:37, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

• I want to make it clear that all I was doing was clearing a procedural question by the Committee, not raising a concern to the community or even commenting on the merits of the appeal. Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) 03:21, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Nevertheless, you have brought into the daylight something within the ArbCom process which few editors know, imo, i.e. that "abuse of discretion" is seen by ArbCom Members as the only standard by which they should/will overturn a decision by an Administrator, regardless of how obviously wrong or unusually punitive that decision may be. And since we are bound to Assume "Good" Faith, and since "abuse" by definition involves "bad" faith,then I don't see how ArbCom can ever overturn a decision by an Administrator. Thus,our Administrators, or a couple of them together, have dictatorial authority. And perhaps just as bad, ArbCom has embraced a standard which has the effect, whether intended or not, of making their work a whole lot easier as it will usually be unnecessary for them to actually read thoroughly any matters related to Administrator decisions( they can just browse looking for "abuse of discretion" sticking out like a sore thumb, and simply say "decline" very quickly, as was done in my case by one "Arbitrator"). Any clear thinking editor who reviews the Request for Enforcement which resulted in a topic wide ban from US politics since 1932 against me, an 8 year editor with many thousands of productive edits and no blocks at all, will see a blatant overreaching and misrepresentation by the Administrator who decided upon the topic ban within 1 day of the request for a ban from editing 1 single BLP. And if ArbCom is self-limiting itself to a nonsensical standard which only serves to enable abuse of authority and discretion, which because of AGF can never be seen as such, then the foundation of Wikipedia is under attack; not by intent nor individuals, but by double think and the evaporation of critical thinking among most of us, imo. Perhaps its a good time to remember the Essjay controversy as many of us are giving so much leeway to Administrators and Arbitrators, as Essjay was both and accorded the same high levels of leeway.Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:35, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Best wishes for the holidays...

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing you a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Hafspajen (talk) 09:52, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

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Happy New Year Jimbo Wales!

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Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. Poepkop (talk) 14:25, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

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2016 is nigh...

	Happy New Year!
	Hello Jimbo Wales: Did you know ... that back in 1885, Wikipedia editors wrote Good Articles with axes, hammers and chisels? Thank you for your contributions to this encyclopedia using 21st century technology. I hope you don't get any unneccessary blisters. North America1000 21:00, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

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On whether to doubt the assertions of women who say they were raped

There's an interesting discussion on BLPN (link) where some editors are saying that a rape victim (viz Jameis Winston) should not be referred to as a "victim" but instead as an "accuser". The reason for insisting on this change, apparently, is that we should retain doubts about whether she was telling the truth -- which I think amounts to saying that we should retain doubts about women's reports of rape as a general rule. This might be a discussion of wide interest to editors here. I naturally think the topic is connected to what some people perceive as Wikipedia's gender problem. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 16:24, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi Nomoskedasticity, I think the correct legal term in this case is "complainant", which doesn't isn't supposed to imply either way. I understand your concern. Thanks, Rubbish computer (Merry Christmas!: ...And a Happy New Year!) 16:55, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh, I think it might easily be read to imply that she was (merely) complaining... Nomoskedasticity (talk) 16:57, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Nomoskedasticity I understand, but that's the legal term that would be used. Rubbish computer (Merry Christmas!: ...And a Happy New Year!) 16:58, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

One can always wikilink the term (which redirects to Plaintiff) to forestall improper implications. -- Avi (talk) 17:10, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

That would be one approach, but it seems that if we use a word and have to wikilink it because we know it may be misinterpreted, we should usually try to look for a better word that says what we mean in a more direct way. In this case, "accuser" is the plain English word that I think we're looking for. And given the overall facts of this particular case, at least as currently presented in the article, there seems no way for Wikipedia to say anything stronger than that.

I hasten to add that this in no way amounts to saying that "we should retain doubts about women's reports of rape as a general rule". Indeed, it strikes me that if we adopted the stance that we must in every case use the word 'victim' upon a report of rape we would be adopting a rule to "assume the truth of all rape allegations as a general rule". Neither is suitable for Wikipedia, which should always take a pretty cautious approach in terms of reporting what is known and confirmed.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:42, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

"Accuser" seems right to me as well. I don't know how it works if all the RSs ae using a different term though, are we obliged to parrot the RSs term? I do not know and would appreciate an answer on that aspect. Nocturnalnow (talk) 16:37, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

WP:BLPCRIME plays a major part. Since rape is a serious criminal offence, saying "victim" implies guilt regardless of whether a court has decided this or not. This leads to NPOV issues and also potential libel. Although many rape cases never come to court, there is also a need not to allow guilt by accusation.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 20:12, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

As I understand it, a person who has been raped only becomes a complainant upon filing charges, and cannot become a complainant at all if, for some reason, charges are not or cannot be brought. The victim's inability or unwillingness to file charges, or the court’s failure to accept them, does not mean the rape did not occur. What if the courts are not functioning because there’s a war? What if the victim is a slave, or otherwise lacks legal standing? It is very well to say that Wikipedia "should always take a pretty cautious approach in terms of reporting what is known and confirmed," but in the absence of a definitive judicial determination, how is Wikipedia to know or confirm? That could lead us into the unsavory old custom of assuming that a person who says they have been raped should be treated as a liar unless they can prove otherwise. The specter of libel raised by ianmacm appears to be illusory, since the underlying libel -- having been published by the victim and reported by reliable sources, could not be laid at Wikipedia’s door.MarkBernstein (talk) 20:40, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

In the UK, fewer than 10% of rapes reported to the police result in a conviction. By the logic favoured by most editors posting on this topic, what we then get is that more than 90% of women who report rapes to the police are not "victims". Have some fun with that. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 20:42, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

I think there is a gap in your reasoning here. It isn't that anyone here is arguing that they are not victims, it is that we cannot assert positively that they are. This is not the same thing.

Note as well the deeper problem with your reasoning from the general to the specific. The principle is that it is invalid to argue from a statistical likelihood for a category to a conclusion in a particular case. In "he said, she said" situations there are generally two main possibilities: he's lying, or she's lying. That leaves 3 possibilities for Wikipedia: say (or imply) that he's lying, say (or imply) that she's lying, or adopt neutral language that doesn't answer the question either way. Let's assume for the sake of the argument that we believe based on broader evidence that in 90% of the cases, he's the one lying. That still doesn't justify moving from the neutral language position to a conclusive position, absent clear guidance from an external source.

Going back to this particular case, we have a state Supreme Court Justice saying "I do not find the credibility of one story substantially stronger than that of the other". That's a pretty strong positive reason for us to stick with neutral language. That is, it isn't just that we don't have strong evidence (such as a conviction) to move us at this time into a conclusive statement in either direction, we have positive evidence that neutral language is the best solution.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:40, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

No, that is emphatically not the case. The term "alleged victim" is commonly used in newspapers here in the US and by police and court officials in the absence of a conviction against a named defendant, as is the case in the BLP article we are talking about. Please don't imply that most of the editors working toward an NPOV resolution here are rape denialists. That is unacceptable. Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 23:21, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

• I know that most rapes reported to the police do not result in a conviction. However, rape is such a serious criminal offence that guilt by accusation is unacceptable.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 20:52, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. As I understand it, a person who has been raped only becomes a complainant upon filing charges, and cannot become a complainant at all if, for some reason, charges are not or cannot be brought. The victim's inability or unwillingness to file charges, or the court’s failure to accept them, does not mean the rape did not occur. What if the courts are not functioning because there’s a war? What if the victim is a slave, or otherwise lacks legal standing? It is very well to say that Wikipedia "should always take a pretty cautious approach in terms of reporting what is known and confirmed," but in the absence of a definitive judicial determination, how is Wikipedia to know or confirm? That could lead us into the unsavory old custom of assuming that a person who says they have been raped should be treated as a liar unless they can prove otherwise. The specter of libel raised by ianmacm appears to be illusory, since the underlying libel -- having been published by the victim and reported by reliable sources, could not be laid at Wikipedia’s door.MarkBernstein (talk) 20:40, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

With regard to the term accuser: an accuser is someone who accuses a specific person. Some rape victims cannot accuse anyone, because they are unable to identify the perpetrator. In other cases, rape victims may be prevented from identifying the perpetrator by extortionate demands, fear of reprisal, incapacity, or other considerations. A crime may be reported by its victim, but that victim may in some cases be neither an accuser nor a plaintiff nor a complainant. MarkBernstein (talk) 20:50, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

In the case at hand, the reliable sources use the term "accuser" - thus we should not use a stronger term than the sources use. And the (unusual) argument that by using "accuser" we are saying rapes do not occur or that we imply that "accusers" are liars is simply Python-esque. Collect (talk) 23:16, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Mark, I agree that such cases exist and that in those cases the term "accuser" isn't the right one. But that is not the case we have been discussing, where quiet clearly she did accuse a specific person. In such cases, the word "victim" is less problematic to some extent because it doesn't implicitly conclude that the person (BLP) being accused is guilty. But let's go further, there are cases where everyone would agree that the victim really is a victim, even the accused, but the accused may be arguing (perhaps persuasively) that there's a case of mistaken identity. (Nicole Simpson - no one argued that she wasn't a victim. OJ argued that he didn't do it.)

My overall point is that no simple formula will do. There are dozens, probably hundreds, of possible scenarios in which we would take a different approach. We can't have a general policy of never referring to people as "victims" nor of always referring to some category of complainants/accusers as "victims". Editorial judgment will always matter.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:46, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Since this is being bandied about here as well in order to please the drama gods, people would like to slippery slope their 'general rule' when in this specific case a rape was investigated by the police and determined given the evidence available no real chance of conviction. It was also investigated by the FSU before an ex-Judge who determined there was a lack of evidence of a crime. What is really depressing about the whole thing is that someone who has a biography on wikipedia has to have a section in it about rape allegations where not only is there unlikely to ever be a conviction, but is probably going to tar him for the indefinate future. Or as long as people can edit wikipedia anonymously in order to smear others. Only in death does duty end (talk) 23:13, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Jimbo's comments above aptly summarize my position on the issue.-- — Keithbob • Talk • 01:12, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

If you want a general rule, persons that make complaints of rape don't "bring charges" regardless of TV. The state brings charges. A "victim" is generally required to bring charges (i.e. Nicole Simpson was a victim when a crime was alleged by the state, she needed to neither be alive, be a witness or consent to prosecution). An example of how the press acts is seen in a lot of self-defense shootings. Initial copy might call the person with the gunshot a "victim" but that will change as the story develops and the shooter becomes the "victim" and the wounded person is the perpetrator. In the case of Cosby, for example, his recent charging document will identify a victim. Victim's Rights bills have given some say to victims regarding charging but it's ultimately the State that says "crime" and "victim" and "alleged perpetrator." When no one is named, use of "victim" should defer to the person that felt victimized. When there is an accusation against a specific individual, the sources and, particularly, the State are naming victims of a crime - as well as deciding if there is probable cause to believe a crime occurred. No one disputes the claim that Nicole Simpson was a victim of murder largely because the prosecutor and coroner and police said she was a victim and it is reported in RS. In a strict definition, a "victim" is the person named in a chargeing statement that they are a victim of a crime. The case against Cosby will be "Pennsylvania vs. Bill Cosby", not "Jane Doe vs. Bill Cosby." --DHeyward (talk) 23:12, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

2016

	Happy New Year 2016!
	Did you know ... that back in 1885, Wikipedia editors wrote Good Articles with axes, hammers and chisels? Thank you for your contributions to this encyclopedia using 21st century technology. I hope you don't get any unneccessary blisters.    – Cullen328 Let's discuss it 06:35, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

We called it "Visual editor" back then. --DHeyward (talk) 06:16, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Jimbo Wales!

Happy New Year!

Jimbo Wales,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 00:12, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

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By the way, did you know that this edit was the last edit made in 2015, and this is the first edit of 2016? (Times in UTC, of course). —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 00:12, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Jimbo Wales!

Happy New Year!

Jimbo Wales,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. Rubbish computer (Merry Christmas!: ...And a Happy New Year!) 01:12, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

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Happy New Year, Jimbo Wales!

Happy New Year!

Jimbo Wales,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. –Davey2010 ^{Merry Xmas / Happy New Year} 10:44, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

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Happy New Year, Jimbo Wales!

Happy New Year!

Jimbo Wales,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. 5 albert square (talk) 13:14, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

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New Years Strangeness

"Category:Sextets" has been re-created -- without a single actual sextet to be seen therein. I think this is a first -- a category without a single entry related to its specific stated subject <g>. Collect (talk) 21:27, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Database reports/Empty categories.—Wavelength (talk) 21:47, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

That category was manually (re)created by User:Ottawahitech at: 2016-01-02T20:23:12‎ — xaosflux ^Talk 22:03, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

How Wikipedia appears to weigh material

Bill Cosby total size 86K

Bill Cosby sexual assault allegations 182K. Includes vast amounts of claims and allegations.

This is how some Wikipedia editors appear to weigh biographies. Collect (talk) 17:34, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

That’s quite an article. There is even an enormous list of degrees rescinded. On the other hand, all the statements are sourced, and it’s difficult to put a finger on exactly what is wrong here – even though I agree something clearly is wrong. Peter Damian (talk) 17:57, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, Collect, and everyone is invited to improve them. Your belief that Mr. Cosby's mugshot is of "nil value" to this encyclopedia, following his arraignment on Class I felony aggravated indecent assault charges, speaks for itself. Personally, this is not how I would suggest trimming the article. Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 18:07, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

And I would point out that claiming that class 2 felony charges are "Class 1" is a teensy bit errant. Too many folks appear to think if 10,000 words do not convince anyone that a person is a figurative Satan, that 20,000 words will be better <g>. And again - allegations make for really bad biographies. A photo of a nearly-blind old guy up for class 2 felonies does not meet my idea of "encyclopedic value", alas. Collect (talk) 18:25, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Mea culpa!! As Mashable reports, "The Montgomery County District Attorney's office has said that the charge against Cosby is a second-degree felony. It previously called it a first-degree felony. That means the maximum prison sentence is 10 years, not 20." So if he can only go to prison for 10 years for felony aggravated assault, does that make his mugshot less EV? Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 19:04, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

And did you read what the minimum sentence is for such a crime? And the maximum fine for such a crime? Class 2 felonies are then often plea-bargained down to misdemeanors, as a simple matter of fact, especially where there is a significant "he said/ she said" factor about the specific case at hand. Cheers - he is not yet alleged to have committed first-degree murder, as far as I can tell. Collect (talk) 23:49, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Bearing in mind the Dear Leader’s immortal words (“What actions are you recommending at this time?”), the list in Peter’s link could be heavily cut for a start. All it needs is the name of each university, the date the degree was awarded, the date it was rescinded, and cites, without all the rest of the twaddle. But of course an officer of the Obsessive Detail Protection Force would probably add it all back again. Writegeist (talk) 18:55, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Have already suggested as much on the article's Talk page. Again, anyone can help, it's not rocket science. Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 19:04, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Bill Cosby sexual assault allegations, involving dozens of people, is much more important and deserves much more content. Remember, there is a trial scheduled as well which is likely to generate even more material. Nocturnalnow (talk) 05:28, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Importance: Nuremberg trials - 96K. Cosby is clearly at least twice as important to an encyclopedia as the most significant war crimes trial in history (which concerned many millions of people). Collect (talk) 14:31, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Importance is not shown by word count or file size. Recent history will almost always be larger because we have so much more information about it: we can quite easily get four citations per sentence, and those citations will include more detail than bibliographical citations at the Nuremberg trials. In the future the article will likely be trimmed, but for now stuff like this and our BLP policies mean we need to ensure every single statement is cited to the nines. -mattbuck (Talk) 14:56, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Great point I think. Nocturnalnow (talk) 16:41, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree with Collect. The Nuremberg article needs to be expanded to include much fuller coverage. I can point him to some excellent references for this. Best regards, Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 15:09, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Nope. The stated goal is to write an encyclopedia - not to convey every factoid, allegation and rumour about a scandal remotely supportable in a "reliable source." If the article is not worth a 200K size today, it will not be worth that space in 50 years. And WP:BLP does not say "cover every factoid and allegation about a living person in detail with as much verbiage as possible" - it says we must write biographies conservatively in the first place. Sorry -- this idea of "make scandals and allegations about living persons the dominant feature of Wikipedia" is the sign of the end of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, and marks a deliberate transition to Rumourandallegationopedia. (word counts: Nuremberg trials about 6300 words, Cosby allegations over 14,000 words or significantly more than double) Cheers. Collect (talk) 15:40, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

FWIW, I took a very bloated article on Joseph Widney, reduced its size by 3/4 - and made a "good article" out of it. One would be very hard pressed indeed to make any claim that I seek to "bloat" any article on Wikipedia whatsoever. There are no valid reasons for any article to become bloated at all. Collect (talk) 15:50, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Good for you. Go do it to other articles then! -mattbuck (Talk) 16:11, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Reducing the size of one article because it is "less important" than another is ridiculous. There can scarcely be a more vulgar error. Why do we have FIVE WORDS about the wrestling leagues, when you can scroll to the end of our article about the Sun? Because people, God help them, put in the effort. If someone doesn't want 182K of allegations about them in Wikipedia, I suggest they not leave themselves open to accusations by that many women, or do a better job providing refutations for us to summarize. Once it goes in the literature, it is an encyclopedia's job to review it. Wnt (talk) 22:06, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Great idea! We should rewrite WP:BLP to say If anyone makes allegations about persons who are notable, put them in. It is the notable person's own fault that the allegations are made. Unfortunately for your position, that is not what WP:BLP states. Warm regards. Collect (talk) 14:23, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

@Collect: What it states is "A politician is alleged to have had an affair. He or she denies it, but multiple major newspapers publish the allegations, and there is a public scandal. The allegation belongs in the biography, citing those sources. However, it should only state that the politician was alleged to have had the affair, not that he or she actually did. If the subject has denied such allegations, that should also be reported." Could it be clearer? Wnt (talk) 16:32, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

And the purpose of Wikipedia is not to deliberately promote unproven allegations of crimes in exhaustive detail. We have the allegations in the BLP - that is not the same as what is sought here - to make sure that people know that a person is a rapist, drug-abuser, felon etc. where the allegations are not shown to be accurate in a court of law. "I suggest they not leave themselves open to accusations by that many women" is a clear indication that you appear to hold very strong personal opinions that the allegations are the same as facts, which is your right. It is not, alas, what Wikipedia uses in the non-negotiable policies. At such time as a person is convicted, then the matter is substantially different from the matter at hand - and it is not our job to make sure that a person is tried on the Internet. However, it should only state that the politician was alleged to have had the affair is the policy. The laundry list of details seems to go substantially beyond the "only" you so nicely quote. Cheers. Collect (talk) 18:18, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

I quoted the policy. The news in this case amply fulfills the exact circumstance policy is talking about. I do not regard the allegations as proven, nor do I suggest they be presented that way - but since you were going by byte count, you can scarcely tell me now this debate was about how the text is written! Honestly, I have no idea what the truth is in this case - to me, every explanation, whoever it favors, seems implausible. So I am glad when people steadily document each bit of published knowledge they are able to pick up, provided they do so honestly and fairly; maybe someday I'll read about this and it will all make sense. Wnt (talk) 19:25, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree with Wnt. It is up to individual readers of the text to reach their own opinions if they wish and many readers like to have a lot of details so they get an as full as possible basket of information to sift through. That's what makes an encyclopedia different from a news article, imo, its level of comprehensiveness and detail. Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:39, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Unicode: Adopt a Character

At this time, Unicode (http://www.unicode.org) has a campaign in which donors can adopt characters.

• Unicode Adopt-a-Character Submission Form (archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine)

Perhaps Moonriddengirl knows whether this can lead to (legitimate) trademark claims on characters.
—Wavelength (talk) 02:45, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

NYE

Hi. I was just wondering what you could say about this sentence: "And the requests to buy Joel's prints continue - the latest from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia." which can be found on the page [12]. Rcsprinter¹²³ (address) 12:18, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Not really clear what you are asking me, sorry.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:30, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

This reminds me of This post is art. Rubbish computer (Merry Christmas!: ...And a Happy New Year!) 12:54, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Kazakhstan Firewall

You wrote in 2012:

The Wikimedia Foundation has zero collaboration with the government of Kazakhstan. Wikibilim is a totally independent organization. And it is absolutely wrong to say that I am "helping the Kazakh regime whitewash its image". I am a firm and strong critic. At the same time, I'm excited by the work of volunteers, and I believe - very strongly - that an open and independent Wikipedia will be the death knell for tyranny in places like Kazakhstan. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it is absolutely silly to suggest that I'm in any way actively supporting tyrants.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:33, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

How's that working out? The NY Times writes (3 December 2015):

Government officials in Kazakhstan are borrowing a page from China, quietly devising their own version of China’s so-called Great Firewall to unscramble encrypted web and mobile traffic as it flows in and out of Kazakh borders.

... Unlike with China, which filters data through an expensive and complex digital infrastructure known as the Great Firewall, security experts say Kazakhstan is trying to achieve the same effect at a lower cost. The country is mandating that its citizens install a new “national security certificate” on their computers and smartphones that will intercept requests to and from foreign websites.

That gives officials the opportunity to read encrypted traffic between Kazakh users and foreign servers, in what security experts call a “man in the middle attack.”

As a result, Kazakh telecom operators, and government officials, will be privy to mobile and web traffic between Kazakh users and foreign servers, bypassing encryption protections known as S.S.L., or Secure Sockets Layer, and H.T.T.P.S., technology that encrypts browsing sessions and is familiar to users by the tiny padlock icon that appears in browsers.

Peter Damian (talk) 09:33, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Can you explain further what you mean by your question "How's that working out?" The terrible recent developments in Kazakhstan are to be deplored and opposed, as with their human rights record stretching back for many years. There is very good reason to think that a strong and independent Wikipedia (along with an open Internet generally) will be the death knell for such regimes, and this is a fight which will take decades.

In terms of this recent initiative, which effectively mandates a "man in the middle" attack, I will be campaigning with the major Internet providers globally to blacklist the Kazakh certificate and to improve and strengthen MITM protection via certificate pinning.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:42, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

By 'how's that working out', I meant 'how is [an open and independent Wikipedia] working out [in terms of being the death knell for tyranny in places like Kazakhstan]'. A knell is a loud sounding or ringing that happens when death is imminent, rather than 'will take decades'. Peter Damian (talk) 18:21, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

It will take decades, particularly in areas that are mostly neglected by liberal democracies.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:56, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Also, you claimed in 2012 that 'Wikibilim is a totally independent organization'. Wasn't there a question about that? Peter Damian (talk) 18:23, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I am unaware of any questions about that. It remains true.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:56, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

‘ “Kazaksha Wikipedia” project is implemented under the auspices of the Government of Kazakhstan and with the support of Prime Minister Karim Massimov, head of “Wikibilim” public fund Rauan Kenzhekhanuly said in an interview for PM.kz site.’ [13] — Official web site of Kazakhstan prime minister Karim Massimo. Further reading: [14], [15], the December 23 2012 online Examiner article Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales denies Kazakhstan connection, and this Wales talk page thread, in which Wales participated, entitled Kazakhstan government support for Kazakh Wikipedia. Factoid: Currently 50% of Wikibilim’s trustees are paid government employees. Writegeist (talk) 03:29, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

It is completely false that Kazakh language Wikipedia is a project of the Government of Kazakhstan. Wikibilim is a completely independent organization with no control over the Kazakh Wikipedia. It is not a local chapter, and there are no plans for it ever to become a local chapter. As of the last time I checked, Wikibilim employees do not edit Wikipedia. It is easy to piece together misleading quotes to try to imply things that aren't true - but it's easier to just tell the truth.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 06:02, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

By flatly contradicting the Kazakhstan prime minister’s official statement, you are saying that either he doesn’t know what his own government is doing or he’s lying on his office’s website (perhaps calculating that outside Kazakhstan the only likely challenge to the lie would be an unsubstantiated one from someone whose veracity on this page in relation to Kadazhstan had already been thrown into question by that same someone's own words, i.e. (1) “Past connection to the Kazakh dictatorship" - total and utter and complete bullshit. I have no past connection of any kind to the Kazakh dictatorship. — Jimbo Wales, Jimbotalk, 14 December 2014. (2) “I’ve been getting in touch with the government there. I've been talking to the Prime Minister there [ …] I'm going in December and I'm gonna give the award in the presence of the Prime Minister …" — Jimbo Wales, 2011 closing ceremony speech at Wikimania 2011)

Also of interest here: Before he became president of Wikibilim, Rauan Kenzhekhanuly (first recipient of the aforementioned Wikipedian of the Year award) was first secretary at Kazakhstan’s embassy in Moscow and head of Kazakhstan’s government-controlled propagandist TV operation, which was launched by the daughter of Nursultan Nazarbayev. Oh. Who he? President of Kazakhstan.

Wiikibilim is funded by Samruk-Kazyna, Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund. The state is its sole shareholder. Chairman of S-K’s board when Wikibilim was set up: Timur Asqaruly Kulibayev. Who he? Husband of Dinara Nursultanovna. And who she? President Nazarbayev’s daughter. Writegeist (talk) 17:57, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, if he says that, then he's lying. This surprises you?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:22, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Somewhat more than if you are, as I’m more familiar with your track record than with Massimov’s.

You say that Massimo is lying; that there’s no state control exercised in this instance by a government that’s notorious for control and censorship of information and the media, and for suppression of free speech; and that Wikibillim is independent of the government that funds it, fills half the seats on its board of trustees with government employees, and selects 100 of its users to receive free laptops in return for transcribing and writing government-approved articles, none of which address Kazakhstan’s record on human rights or suppression of independent media. Am I surprised you say that? Not in the least.

By the way, FYI, as apparently you are unaware, your unsupported assertion that Massimov is a liar violates the BLP policy, which applies to this page just as it does anywhere on Wikipedia. (For more information on Wikipedia’s BLP policy, refer to WP:BLP.) Writegeist (talk) 18:19, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Astonishing. Mr. Wales has just said that everyone in Kazakhstan who runs the Wikipedia project there, and says it is backed and funded by the state, is lying. Instead the truth is as Wales presents it - that Kazakh Wikipedia is independent of the Kazakh government. Don't believe your own lying eyes kids. Again, Republican primary debate levels of astonishing.Dan Murphy (talk) 18:44, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh, come on. If you put words in my mouth, you can make it seem like just about anything. There are very serious concerns and problems with the Wikibilim organization, but it remains the case that the Kazakh language Wikipedia is not a project of the government. If Massimov says that it is, he's lying. If he's concerned about that as a BLP violation, then he's free to complain. I have not said that Wikibilim is independent of the government that funds it - it is not. What I have said is that Wikibilim is completely independent of the Wikimedia Foundation and of me. I have no connection with the Kazakh government, despite the ongoing pretense by people who know better. I oppose them firmly. I have had contact with them in the past, and I would imagine that I will again - to lobby for change. I will not apologize for that, nor will I allow dishonest people to portray opposition as support.

There is a much more interesting conversation to be had. Rather than dishonestly trying to pin something on me, a rather ridiculous thing to do, it would be better to show some genuine concern for the people of Kazakhstan, and suggest genuine ways that we can help in the current situation.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:07, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh, dear. Wikibilim runs the Kazakh Wikipedia. Wikibilim is entirely funded and run by the Kazkh government and senior Kazakh government bureaucrats. The vast majority of the Kazakh Wikipedia is articles imported from the government's official propaganda encyclopedia. The Kazakh government's academy of arts and sciences runs "fact checking and quality control" on the Kazakh Wikipedia. The Kazakh Wikipedian of the year you named was prior to that award, and since, a rising star in the repressive firmament of the Kazakh regime. And your response to people who say this shows the Kazakh government runs the Kazakh Wikipedia is to call them "liars." It's astonishing you get away with such counterfactual claims. At any rate, this is like talking about the nuclear triad with Donald Trump. I'm out.Dan Murphy (talk) 20:30, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

What he said. Anyone of reasonable intelligence who has been paying attention to this thread can see where the porkies are.

@Jimbo Wales. Question: did you ever actually pay the Kazakh state apparatchik the much trumpeted $5,000 that supposedly went with his Wikipedia of the Year award? A straightforward, factually correct reply please. A simple yes or no will do. Thank you. Then I’m done with you here.

Oh, one other thing. You wrote above, on 15 December, “Wikibilim is a completely independent organization with no control over the Kazakh Wikipedia. It is not a local chapter, and there are no plans for it ever to become a local chapter.” (Emphasis added.) Wikibilim’s own CC submission states: “Recognition of «Wikibilim» as a Wikipedia’ local chapter in Kazakhstan is in progress.” [16] Obviously there were plans for Wikibilim to become a local chapter. What happened to its application? Why were the plans permanently scrapped? Writegeist (talk) 16:55, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Interesting. I see there's an article HTTP Public Key Pinning, and more information on MITM attacks at Transport Layer Security (some copypasted from Stackexchange, according to a tag there...). I don't really understand it though, or how to apply it here. Key pinning is apparently already being bypassed in the Chromium browser to allow the actions that our corporations (and perhaps the Kazakh officials) call "content inspection" - wouldn't a Kazakh end up being unable to do anything online unless he disabled it such a way? And as for blacklisting certificates - how do you blacklist every certificate the Kazakh government could obtain? Wnt (talk) 12:15, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

As I understand it, they are distributing a certificate to everyone in Kazakhstan. If that one gets blacklisted, they could get another one, and distribute that one, but... I'll be looking for technical advice as to the most effective thing that we (and other internet providers of various kinds) can do to help.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:00, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

It looks like this is in flux. [17] I don't know nearly enough about TLS to understand whether a third party site can figure out which top level certificate authority issued a certificate, or how much data it knows about you from that, though I would suspect the worst. But if Kazakhstan actually does execute a MITM attack against a connection, can't they request whatever certificate they want from whomever they want to apply at the point past the "Firewall", as if they were the computer owner, thereby concealing their role? Wnt (talk) 15:06, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

The way certificates work is that the creator generates a pair of keys—private and public. Everyone can get the public key and can use it to check messages signed with the private key. Your computer and/or browser has a list of trusted certificate authorites, and a method to check the trust has not been revoked. The browser will establish an encrypted connection with a web server, but the browser will fill the screen with warnings if the server is not using a certificate from a trusted authority. Presumably the Kazakhstan plan is that each citizen would install a Kazakhstan authority as trusted. Then the government could MITM encrypted sessions—citizen computer to government proxy would be encrypted using the Kazakhstan certificate, and proxy to target web server (say Wikipedia) would be encrypted using the Wikipedia certificate. That is how a company web proxy works when a company workstation establishes an encrypted connection with an external web server such as Wikipedia. Johnuniq (talk) 02:09, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Independence of Kazakh language Wikipedia

You wrote "It is completely false that Kazakh language Wikipedia is a project of the Government of Kazakhstan." (06:02, 16 December 2015).

Let's take a look.The English Wikipedia has an article, Zhanaozen massacre, describing a labour protest where 14 civilians were killed by police. The state described the killed as "hooligans". On the Kazakh Wikipedia, the same article is entitled Жаңаөзен оқиғасы, which translates roughly as "Zhanaozen Story". In English it's a massacre, in Kazakh it's just a story. The lead of the English-language article notes: "The massacre was a stark illustration of the country's poor human rights record under President Nursultan Nazarbayev." The Kazakh article mentions Nazarbayev by name only once: "On December 22, a special visit was made by President Nursultan Nazarbayev who arrived in the Mangistau region."

The largest section of the English article details the testimony disclosed during the investigations after the shootings. It generally focuses on the point of view of the protesters and of outside watchdog groups. The largest section of the Kazakh article details the testimony of the General Prosecutor's Office, which describes the protesters as having engaged in "misconduct", and that "the suppression of the riots" was necessary "for the protection of civilians". The hooligans were participating in "mass disorder". And that's why 64 people were shot.

Peter Damian (talk) 12:16, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

How Kazakh language Wikipedia aids censorship

And as I have pointed out to you before, the development of the Kazakh encyclopedia is part of the process of 'Kazakhisation', i.e. to move both the culture and the language of Kazakhstan away from Russian (a quarter of the population are ethnically Russian) to Kazakh. The department of education has excluded many Russian classics from its instructional program, and there has been a deliberate imposition of Kazakh culture, including Nazarbayev’s brainchild, the six volume national encyclopedia, which began publication in 1999, and which has now been incorporated into the Kazakh Wikipedia. As Bhavna Dave put it, the primary value of the Kazakh language is as an instrument of nationalisation.

The practical effect of the language program is discrimination and censorship. Discrimination, because the Kazakh constitution holds that all public jobs require knowledge of the Kazakh language, which amounts to excluding Russians from the public sector. Beginning in the late 1990s, candidates for the presidency were required to pass a test for proficiency in Kazakh language and culture.

Censorship, because no one understands the Kazakh language outside Kazakhstan. As long as Russian remains the language of inter-ethnic communication in the Kazakhstan, it is a means of opening its speakers to ideas circulating outside the country on TV and on the Internet. While the internet can supposedly route its signal around any obstacle, it can’t help people understand that signal. Once Nazarbayev’s program to focus the teaching of Kazakh on the next generation is realised, no one in the country will understand external media. There is no need to censor something that no one can understand. “Looking at the situation in the long-term perspective, if Kazakh language policy is successfully implemented in the same direction at a similar pace, in few generations we are going to have more and more people who have access to only part of the story unless they learn other languages”, says my friend Yevgeniya Plakhina, a freelance journalist who contributes to the banned opposition newspaper Respublika. “Access to other sources might be also blocked because Kazakhstan has very restrictive mass media and internet legislation. It is clever to say that if you show part of the story it does not mean it is lies”.

Peter Damian (talk) 13:12, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

One of the most useful exercises of freedom of expression I've seen, the interlibrary loan service Sci-Hub, actually started in Kazakhstan.^[18] So that country is not always behind the U.S. - and sometimes, they're out ahead. Wnt (talk) 17:45, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Peter Damian, while I share most of your concerns here, I disagree with your take on the Kazakh language issue. They are indeed downplaying Russian, but that's no different from the vast majority of post-Soviet states who want to distance themselves from their former colonial masters and stress their own national identity. In contrast, they are pushing hard for better English levels, for example Nazarbayev University requires at least band 6 in IELTS. Part of this is for geopolitical reasons (Nazo is nervous about Russia eventually seeking to annex parts of north Kazakhstan with Russian majorities) and part for pragmatic business reasons: 2 devaluations in 22 months have shown them that their economy is over-dependent on natural resource prices and Russia and they're seeking to diversify away from that. Valenciano (talk) 22:25, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks that's very helpful - I didn't know about the English thing. Though this does not detract from my main point: that projects such as individual language Wikipedias can often conflict with the broader aims of the Wikimedia movement - particularly opposition to censorship. Peter Damian (talk) 19:55, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikibilim: the unanswered questions

Jimbo Wales, apparently you missed these questions, which were buried in a preceding thread, so I’m giving them more prominence here. And pinging you.

Q1: Did you ever actually pay the Kazakh state apparatchik the $5,000 that supposedly went with his Wikipedia of the Year award?

Q2: You wrote above, on 15 December, “Wikibilim is a completely independent organization with no control over the Kazakh Wikipedia. It is not a local chapter, and there are no plans for it ever to become a local chapter.” (Emphasis added.) Wikibilim’s own CC submission states: “Recognition of «Wikibilim» as a Wikipedia local chapter in Kazakhstan is in progress.” [19] Obviously there were plans for Wikibilim to become a local chapter. What happened to its application? Why were the plans permanently scrapped?

Writegeist (talk) 08:26, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Q1: No.

Q2: You would have to ask them and people directly involved in the chapter submission process. If I had to guess, when it became clear that such an application would be very unlikely to be approved, they dropped further action on it. But I'm not directly involved. If the matter came to the board, I would strongly encourage the board to not approve the application without some major changes and some thorough due diligence.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:38, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Q1: Thank you for clearing that up.

Q2: I note your emphasis on "due diligence". It’s interesting that Nartay Ashim, Wikibilim’s “National Coordinator”, is listed among the attendees at the 2012 Wikimedia Conference Chapters meeting (so apparently the WMF were already treating Wikibilim as a chapter); and that the WMF gave Wikibilim $16,000 for the 2012 Turkic Wikimedia Conference in Kazakhstan. Was that because the WMF board had failed in its due diligence? I.e. had the WMF failed to grasp that the Kazakh Wikipedia is a project of the Kazakh government?

When you’d accepted the official invitation to Kazakhstan from Yerlan Idrissov (their ambassador to the US), Khazak TV announced you’d thanked the Kazakh government for “creating conditions for significant achievements in the development of the Kazakh language Wikipedia”, and that you’d announced your intention to visit (as you did on Wikipedia). You didn’t go; and neither, as you now confirm, did you ever pay the promised $5,000 to the Kazakh state apparatchik who won your Wikipedian of the Year award. Was that because it wasn’t until after you'd thanked the Kazakh government that you did your due diligence? Writegeist (talk) 23:07, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

I have never met nor spoken nor even heard of Yerlan Idrissov. I have never accepted any official invitation to Kazakstan. I have never spoken to anyone at the Kazakh embassy in the US. I have never spoken to Kazakh TV.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:38, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Kazakh TV reported "The Kazakhstan Ambassador to the US Yerlan Idrissov has already handed over an official invitation to Mr. Wales. Having accepted the invitation, Jimmy Wales thanked the Kazakh government for creating conditions for significant achievements in the development of the Kazakh language Wikipedia." One of you is not telling the truth. Peter Damian (talk) 16:06, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

You brought up the issue of “due diligence” and I’d like to return to that for a moment. Wikibilim’s “National Coordinator” is listed among the attendees at the 2012 Wikimedia Conference Chapters meeting (i.e. the WMF accorded Wikibilim chapter status even though it was not a chapter); and the WMF also gave Wikibilim $16,000 for the 2012 Turkic Wikimedia Conference in Kazakhstan. Was that because the WMF board had not done its due diligence? I.e. had failed to grasp that the Kazakh Wikipedia is a project of the Kazakh government?

At Wikimania 2011 you announced the inaugural “Global Wikipedian of the Year award, in my opinion, given by me personally”. 2011 You also announced you’d been connecting with the Kazakh government and talking to the Kazakh prime minister (the man you recently called a liar), and that you'd be going to Kazakhstan to present the award in his august presence: ”I’ve been following the story of Kazakh Wikipedia [ … ] and I also I've been getting in touch with the government there. I've been talking to the Prime Minister there. [ …] I'm going in December and I'm gonna give the award in the presence of the Prime Minister.” (Same link.) The honored Global Wikipedian of the Year was a Kazakh government operative who ran the government-funded organization tasked with giving Kazakhstan's heavily censored and propagandist national encyclopedia the Wikipedia imprimatur of respectability and independence., and with further adding government-approved content. Presumably you had not done your due diligence, as otherwise you would have known what this fellow was. So when you broke your promise to go to Kazakhstan, and also broke the promise to pay the $5,000 that accompanied the award, was it because you had done your due diligence in the meantime (or someone had done it for you), and it had finally dawned on you that the Kazakh Wikipedia is a project of the Kazakh government?

Above you say: “I have never met nor spoken nor even heard of Yerlan Idrissov"— Kazakhstan's ambassador to the US; and "I have never accepted any official invitation to Kazakstan. I have never spoken to anyone at the Kazakh embassy in the US.” (Emphasis added.)

At Wikimania 2012 you said: “I met with the Ambassador of Kazakhstan this morning.”

Which of these two statements is the truth?

Writegeist (talk) 16:39, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Presumably the second one. I have no recollection of it, and I can say I certainly didn't have any sort of formal sit down meeting. In a line up of dignitaries, it is of course possible. As I have said before, I misspoke if I said in 2011 that I had talked to the Kazakh Prime Minister at that time. I had talked to his office, an Australian guy named Catallus. And since then, I have met with the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan and spoke to him about his country's dreadful human rights record. I've also had, with Orit Kopel of the Jimmy Wales Foundation for Freedom of Information, a formal meeting with the Kazakh Ambassador to discuss freedom of expression. I will continue to have meetings with dignitaries and officials from many countries to lobby for positive change.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:55, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

When someone makes untrue claims about themselves and then backtracks with the euphemism much favored by politicians caught in a lie (“I misspoke”) it leaves an impression of duplicity that’s hard to eradicate.

I note your response evaded my points about due diligence, and I won't press you further. Instead let's examine your claim (in your reply to Peter Damian in the "More contradictions" section) that the Kazakh regime was “interested in change” in 2012— which you cite in support of your “diplomatic gestures to open a discussion”.

In a 2012 article titled “Change put on hold in Nazabayev’s Kazakhstan” Luca Anceschi clearly stated the Kazakh regime’s intractable opposition to change at that time:

• “[There is] a sense of political stagnation that pervades today’s Kazakhstan. A sense that much-needed change has been postponed until the inevitable, though not yet imminent, leadership change [. . .] the (authoritarian) impetus of the 1990s and the 2000s has been replaced by the immobility typical of the end of an era [. . .] It is possible to identify the precise moment at which Kazakhstan entered this phase of possibly irreversible decline, and that is Nazarbayev’s decision to run in the snap presidential election of early 2011 [. . .] Two things mark the post-election landscape: the appearance of a more stable regime and the neutralisation of every form of internal opposition. The neutralisation happened quickly, and targeted both discontent within the elite, as with the radicalisation of society, which in the recent months had come to be viewed as even more dangerous [. . .] Kazakhstan’s future outlook, in this sense, does not appear bright, as the rapid deterioration of whatever little internal dialogue had survived 20 years of fictitious liberalisation is now exacerbating the socio-political stagnation into which the regime slid in 2011 [and] change for Kazakhstan is postponed to a later date.” (Emphasis added.) [20]

Three years later Anceschi would write that the regime still "seeks to sanitise the local media landscape in its print, broadcast, and digital segments.”

This Central Asian scholar’s informed views (which I trust you won’t rubbish, as you did those of a Chinese dissident, as “loud-mouthed rhetoric”) contradict the claim that the regime was “interested in change”. They were interested in it only insofar as it was anathema—they saw it as antithetical to their tyrannical socio-political ideology and self-interest, and blocked it accordingly.

The regime's obdurate opposition to change is further evident in the Human Rights Watch World Reports on Kazakhstan for 2011, 2012, and 2013:

• 2011: “During its 2010 chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Kazakhstan's human rights record was marred by continued disappointments. Restrictive amendments to media and Internet laws remained, and a number of websites and weblogs were blocked on a regular basis.” (Emphasis added.)

• 2012: “Kazakhstan failed to carry out long-promised human rights reforms in the year following its chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Instead, its rights record suffered further setbacks. Control of the penitentiary systems moved from the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, putting prisons back in police control, and a new restrictive religion law was adopted. Websites were blocked and legal amendments limiting media freedoms remained. A union lawyer was imprisoned for six years for speaking out on workers’ rights.” (Emphasis added.)

• 2013: “Kazakhstan’s human rights record seriously deteriorated in 2012, following violent clashes In December 2011 between police and demonstrators, including striking oil workers, in western Kazakhstan. Authorities blamed outspoken oil workers and political opposition activists for the unrest. Freedom of assembly is restricted and dozens were fined or sentenced to administrative arrest in early 2012 for participating in peaceful protests. A restrictive law on religious freedoms remained in force. Media remains under tight control and there were attacks on independent journalists.” (Emphasis added.)

You mentioned media reports asserting the Kazakh regime's interest in change. In the light of the above, it would be interesting to see them. Were they Kazakh state media?

Writegeist (talk) 19:41, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

@Writegeist:

You are essentially calling Jimmy a liar, and generally harassing him in this entire 6,000 word section. I'll be mostly out-of-touch until the new year. I hope you can make amends before then. Otherwise, I'll just assume you are unwelcome on this page. Happy holidays. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:40, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

@Smallbones:: I think you're over-reacting. There is no doubt that the Kazakh government have been responsible for serious human right infringements. And how much they control the kk.wp is an interesting question. Whether or not it is Jimbo's "fault", as a member of the WMF board he is the right sort of person to pose these questions. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 04:39, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Whatever Wales may or may not be—and I see no need to hazard a guess here—he's certainly not such a precious snowflake as to be incapable of conducting a robust dialogue without officious, dishonest, patronizing, and threatening interventions by Smallbones. Writegeist (talk) 07:39, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Why don't you just get to the point. Do you have particular actions to propose?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:47, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

I had already got to the point: to be blunt, the takeout from my post is that you appear untrustworthy when it comes to facts.

For further clarification, and at the risk of belaboring the point:

You’re no fool. You successfully hosted soft porn on the Internet. You were one of the people who started an online encyclopedia compiled by volunteers. You parlayed that into public speaking engagements and some useful social climbing in London and elsewhere. And you cast yourself in the role of bold free speech activist and “lobbyist for change”. Yet you stand shoulder to shoulder with representatives of a despotic regime when they mount an odious public PR exercise to whitewash their image in the eyes of the world, and on that stage and under that international gaze you coolly accept fistfuls of their money without also taking the opportunity of that public platform to utter so much as one word of protest against their vile human rights abuses, including lethal oppression of free speech—which, coming from you, and given the circumstances, would have put these crimes front and center in the global media. Further, you present an award to an operative of another repressive regime, also without uttering a word of condemnation; then also make plans to travel to the country to pay money to the recipient of your award in the presence of the country’s dignities, and when you announce these plans you inflate your importance by gulling an eager audience with a story of communicating with the host government at the highest level—with the prime minister, no less—when in fact the PM’s office had palmed you off onto some Australian guy; and then you don’t even go—thus missing another outstanding opportunity for public condemnation of the host regime’s records on human rights and free speech.

When you don’t walk the walk, your talk is further devalued. We’ve already seen pronouncements from you that are evasive and less than honest. E.g., to take a recent one: you “misspoke” about a chat with the Kazakh PM that never actually took place, just as Hillary Clinton “misspoke” about arriving under fire in Sarajevo, which never happened, and Richard Blumenthal “misspoke” about fighting in Vietnam. (To be fair though, it’s easy to mistake an untroubled stroll across an airport for ducking and diving through sniper fire, or being in America for fighting in Vietnam, or speaking to some Australian guy for speaking to the Kazakh PM.) Also, in 2012 in Washington, you said that you had met with the the Kazakh ambassador that morning. Later you denied saying it. When provided with the recording in which you said it, you backtracked, saying you couldn’t remember.

So for someone who isn’t a fool you sure do make yourself look like one; and by repeatedly underestimating the intelligence of well-informed people, you treat them like fools also. There are well-informed people among your Wikipedia volunteer force on whose work you have built your career. You present yourself as the public figurehead of their enterprise. They deserve a figurehead who doesn't appear foolish.

You ask what action I propose. I propose you either abandon the posture of advocating for human rights in general and free speech in particular or play the part with real commitment, conviction, courage, integrity, honesty, and good judgment. (Yes, yes, I know about the Jimmy Wales Foundation--and about the history of its creation.) Another proposal: escape the clutches of whatever amateurs appear to be advising you—to attend the China event, for example, when people who actually know what they’re talking about urged a boycott—and consult with experts who can give you knowledgeable, well-judged guidance on how to walk the walk.

Moving on briefly:

(1) You state on this page: “There is no trademark agreement [between Wikibilim and the WMF to revoke.”

(2) A post in August 2011 on Meta re. Wikibilim’s application for chapter status states: 8 June 2011 – Signed Trademark License Agreement with Wikimedia Foundation Inc.” [21]

Point: These two conflicting statements cannot both be true. Question: Which is the truth? Proposed action: answer (1) or (2)

(3) “promises from aides . . . that [the Kazakh regime] were interested in change.” Aides of the regime? Proposed action: reply yes/no; if “no”, who were they? I ask because you also said:

(4) “[there were] news reports at the time that [the Kazakh regime] were interested in change.” Point: this appears false in light of the evidence (some of which I presented above) of the regime’s well-documented, implacable opposition to change. Proposed action: diffs please.

Thank you. Writegeist (talk) 20:41, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

More contradictions

1. You say you will not "allow dishonest people to portray opposition as support". Yet you say at the Wikimania 2012 conference (time code 23:45 onwards) that you are going to give the award [to Rauan] 'in the presence of the President and Prime Minister'. So that's opposition, and it would be really "dishonest" to portray your giving an award in the presence of the Kazakh President and Prime Minister as support? I don't follow this.
2. "I have not said that Wikibilim is independent of the government that funds it - it is not." But you say in your interview with Yevgeniya – now ironically deleted from the internet, probably by the Kazakh authorities – that "Wikibilim is absolutely independent. They do not [control] and do not [manage] the Kazakh-Wikipedia", and you say that while there was a government grant, it was issued without any obligations [regarding] the Wikipedia content (which Wikibilim in any [event] does not control). You also concede in that interview that the funds were used to import the Kazakh encyclopedia, but as I have pointed out above, that encyclopedia is an instrument of nationalisation, whose effects are both discrimination and censorship.

Peter Damian (talk) 14:15, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Diplomatic gestures to open a discussion, given promises from aides and general news reports at the time that they were interested in change, is not support for a tyrannical regime, but support for change.

I don't understand your second point at all. It seems dependent on severe and deliberate misinterpretation of multiple parties. Wikibilim does not control and does not manage the Kazakh language Wikipedia. Indeed, when I last checked, employees are forbidden from editing Wikipedia. If that has changed, that's interesting and useful information - I haven't checked recently. There have been other instances of previous encyclopedias being imported with permission into Wikipedia (one in Kerala comes to mind) and yes - they generally come in with severe biases that the community needs to correct.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:54, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

"Indeed, when I last checked, employees are forbidden from editing Wikipedia." - Jimmy Wales, Dec. 25 2015. In January 2013 you were expressly told that Wikibilim employees (that is, Kazakh government employees) were editing the Kazakh Wikipedia. When the evidence of Wikibilim honcho Nartay Ashim editing the Kazakh Wikipedia was presented to you, you responded. "He edits on his own time. Lots of people do that." They were never forbidden from editing Wikipedia (and it's strange that you would claim to know so much about internal policy of an organization you otherwise have claimed you know little about - never-mind that that's not the policy). At any rate, the Kazakh Wikipedia is now run by the Kazakh government. It was run by the Nazarbayev regime at the time you rewarded the Kazakh government propaganda official Rauan Kenzhekhanuly with "Wikipedian of the year." It is still run by the Nazarbayev regime. It will be run by the regime for the foreseeable future. That has been the succesful Nazarbayev regime strategy for Wikipedia - and a model that's incredibly easy for other dictators to emulate, thanks to the Wikimedia's own policies and actions. Or perhaps better: Non-actions.Dan Murphy (talk) 17:34, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Good grief. When I was informed, I inquired. When I inquired, I was told (a) that he was editing in his own time (very common in such organizations, for example chapter employees are often active wikipedians) and I was told (b) that this would stop. I'd like to ask you: what actions are you recommending at this time?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:42, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

I'd pull the plug on the servers if I'd let my supposed encyclopedia be coopted as part of a propaganda exercise of a more than usually unsavory dictator. Then I'd begin a major initiative at board level to hire area specialists to supervise the various small Wikipedia's that are completely unsupervised and are tailor made for the brand-sweetening exercises of thugs like Nazarbayev. Language and academic expertise would be required. Ignorance is only bliss to the criminally arrogant and irresponsible.Dan Murphy (talk) 16:27, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Dependency matrix

Of course you know very well that it sounds cool if you say they are "completely independent" while omitting to make clear that you mean completely independent of the Wikimedia Foundation. To help out, here is a matrix connecting the four different entities.

	KZ state	Wikibilim	KZ Wikipedia	WMF
KZ state		Entirely dependent	Via Wikibilim, state encyclopedia etc.	Via KZ Wikipedia
Wikibilim			Grants to develop content. "The Kazakh Wikipedia was the first project of the WikiBilim Public Fund, which kicked off in June 2011"[22]	KZ Wikipedia, conference grant, trademark etc
KZ Wikipedia				WMF owns servers, trade mark etc.

This chart is misleading and confusing.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 17:55, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

It would be helpful to indicate where you think it is misleading and confusing - thanks Peter Damian (talk) 18:58, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Mr Wales probably means that it doesn't give any indication of the direction of the dependency. In other words, when we look at the chart, are you suggesting that the government of Kazakhstan is entirely dependent on Wikibilim for the survival of the government? Not likely, but it could be interpreted that way. Whole milch (talk) 20:28, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Indeed. The box you are reading is almost certainly meant to be read in this direction "Wikibilim is entirely dependent on the Kazakh government" - and that's certainly true at some level (though the relationship is via a grant that I'm told had no content stipulations in it, one can assume that Wikibilim employees whatever their personal views would not feel comfortable and secure writing in an NPOV way about human rights in Kazakhstan, etc.). --Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:40, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks - I thought your position was that Wikibilim was entirely independent of the government? Peter Damian (talk) 14:50, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

No, that is not my position. Never has been since they secured their major funding from Samruk-Kazna. I wish they had never sought nor received that funding, although it is understandable that they would naturally turn to their government for a grant.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:02, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikibilim employees forbidden from editing Wikipedia?

"Indeed, when I last checked, [Wikbilim] employees are forbidden from editing Wikipedia." - Jimmy Wales, Dec. 25 2015. I already pointed out above the Kazakh Wikipedia article on the Zhanaozen massacre, a labour protest where 14 civilians were killed by police and 60 or more were wounded in the shooting. The article calls the same event Жаңаөзен оқиғасы, loosely "Zhanaozen Story". I should have added that the article was almost exclusively written by user:Ashina, who is an active administrator on the Kazakh Wikipedia to this day. Weirdly, Wikipedia's rules on censorship forbid me from mentioning the real life name of 'Ashina', but his occupation is Head of the Astana office at Bilim Media Group, where his work includes Government relations and communications. Previously he was employed in other government and corporate communications positions. The justification for not employing real names is that dictatorships may bring pressure on Wikipedia editors. But of course this equally works the other way round. Wikipedia secrecy rules make it difficult to identify when governments have infiltrated Wikipedia projects.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the Kazakh government's line has not been that nothing untoward happened in Zhanaozen. Nazarbayev sacked his son-in-law Kulibayev over the affair, and governor Krymbek Kusherbayev (Rauan's erstwhile boss in Mangystau, now his boss again in Kyzylorda) resigned when Nazarbayev visited, presumably to help Nazarbayev save face. Kusherbayev certainly never fell out of favour with Nazarbayev. [23]

I can only report on what I've been told. Thank you for looking into it further. What action do you propose?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:32, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Proposed action

I think it's really up to the WMF, but here is a suggestion. Why can't WMF hire a person, based outside Kazakhstan, but proficient in the Kazakh language, to make more accurate translations of articles in the KZ Wikipedia, so that the WMF can assess for accuracy and so on. The WMF should also investigate the administration of the encyclopedia to ensure that it really is independent, and not run by Wikibilim or the government or whoever. Or something on those lines. Intended outcome: determine whether the encyclopedia really is independent. If not, remove its charter. Peter Damian (talk) 14:57, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

What 'charter' do you mean?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:04, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

[24] Peter Damian (talk) 15:07, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

To my knowledge, no organization in Kazakhstan has permission to use the Wikipedia trademarks. As with every language version of Wikipedia, Kazakh language Wikipedia is hosted on Wikimedia Foundation servers and is 100% under the legal control of the WMF. There is no trademark agreement to revoke with anyone.

I'm surprised this organizational information isn't known to you, but assuming good faith, I suppose what you are suggesting is that the WMF could remove the logo from the website? That wouldn't do very much, since it's all about the domain name and the inbound links. Other options that you might be suggesting, such as closing down the Kazakh language Wikipedia (or deleting the content to start over or something like that) don't strike me as particularly helpful.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:15, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm not an expert in the WMF organization, for from it, but it seems to me that something called the 'KZ Wikipedia' (Уикипедия) is borrowing the Wikimedia brand somehow. What about establishing the facts first, namely my suggestion of hiring an expert translator. I have used Google translate to look at some of the articles and they do not seem to be neutral. Furthermore, WMF could easily investigate who actually is controlling the content of KZ Wikipedia. After the investigation, a decision could be made whether or not to continue with the KZ encyclopedia. Peter Damian (talk) 15:22, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

I also note here that it has a whacking great Wikimedia/Wikipedia logo on the top left, and says 'A Wikimedia project' on the bottom right. Peter Damian (talk) 15:25, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, the Kazakh Wikipedia is under the control of the Wikimedia Foundation in the same way as the English Wikipedia is. It isn't "borrowing" the brand any more than the English Wikipedia is. You are forgiven for misunderstanding, given the level of misinformation from people who claim/hint otherwise. In terms of the WMF conducting an investigation, I support the idea. Too many of the people in this conversation who are making claims seem to have as their primary interest attacking me, rather than genuine concern for freedom of expression in Kazakhstan.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:31, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

I think there is an ambiguity in the term 'Kazakh Wikipedia'. You take it to mean the servers. I take it to mean what is sometimes called the 'mind and management' of an entity. But if you think it is appropriate for WMF to conduct an investigation, that would be a good start. Thanks Peter Damian (talk) 15:41, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Right, well, who is the 'mind and management' of any Wikipedia? It usually isn't the chapters, for example. It's usually an ArbCom or the ArbCom+active admins.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:59, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

I have a separate question here. There was a "fast track" approval of the trademark licence agreement with WikBilim in 2011. Something very out of the ordinary must have happened for Wikibilim to get this, less than a month after they first communicated with WMF, and barely a month after Wikibilim was established. Do you know anything about this? See the timeline below. Peter Damian (talk) 17:22, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

I know little more than your timeline, and I would not have been able to construct that today without a lot of work. I can say this - nothing strikes me as out of the ordinary at all about any of it. Indeed, since that time, we have become more liberal with allowing user groups to use the marks for events, etc. And I think we should be even more liberal than we are today.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:00, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Timeline, 2011

• 4 May 2011 – The registration of WikiBilim Public Foundation (per Wikimedia Meta page) takes place.
• June 2011 - Nartay Ashim contacts Wikimedia Foundation. WMF agreed to send Mr Ting Chen. It was June 2011. We tried to involve many parties as we could. We communicated with the business and academia, research centers. Kazakh Encyclopedia agreed to donate paper based materials, they are not even old. It is National encyclopedia. We involved the students from International IT University in Almaty.
• 1 June 2011 – According to statements made on Wikimedia Meta, Nokia Kazakhstan signs an agreement to sponsor a Wikipedia article writing contest (awarding mobile phones to winning writers).
• 8 June 2011 – According to the Wikimedia Meta page, WikiBilim signs a Trademark License Agreement with Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
• 16 June 2011 – Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees Chair, Ting Chen, visits Almaty, Kazakhstan. On a Wikimedia Meta page, WikiBilim indicates it received a letter of support from the CEO of the Samruk-Kazyna Foundation, providing financial sponsorship to WikiBilim (including laptops for winning participants in the Wikipedia article writing contest). WikiBilim conducts a press conference (with participation of Ting Chen, Murat Abenov (member of Kazakhstan parliament and future Deputy Minister of Education and Science), Bauyrzhan Zhakyp (Chief Editor of the government-published Kazakh Encyclopedia), and A. Tutykin (Deputy Head of Kazcontent JSC).

"Ting Chen of the Wikimedia Foundation attending the press conference said that 'the Foundation is considering launching a regional office in Kazakhstan. Altogether, there are a total of 30 representation offices. I believe Kazakhstan stands all chances to be home to one', he said."

Reported on Wikimeta: "On June 16, 2011 in Almaty, Kazakhstan chapter creation initiative group organized the first WP events. It had been press-conference and presentation of the web-page with kazakh video & PDF tutorials and start of Wiki-campaign dedicated to 20th independence anniversary. Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the WMF Mr.Ting Chen, Head of Kazakh Encyclopedia Mr. B.Zhakyp, Parliament deputy Mr. M.Abenov (internet advocate), co-founder of Wikibilim Foundation Mr.Rauan Kenzhekhanuly, deputy chair of JS "KazKontent" (state agency responsible for development of Kazakh internet) had participated in the event. Also Mr.Ting Chen held a seminar on Wikipedia and WMF development. [25]

• Ting Chen wing.philopp at gmx.de Fri Jun 17 20:32:55 UTC 2011 I was mostly on travel last week, and had visited Almaty, Kazakhstan. Something really remarkable is happenning there. Our volunteers there had started to organize a nationwide movement and had found support in the politics, companies and media. The Kazakh Encyclopedia had decided to put its up-to-date 16-band encyclopedia under a free licence. There are initiatives in the parliament to make the copyright law more clear and supportive in respect of free-licenses, and the biggest national welfare fund "Samruk-Kazyna" had decided to fund activities to build up the Kazakh Wikipedia. Our volunteers there are going to start ambassador programs in the universities in Almaty and had set the very ambitious goal to expand the Kazakh Wikipedia into 200k articles until December 16th, the 20th independance [sic] day of the Republic Kazakhstan, not by using bots, but by writing and translating qualified articles. That would mean about ten fold of the article amount than at the moment. It was on my way from airport back how when I got the first congratulations, before I got know the result.
• June 20, 2011 - The Wikimedia Foundation holds a board meeting via IRC. Ting Chen and Jimmy were both in attendance.

Other possible actions

I will leave it up to the community to make their suggestions, but other actions could include:

• Put a banner on the Kazakh Wikipedia, visible on every content page, pointing out to readers, in Kazakh and English, that significant parts of the Kazakh Wikipedia's content are non-free and/or reflect the Kazakh government's view only, and advising them that they should consult other Wikipedias to get a more rounded view of certain topics. The WMF and the community should collaborate to work out an appropriate wording for this on Meta. Peter Damian (talk) 17:20, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

To my knowledge, all of it is "free" in the sense of the license. As has happened in other countries, the copyright was donated. In terms of pointing out the bias, it strikes me as overkill to place it on every single page. Would it not be better to work with the community there to be sure that NPOV notices are placed liberally whenever they are needed? And to be prepared to deadmin and make new admins if it turns out the existing admins are not acting in accordance with our principles? Obviously, all of this sort of thing should follow not precede a thorough study of the situation there. Trusting a bunch of people who don't read Kazakh and who have a long history of trying to discredit me with an insane view that I'm a supporter of the regime in Kazakhstan is hardly a proper process.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:04, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Support these proposals (i.e. make a thorough and independent study, then work with the community on KZWP to be sure that NPOV notices are placed liberally whenever they are needed, and be prepared to desysop or create new admins where necessary. Peter Damian (talk) 22:41, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

@Wales: Of course my view isn't that you deliberately and actively support the Kazakh regime; you have repeatedly said you oppose it. But where "discrediting" you is concerned, your own actions make a pretty good job of that: allowing your WMF servers to serve the agenda of despots like Nazarbayev and his cronies is hardly an act of opposition. By the way: you and whatever "bunch of people" you trust all read Kazakh? Writegeist (talk) 23:25, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Deleted post

I copy below, and take responsibility for, a post by user:Writegeist which has repeatedly deleted from your page, with comments like ‘Writegeist not welcome here’. The points he make seem reasonable, and in good faith. I do not know if he is welcome or not. If not, please (addressing Jimmy here) feel free to delete. Thanks Peter Damian (talk) 23:28, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

---

I've removed the comments again. Writegeist is not welcomed on this page and I will continue to remove all his comments put on this page. He has been trolling here, and if anybody takes responsibility for putting his comments back on the page, they are trolling also and will not be welcomed here. Jimmy can let me know if he thinks this is not a good way to moderate this page, but until he does, that is the way that I will moderate the page.

Let's be clear, Jimmy has a right to moderate his talk page and to let others do it in his place. It is his stated practice that others (specifically including myself) should do the moderating for him. This has been upheld twice at arbcom. If you disagree, you can ask Jimmy, or ask arbcom to reconsider. Until I hear otherwise, Writegeist is off this page. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:55, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Writegeist has made some perceptive and insightful comments about an important issue, namely the possible co-opting of one of the language Wikipedias. Saying he is 'not welcomed here' seems to be your opinion only. Do we know what Jimmy's opinion is? Peter Damian (talk) 09:58, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Can Jimbo simply clarify this question? Is Writegeist still allowed to post here? A yes/no answer would save a lot of pointless edit warring. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 01:23, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

I would prefer that he not post here. I approve of Smallbones actions.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:37, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Also, I would ask Jimbo Wales, "What about Writegeist's comments was beyond the pale?" and "Is Smallbones ban of Writegeist from your page a reasonable and defensible action given the circumstances?" Buster Seven Talk 13:57, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

It is settled then. Buster Seven Talk 06:42, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom's mysterious banning

ArbCom banned administrator Soap and editor The Devil's Advocate. Everyone wants to know why? They are mum on the reasons. Can you please, take a look at the evidence held like a state secret?--223.176.9.243 (talk) 04:29, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

It is not "mysterious" and everyone knows the general reason why. They were banned for off-wiki harassment. Are you asking for specifics? Jimbo can look but I doubt he will perpetuate harassment in any form by publicly disclosing specifics. --Majora (talk) 04:46, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

There is no mystery about it and the evidence is certainly not held like a "state secret". You can view the discussion that took place here. To be honest, I don't think that there is anything that Jimbo can add other than what is there. Harassment on or off Wikipedia will not be tolerated. The Devil's Advocate was given plenty of chances by us admins and the Arb Com to change his behaviour. As he didn't, it has led to an indefinite block by the Arb Com.--5 albert square (talk) 17:25, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

With respect, that entire thread you linked to is about the secrecy surrounding TDA's ban. Townlake (talk) 01:34, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

A subscription model for Wikipedia?

I am unsure where is best to post this. If anyone knows of another discussion-based page for Wikipedia editors, please let me know and I can copy it there.

For a number of years, I was a contributor to IMSLP, the 'International Music Score Library Project'. The website was based on the same principles as Wikipedia. Volunteers scan public domain (out of copyright) music scores so as to create a library of music, just as Wikipedia editors have created a library of articles. Contributors, such as me, took pleasure in creating an open resource for musicians. Until now, the website has been hugely successful, holding more than 330,000 scores and being ranked within the 10,000 most accessed websites worldwide.

Over Christmas, the owner of IMSLP, Edward Guo, introduced a subscription model to the website, where 'users who have not paid for a subscription are obstructed from downloading files'. Any user who has not paid the annual $22.80 subscription fee must sit through a 15 second waiting period before viewing each file. More recent files are blocked altogether. Although most files are still available for non-paying users, the changes are extensive enough to make ordinary browsing of files difficult and frustrating. An interesting forum thread [26] contains further details and the related concerns of contributors.

It turns out that Guo has never made a proper attempt to raise donations: he has turned straight to monetisation. More scarily, the website is not a charity, but a private company owned by Guo. Guo has admitted that donations have always been sufficient to cover server costs. He has refused to release proper accounts or plans to explain why money on top of server costs is required. All Guo has admitted is that he wishes to alter the structure of the website by employing paid contributors at the top of the company, a change from the previous, and successful, volunteer-led effort.

Most contributors, me included, are surprised and disappointed with these changes. Our scans, which we took the time to produce for the general benefit of musicians, are no longer easily-accessed and are instead being used as a way to generate income for a private company.

I am interested at getting feedback from Wikipedia contributors. How would contributors feel if something similar were to happen on Wikipedia? Would they still feel motivated to write and edit articles? Is there any support in having a small group of paid contributors at the top of the company? For those who know more about Wikipedia, could something similar ever happen here? If Wikipedia talk pages are not the best place to discuss this, then please comment here instead (or as well), the associated forum for IMSLP contributors.

Yours faithfully,

Daniel Lewis (IMSLP contributor) Dlewis1079 (talk) 13:41, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

@Dlewis1079: I'm not sure if you're familiar with Wikitravel and Wikivoyage, but they provide interesting background. The whole point of CC-by licensing (or public domain) is that it is difficult to lock it up. Also, we could use some more specifics - I just went to the site and encountered no delay or ads for a featured Vivaldi score; though (as usual) I had scripts off. Does this policy affect those other country-specific servers mentioned in the article?

As for Wikipedia, its nonprofit status offers some protection over a private company. Nonetheless, the U.S. has many, many blatantly corrupt nonprofits that rake in money and spend only a few percent on anything but enriching their officers, so that is not a foolproof protection. As you see above, the Board is a cabal that selects its successors, leaving open the possibility at any time that an outside force will succeed in gaming control over it and booting everyone else off. On the other hand, the community itself is a cabal, notoriously driving off women who want to participate, or people with a poor tolerance for Byzantine regulations, so it wouldn't be a very good check. Nor would democracy, since in a 'free' vote of the people of the world they would probably ransack and destroy all sorts of content just to not be offensive, dangerous, etc. So the main defense is that we need to keep seeing genuine forks of Wikipedia, backups in other hands that offer an insurance, via contingency, that things will remain mostly on the up and up... Wnt (talk) 17:11, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt:: Thank you for your reply. It is really interesting to hear from a Wikipedia contributor. I have never heard of the Wikitravel/Wikivoyage situation, so it makes relevant reading. Do you think the Wikimedia project would be interested in something similar here?

In terms of specifics, from my experience not logged on, it seems as scores hosted on the region specific servers (CA, EU and US) are exempt, as well as editions that are still under copyright but made available with the permission of licence holder (including protected typsets of public domain pieces). It has been a bit hit-and-miss for me so far, though. Can you see the blocking period for this piece (file 02094)?

Your final thoughts are provoking. I think we at IMSLP have all taken security for granted, until now. Dlewis1079 (talk) 22:57, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

@Dlewis1079: I'm just one person, not an insider; I hope others will chime in. In the Wikitravel incident some of the people trying to recruit people away from the company (ironically enough, User:Doc James above!) were hit with unreasonable lawsuits trying to punish them. As I expect the same of any private company trying to keep its web assets, you understand people will probably be wary - it would be a good issue for WMF to provide overall legal guidance and institutional support regarding. The link you gave does indeed not work for me (I suppose if I enable scripts, the waiting period ends; but without doing so, it just stays jammed). Looking at the HTML source, it appears to link entirely offsite to the desired document on a javanese.imslp.info server. I am surprised they made no real effort to obfuscate this - I've seen far more annoying scripting. Even someone as clueless as myself could hack together a python script with a urllib call and a regular expression search to extract the lone .info link from the source and redirect - though again, a hostile response seems probable, so don't count me as volunteering - and if not legal action they might just hide the desired data deeper, which is not desirable before whatever public domain material is mirrored in full by someone serious. I wouldn't be surprised though if they intend more changes anyway. Wnt (talk) 00:46, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

To clarify I did not so much encourage the volunteers of WT to leave but helped facilitate and provide a reality for their already present desire to leave.

User:Dlewis1079 if the content in question is under an open license I would be happy to help to try to find some place in the Wikimedia world for it.

As mentioned by User:Wnt we have a few more safeguards in place but we are not bulletproof either. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:28, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for all of your help here. Our community really needs it. @Doc James:, do you really think that might be a possibility? As far as I know, the entire website has been given the 'Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License'. It would be really good if you could introduce yourself on the forum thread so other contributors can be part of any Wikimedia discussion. Dlewis1079 (talk) 10:46, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Dlewis1079: Given the license, Wikisource seems like it'd be a really good fit for this kind of source material (i.e. sheet music). I, JethroBT ^{drop me a line} 10:59, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, there is s:Portal:Sheet_music. William Avery (talk) 11:15, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Note that Wikisource is a bit of a backwater, a project mostly to textify content from Wikimedia Commons. Since sheet music isn't text, I'm not sure if we should worry about it for now. To give an example of how we would proceed, I took the document cited above and uploaded it to Commons here. Please let me know if there are any copyright issues I missed, as it is vital not to leave any opening, however small, for legal action. For example, I did not directly link the filename from the .info domain in the upload, under consideration that if we used a large set of their filenames, they might call that copyrighted information (there was some exploit along that line that gave private publishers a sort of copyright over U.S. law books, because the page numbers were copyrighted). I also created the file name and description in a way that I think can be readily automated, provided the bot knows the index page and item number.

There are two ways that this could turn into a large-scale site fork. One is that a lot of individual editors get working on uploading many such pages, and do what I did 100,000-fold. The other is that someone writes a bot that goes through all the item numbers, downloads the wait page (e.g. http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:IMSLPImageHandler/02094 ) extracts the real file, and uploads it. In theory you could simply go through all the numbers sequentially without knowing what they are --- but there's a problem.

The big problem is that Wikimedia Commons was far more obliging to international claims that IMSLP was, and instead of establishing different servers, they only hold documents that are PD in both the US and the source country. That means that in practice a bot would have to be much smarter, go through the indexes, try to figure out what documents are acceptable by Commons' standards. And honestly, I'm not clear how to do that if it's not Bach sheet music edited by someone who died in 1910.

One solution would be if WMF decided, at a high level, to mirror the entire IMSLP database, and to set up a server structure equivalent to what they use, in which case the whole database can go.

The other is some kind of semi-automation where users go through index pages and perhaps manually dump numbers of files that are OK to copy into a holding area for a bot to work with. Still a difficult thing to program.

As I said, I'm not a WMF insider and I don't know how they would react to this opportunity; what I can say is that if you have some favorite composers whose work you'd like to transfer over, the path is open now. Wnt (talk) 14:49, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia: hello!

It's a pleasure to be here, Mr. Wales, sir. I just created my account 5 days ago and am just getting started. I'm currently starting off fresh by making several improvements to articles, and I wish you and every user here the best of luck. To be honest, if we ever met in real life, we'd definitely be shaking hands right now. John "Soap" MacTavish 23:55, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

soap? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 223.176.3.157 (talk) 04:51, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

How may I help you? But please, do remember to sign your comments with ~~~~. John "Soap" MacTavish 05:55, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Mr. Joseph Jobs paying us a visit... Carrite (talk) 03:54, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

xtools

Cyberpower768 says that Hedonil changed the xtools code and he can't do anything. WMF must maintain important tools.--223.176.3.157 (talk) 04:51, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't know anything about any of that. :-( --Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:33, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

It's best to courtesy notify @Cyberpower678: @Hedonil: when discussing them here. Wnt (talk) 14:53, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

It would seem that someone else is maintaining the tools, on GitHub at the moment, but I would appreciate more developers be active in the maintenance of the code. I no longer have the time to maintain them myself.—^cyberpower_{Happy 2016:Online} 14:58, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Isn't that one of the core businesses, where the multimillions the WMF is haveing in te overfull coffers should be spent, instead of of unwanted pet projects like Flow? Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 16:08, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

There were a number of proposals for WMF maintenance and/or development of tools at the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey, but those related to xtools didn't make the top 10. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:10, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

If xtools was working fine at the time, contributors to that wishlist probably didn't see a need to add it at the time. I, JethroBT ^{drop me a line} 04:42, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Just want to point out that when Cyberpower678 says "someone else is maintaining the tools, on GitHub at the moment", that someone is an employee of the WMF, based in San Francisco. I don't know whether this is part of their regular work duties, or something they've volunteered to do in their free time, but, either way, I'm thankful for their help. Wbm1058 (talk) 14:50, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

As am I. Thank you WMF.—^cyberpower_{Happy 2016:Limited Access} 16:20, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Why use acronyms like "WTF"?

Jimbo, do ordinary human beings really go around engaging in an internal mental conversation consisting of a series of WTFs? That is certainly not how I think or how I imagine that the vast majority of productive encyclopedia editors think.

You say "In the past (things are improving) the Foundation underinvested in engineering/product. This means that we are stuck with software that has not improved to keep pace with modern developments and our own learnings. Let me give just one simple example. To respond to you I had to write ':' before each line. That's not so bad, but after I comment, you'll respond and it'll be '::'. Others will chime in and pretty soon we are up to '::::::' is that 5 or 6? It's madness. Anyone new thinks: WTF WTF WTF."

Are people who sincerely want to become encyclopedia editors really deterred by learning wikicode, including the convention of indenting with colons? In my case, I learned this easily and effortlessly in my early days of editing. If wikicode was so hard to learn, then how have we created this English encyclopedia with five milion articles, and all the other wonderful encyclopedias in a surprising number of languages? How did we ever accomplish this, if indenting with colons is so onerous?

There have been a few successful software improvemements. "Thanking" and "pinging" come to mind. But in my view as an active editor, the major WMF software initiatives are all failures. Massive amounts of money spent without making editing easier, either for newbies or for experienced editors. Of course, things could change in the future. Where's the evidence?

In my opinion, the success of this project is almost entirely due to the volunteer encyclopedists. The rank and file editors. The big money, rarified "Silicon Valley North/Davos/hobnobbing with celebrities" world of WMF board meetings and career opportunities for dozens of coders has brought us very little. I think we need to return to our roots, and turn the WMF over completely to people like Doc James. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:54, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

@Cullen328: On the WTF factor, I can say that in hosting edit-a-thons and doing GLAM work in Chicago for a few years now, I've tried to pay attention to the experience of folks editing for the first time. Insofar as those programs are concerned, I can say with confidence that folks are taken aback by systems (and to some extent conventions) around discussions and contributing. Sometimes they warm up to them, and mostly they do not. I see newer folks in these settings deferring more to VisualEditor these days, and I can't say I blame them (and also, that preference isn't a real problem anymore.)

I've thought about this matter of learning from time to time: "I took the time to learn wikicode, conventions around discussion and contributions, etc., and I've never really been a particularly tech-minded person. So why can't everyone else learn it?" Over time, one difficulty I'm aware of is the time and engagement needed to learn these matters in practice; not having that knowledge/experience understandably limits what they can do, but it's not as though they cannot make meaningful contributions. Another difficulty is a matter of prior knowledge people have from other places on the web. Folks new to our projects come in with different expectations than they used to: Some of those expectations are and always have been obviously inconsistent with our goals (e.g. I want to promote my business here / I can use this exactly like I use Facebook), but others are not clearly inconsistent in my view (e.g. When I comment in a talk page, I shouldn't need any special code so editors know it was from me. I'm logged in, after all.) I don't think there is a question of sincerity on the part of these editors, either. They may not want to or are unable to become active, but they have something valuable to contribute. I don't think we should discourage that. I, JethroBT ^{drop me a line} 10:57, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

• While wikicode is easy (and reminds me of when I designed using the X & Y axis), software ought to be updated more often than once every decade. Communication should be of utmost importance to Wikipedia, yet it has become most difficult. It's obvious there is better out there. All one needs to do is go to Reddit.
  

The other thing Wikipedia ought be aware of is that "the behind the scenes of Wikipedia" isn't so behind. It continuously leaks out all over the net! --MurderByDeletionism^"bang!" 00:20, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Could we not just rename {{outdent}} to {{wadafa outdent}}"?? Martinevans123 (talk) 12:24, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Involuntary celibacy (4th nomination)

I don't know if you are still interested in the situation here, but information suppression is the only term I can think of. When the momentum began to move in favor of inclusion false allegations of canvassing were posted on the talk page. These discussions have skewed the discussion toward deletion. I am not sure of the next step, perhaps postponing the discussion until the matter is resolved is best. I believe these discussions are historic. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 18:38, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

And so you entertain yourself with a bit of canvassing here, to prove that allegation, right? Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 18:51, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Skewed the discussion toward deletion? This is just more canvassing from you. You claim established editors have favored inclusion, yet almost half of the keep voters are either sleeper accounts or are conspiracy editors. You should be topic banned from this topic and all AfDs. You have no sense of Canvassing guidelines and repeatedly attempt to recruit editors who favor your POV. Un-fucking-believable. Dave Dial (talk) 18:59, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

I do ask respected editor for their opinions, also he was involved in the discussion multiple times and pinged to the page by Sandstein, this is obviously not canvassing. Given the amount of attacking on the page, I thought he might be interested in this. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 19:21, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Oh no, of course. It can't be canvassing if it's done by you and for such a terrific and worthy cause. Sorry for stating something only valid for non-valoems. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 19:25, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

That's ridiculous did you read Wikipedia:Canvassing?

Appropriate notification:

• • Editors who have participated in previous discussions on the same topic (or closely related topics)
  • Editors who have asked to be kept informed

Valoem ^{talk contrib} 19:33, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

You are purposely leaving out the parts that say:

The audience must not be selected on the basis of their opinions—for example, if notices are sent to editors who previously supported deleting an article, then identical notices should be sent to those who supported keeping it.

But you already know that, as it has been pointed out to you many times previously, when you have canvassed. Dave Dial (talk) 19:39, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

But you see DD2K if you are in the right its OK to IAR canvass people who have the right opinions. The only thing that has changed is that our friend has got much more sneaky in disguising his behaviour. For Valoem Its a case of they canvass, I can only do right. Perhaps we are all wrong. After all, he has fought this good fight for so long that there must be a good reason why he continues to try to right this terrible wrong. I think I'll have to go away and rethink my position.. actually I'm going to try and get my son to revise but its all the same in the end... Spartaz ^Humbug! 19:49, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

How sad you must be to use fabricated evidence never ask inexperience editors which is what that was, you've always been bitey unfortunate you feel the way you do, may you be the model administrator for all to see. I am somehow going to remain civil even after your post of having no respect. Carry on then. Valoem ^{talk contrib} 01:34, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Spartaz, this needs to be toned down immediately. Asserting bad faith is one thing, its another to taunt that you will have your son start making changes as a sockpuppet (whom you expect will be discovered in the end). I agree that Valoem, should not have taken the bait. But your physical threat to his children is over the top, and I suggest you retract it immediately. This physical threat is so overt it is certainly reportable outside of Wikipedia. De-escalate, clarify, and I would suggest an apology. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AValoem&type=revision&diff=698852962&oldid=698448712 Mystery Wolff (talk) 23:28, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Maybe I am missing something but all they said is that they were off to get their son to study, I assume for school, revise=study in UK and is not some reference to SOCKing. Jbh^Talk 23:38, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Have you been smoking something Mystery Wolff? I suggest you butt out now. If this is your attempt to make me involved with regard to your AE case then this has been a complete bust as there is specific precedents that such actions do not make the admin you are taking on involved. Are you going to equally chastise Valoem for saying that he pitied my children or does your outrage only extend to people who have endorsed a topic ban against you? Spartaz ^Humbug! 23:46, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Jbhunley, never heard the term revise in relationship to a school, neither has Merriam-Webster's book. I used the commonly understood term of revise as to edit. As we are editors, it seems most logical, to assume his son was an editor. Why would he be talking about trying to get his son to school? You either are going to drive your kid somewhere or not, you don't try. (with apologies to Yoda) "but its all same in the end" has nothing to do with his son going to school, or whatever. Perhaps I don't understand the context....but I did read what he wrote on Valoem's page, when I was looking to see if he had responded to me on something else, and it still reads as a threat, regardless if he was going to get his son to revise an article, or if for some reason he thought it important to be talking about his personal itinerary. Mystery Wolff (talk) 09:30, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

@Spartaz:this has nothing to do with me at all, nor have I ever claimed you were involved with any of my edits. The only thing it has to do with me, is how I use a clunky system to check for replies and actions, I look at the a users contributions. In this case I looked at yours to see if you responded in areas that affect me. What I found at the top of the list was a header of "I think one day you might come do regret this....", so yeah I clicked. The body of the message was "Do you have children Valoem?" and your signature. That looks like a real threat, and if it not a threat, I have no idea why you are pushing and instigating a fight like that, on a person talk page. {Subject: you will regret this, Body: do you have kids?} Maybe Spartaz, you want to explain what the "some day he will regret" part is. I don't know how you can justify it. Its aggressive and provocative, and whether he has children is not your business in every case, its not something to push into Wikipedia, as in never. It's a bright-line. I have no idea who Valeom is, nor care....but I do care if Wikipedia is a secure place to have our opinions put out, without threats in the real world. I don't see any dance that does not make it a threat in the real world, that is how it reads. And Spartaz I am not smoking anything, that's not cute. Does that now make sense? Again, I believe you should remove it, and apologize. Are you able? Mystery Wolff (talk) 09:57, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

The way I understood the comment is not as a thread, but rather a post meant to make the user Valoem understand it is not alright to attack someone using their children. Saying something like "I pity your children", is a deeply personal attack as it essentially says "I would hate to have you as a father, I feel sorry for your children for having you as a father", or something along those lines. This comment seemed to come out of the blue, and naturally as a father, Spartaz has every right to be upset at such a low blow. The "some day he will regret" part, to me, could be about how Valoem, if one day he had children himself, might look back on this comment and feel bad for having made it. There is no threat and I am amazed at someone explaining the comment as one, as if this were some sort of Godfather mafia movie and not an online encyclopedia. Try not to blow things out of the water, people. Mythic Writerlord (talk) 10:50, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Mythic Writerlord, when Sparta posted his innuendo on Valoem page, it was several hours after Valoem had already removed it on his own. You know that, and so does Spartaz, and Spartaz knew it was out, when he wrote the threat. So under you reading, there is no point for Spartaz to try and make Valoem understand anything. Right? Spartaz has style of communication that is anything but gentle, it tends to be mocking. If you have not noticed his tagline moniker is "humbug" which is defined as "deceptive or false talk or behavior", so it's anything but a hidden style. I do not think that Spartaz has every right to be upset He can not just lash out, then insert his son into the argument, and be stunned it would come up. I already said Valoem should not have taken the bait, but he did, but he also removed the quip on his own. Mythic, I am sorry but you are not using logic, when with your explanation of why Spartaz is floating out "you will regret it". There was no reason for Spartaz to ask about Veloem's children. While I think your explanation is creative, it would be much simpler if Spartaz removes his remarks, and apologizes. It reads as physical threat. Your only point was that its a fair reprisal, I disagree. There is not a single good reason for Spartaz to be pushing that message on people's talk pages. Mystery Wolff (talk) 11:54, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

User:Hobit said "KEEP", so Valoem is not alone in his opinion and the canvassing accusation is not true in fact. I think Spartaz,Dave Dial, andSänger ♫ should be blocked for vicious personal attacks here against Valoem. Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:07, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

• Brilliant reasoning Grant, simply brilliant. Your recent activity just shows that your topic ban should be extended to include the drama boards and Jimbo's Talk page. You've done nothing but try to shit stir since. Dave Dial (talk) 04:11, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

In the light of "vicious personal attacks", it does not get any more personal then this little remark. Editors are getting far too worked up over this debate, and far too personally and emotionally involved in it. May the upcoming close be a strong and lasting one, for the sake of all parties involved. Mythic Writerlord (talk) 04:28, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Oops, that is really bad. You are correct Mythic Writerlord. There is too much emotion on this one. Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:52, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

This page has traditionally presented itself as immune from canvassing regulations, so all this nastiness is pointless. I think people on both sides of the issue read it. The case itself is a close one, and neither merge nor keep is very stable, so I think the best thing is just to let people vote how they want. Wnt (talk) 13:48, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, Wikipedia is really good at suppressing information - original research, attempts to promote neologisms, abject nonsense, all get ruthlessly suppressed (after endless tedious deletion debates, reviews, canvassing, more debates, off-wiki campaigns, and usually an ArbCom case or two). Guy (Help!) 23:51, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Alas this one fails the arbitration test but I still have some small expectation that this will pop up on RFAR after another unsuccessful DRV gets closed against someones special perceived understanding of consensus. Spartaz ^Humbug! 00:01, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

"readers' IPs are recorded in site logs."

@Jimbo:Regarding this matter mentioned above: "readers' IPs are recorded in site logs." Should not readers be informed of this on the home page? Perhaps with a prominent top left suggestion that they read the privacy policy before they start reading or contributing? I think that is only fair, perhaps something like this:

Welcome to Wikipedia,

Please read our privacy policy before using Wikipedia,

the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

What do you think about that idea? Nocturnalnow (talk) 05:44, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Every single website you visit stores pertinent information about the connection. That is how the Internet works. Google, Facebook, YouTube, every news site you ever visited, they probably all store your IP address in their servers. Anyone that uses the Internet should know that. It is 2016 not 1990 and that information should be pretty close to common knowledge by now. If you want to view Wikipedia privately use Tor, you just won't be able to edit without IPBE. --Majora (talk) 05:52, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

It is not common knowledge, not by a long shot, and since you use the word "probably", perhaps the storage of IP addresses is not as common as you think. More importantly, what we are talking about here is what people read, which a lot of us have been taught is a private matter in a free society and something that has historically been used against perfectly innocent people from time to time; e.g. McCarthyism. In addition, Wikipedia should be a leader in full and up front disclosure to our customers/readers/donors of whatever info about them or their IP address is kept, how it is used and when it is shared. I think providing a prominent link to the privacy policy is the least we should do. Nocturnalnow (talk) 06:18, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

There is a link at the bottom of the page, which I consider more than sufficient. If you're worried about Wikipedia storing this, remember your ISP can and may store this too, for far longer than you think. Oh, and local intelligence agencies may well capture this too.... Mdann52 (talk) 13:12, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

With respect, you miss my primary point which is simply one of disclosure to our readers and to a lessor degree to our contributors. Your points about local intelligence agencies or ISP providers are off point, as I am only addressing here what we (Wikipdeia) are doing. Also, the link in teeny tiny font at the bottom of the page is certainly not sufficient, imo. and is something I already noticed, which is why I used the word "prominent" in my suggestion above. People's freedom to select and read material on Wikipedia, without being recorded by Wikipedia, is reasonably assumed by most Americans and Canadians, imo.

But more to the point, what is wrong with making the change I suggest above, i.e.,

Welcome to Wikipedia,

Please read our privacy policy before using Wikipedia,

the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

???? Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:58, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Given the overall context, such a message would be wildly misleading to most non-technical people. IP addresses are recorded as a matter of course at virtually every single website. It's the default for web server logs for all major web server software packages. It's routine. Having a special scary disclaimer would suggest that we are more intrusive of privacy than other websites, when the truth is exactly the opposite: we adhere to absolute best practices of disclosure and - importantly - burning data as quickly as is reasonably practical.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:57, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, I have ran open source servers in the past. From what your saying you get rid of old data. Can you give any information on when the sever logs that store the ip's are deleted? I can bet with a site as big as WP the logs would have to be limited in size before another is started and deleting the old ones would be necessary on probably a weekly or monthly schedule. Perhaps that will help reassure people who fear information collection. AlbinoFerret 14:23, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo, is there a reason that IP addresses of readers are recorded? I would prefer that we not record the IP addresses of readers, although I am fine with recording the IP addresses of editors. EllenCT (talk) 06:22, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

It is important for statistical reasons, and it should be (and is) deleted as soon as is practical. You'd have to talk to someone at the Foundation about the current precise practices, but every time I have checked, I've been satisfied that the practices are very good indeed.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:57, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia doesn't seem to be radically different from other major websites in terms of IP logs, cookies etc. Here is the BBC's privacy policy.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 08:11, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@EllenCT: because the WMF uses this data to improve the site, and to deal with abuse. I think that storing this data is needed for some purposes. I would also note m:Data retention guidelines#How long do we retain non-public data? - and the fact this is less identifying than walking into a library, for example, and having your face caught on CCTV. Mdann52 (talk) 13:10, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Mdann52: That is a fairly good comparison. Libraries may have CCTV cameras ....... but there is a huge range of things they might do with them. Do they throw out old tapes after 48 hours unless there's a vandalism problem, or do they hold them forever? Do they keep them locked in a basement or do they put them on an online server by a third company that might harvest data or consent to police monitoring? Do they run facial recognition, do they cross-index with book withdrawals and create a database that may be taken by hackers?

There are a lot of things that can be done with information. A key question here is: do you keep the IP for as long as you're serving the page, for months, or forever, and who do you share it with? And so far all the changes in policy have been in the wrong direction. Wnt (talk) 14:57, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Keeep in mind that storing IP adresses is extremely helpful for sock puppet investigations, by a small group of trusted Wikipedia users using the CheckUser tool to find accounts sharing IP addresses. --Distelfinck (talk) 15:23, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

That's for accounts and IP-editors. Is not Readers. -DePiep (talk) 10:03, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

@Distelfinck: I hope that readers' IP addresses are not being used in sock puppet hunts. Though it is hard to rule out anything in the quixotic - but ultimately sinister - bureaucratic crusade to identify anonymous editors. Wnt (talk) 15:27, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Wnt: the raw data is only available to WMF ops (AFAIK), and is aggregated and the original data deleted as soon as possible. Mdann52 (talk) 15:30, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

WP:CHECKUSER data is kept for around 90 days according to a question asked in the past. It is necessary to comply with European privacy law and website privacy policies are often written in a rather vague way to avoid possible legal problems. For example, if the policy said "We keep the data for 90 days" and then a computer glitch caused it to be kept for 91 days, the website could face a host of lawsuits. The Wikipedia and BBC privacy policies both use the same type of wording along the lines of "We log IP addresses and use cookies to improve website experience" which is about as detailed as many policies get.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 15:39, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

What it actually says is "If you are visiting Wikimedia Sites with your mobile device, we may use your IP address to provide anonymized or aggregated information to service providers regarding the volume of usage in certain areas. We use IP addresses for research and analytics; to better personalize content, notices, and settings for you; to fight spam, identity theft, malware, and other kinds of abuse; and to provide better mobile and other applications" Does that sound like a conservative wording to you? Especially note the clever "anonymized or aggregated". Bear in mind that we must have heard a thousand companies say they "store no personal information" because an IP "isn't personal information", so IP addresses are, by definition, anonymized, and so they presumably can share them with mobile phone providers (read, government stooges) at will. Now of course, the providers already have the IP addresses of their own devices, so what IP data are they sharing? Well, maybe the IP addresses are in the cookies, local storage, and collected by tracking pixels that they mention. The effect being that the somewhat difficult to verify data - IP address, which could be anyone visiting a house or hotspot - can be related back to the government identity and tracking records held by the phone companies that do monthly billing. (honestly, I have no idea where the tracking pixels are - are they even on site or in other sites around the web?) The bottom line - the "privacy policy", like any corporate privacy policy on the internet, is a long justification of how whatever they can do they will do and isn't it nice of them to say so? Wnt (talk) 16:14, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Pretty much every website on the internet records the IPs of everyone who visits by defaults. This is true for very near 100% of all of the internet. This is hardly anything to be concerned about. This is exactly common knowledge, and while some people may not know this it is tantamount to saying someone does not know that a car uses fire to move.

For those who don't know, any time you do anything on the internet with any other computers they are announcing their IP, that is how the tubes know where to connect. HighInBC 16:22, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Re: "Pretty much every website on the internet records the IPs of everyone who visits by defaults"; Evidence, Please. A google search on the phrase "we do not collect IP addresses" gets a lot of hits. I am still waiting for someone to explain what use Wikipedia has for the IP addresses and pages visited by readers (as opposed to editors).[27] I often read Wikipedia through the Tor anonymity network, which means that Wikipedia has no IP address they can link to me and idea what pages I have read. Can someone explain, in detail, in what way this lack of knowledge has hurt Wikipedia? --Guy Macon (talk) 16:40, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Well I am basing this on my 15 years experience as a web developer. Any major website is going to be subject to hacking attempts and possible denial of service attacks, without IP information defence against such attacks is near impossible. Intrusion detection systems will detect malicious traffic and block is, by the IP. Without this information the people who keep the servers running cannot complete their job.

Please do a bit of research before asking me to prove something that is a standard practice. If you really want you can setup a website and see what the default logging is like. HighInBC 16:46, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

I second this comment.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:57, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Also if you actually read what "We do not collect IP addresses" is part of on those websites you will see that they do indeed collect IP addresses and that the sentence you quote is almost always followed by "We do not collect IP addresses for the purposes of". As in they collect them for technical reasons but not contrary to their privacy policy, like we and everyone else does. HighInBC 16:48, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Here is some introductory reading on the subject: Do Websites Track and Record IP Addresses?. HighInBC 16:50, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@HighInBC: When you connect to a website, it inevitably learns the IP you are at. It does not inevitably learn the IP you were at as recorded in a tracking cookie or local storage. Nor can it necessarily correlate where your IP was at with other sites, unless the sites coordinate their records by data sharing or by using tracking pixels.

I also neglected to mention above that the privacy policy doesn't in any way seem to disparage the collection of information by "third parties", who are not subject to the privacy policy, except that you can report it to a WMF IP address. So there's no specific guarantee I see that a site like a company running the Wikipedia shop (which I remember doing this a while back) can't legitimately hotlink to images on their own pages, thereby potentially getting their own collection of IP records to play with. Wnt (talk) 16:49, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

A good rule of thumb for privacy on the internet, "If you are on the Internet, it is probably not private". Even if the Foundation fails to properly track your actions the NSA will be sure to get it. If you see any suspicious external links let me know and I will look into it. HighInBC 16:54, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

To try to give an explanation maybe more accessible to laypeople (I'm a programmer myself): the Internet is a bunch of computers that talk to each other. Every computer on the Internet has a number called an IP address that identifies it (let's ignore proxies and NAT and all that to keep things simple). Every message a computer sends over the Internet contains its own IP address (the source) and the destination's IP address. This is how the computers that sit between them (the "Internet backbone", loosely speaking) know where to send the messages. Analogies are often drawn with the postal system. If I want to send you a letter, I need to know your address and put it on the envelope so the postal system knows what to do with it. And if I don't include my address as the return address you won't know where to send a reply (assume for the sake of the analogy that it doesn't work well to put my address inside the envelope); in this analogy the postal service automatically rejects anything without a return address. So you can see from this that every computer you talk to over the Internet knows your IP address, by virtue of how the Internet works. The computer can, of course, immediately throw this information away after it's done talking to you, but such things are up to whoever controls the computer. And it's true that, as touched on above, retaining logs of who talked to you and when, at least for some period of time, is routine for servers; it's helpful for a lot of things, including diagnosing problems. To debug complex network issues you pretty much need to log network activity. Another point worth making is that every computer between you and the other end also knows who you're talking to. They also know everything you say if your communications aren't encrypted. This is the "low-hanging fruit" of mass surveillance programs: you simply tap the Internet backbone and read all the messages as they pass back and forth. Intelligence agencies have engaged in other programs as well that involve more active measures, but that's another topic. I'm not trying to advance any particular position, just trying to be helpful. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 20:39, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Prominent Disclosure Placement is an issue that needs addressing, imo. There has been no compelling argument here as to why we should not have something like this:

"Please read our privacy policy before using Wikipedia"

at the top of our main page.

It is important, imo, that we prominently make our readers aware of the policy and encourage them to have a look at it, because most will not assume that they are subject to so much monitoring and recording of their reading activities.

I have not read much of our privacy policy as yet and I have already come upon wordings that surprised me: e.g.

We use some downloaded products, like MaxMind’s GeoIP City DB, which allows us to internally determine the approximate ::location of our users..........the data we retrieve is unlikely to be good enough to have a sandwich delivered.

Other times, we may use third-party providers to help us manage the information we store or use.

independent researchers have been able to link non-personal and aggregate information from different sources to particular users. While we try to avoid this by seeking to anonymize information before sharing it for research purposes, we want to make you are aware of this risk.

IP addresses associated with contributions from unregistered users are visible in an article’s revision history indefinitely

You are consenting to the use of your information in the U.S. and to the transfer of that information to other countries in connection to providing our services to you and others.

So sometimes we use third-party service providers or contractors who help run or improve the Wikimedia Sites for you and other users. We may give access to your personal information to these providers or contractors as needed to perform their services for us or to use their tools and services.

Bottom line is, if we are happy with our privacy policy, why not take the link to our privacy policy out of the fine print at the bottom of the page and place it in a prominent, top of the page position? Nocturnalnow (talk) 22:00, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Should they also have an alert to let readers know their computers are connected to the internet and the page they are viewing is not on their PCs? I've ran websites, forums and FTP sites in the 90's. Every time you connect to a server, your IP is logged. This is not new information. Dave Dial (talk) 22:16, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Also, Jimbo's talk page really isn't the place to have this discussion. If you want to place something new on the main page I recommend starting a RfC on Talk:Main page. If consensus is on your side so be it. But again, I have to agree with Dave Dial. Every website you visit logs your IP. Wikipedia is not doing anything different and a disclaimer at the top is a little silly if you ask me. --Majora (talk) 22:21, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. So, I put the Rfc there, I hope I did it right.Nocturnalnow (talk) 03:34, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Who has access to readers' IP addresses, and how long are they kept? Can we turn off collection of them except when abuse such as DDoS attacks are occuring? 168.103.81.4 (talk) 01:23, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Here's the story as it reached my ears: The logs are kept for a few weeks. Ops uses the aggregate data to figure out problems. The two main problems are due to ISPs between Wikipedia and readers (e.g., "We're getting complaints from Indonesia that pages aren't loading, and the logs confirm that traffic to that IP range is lower this week compared to last week") and the occasional external process gone bad (anyone else remember when Amazon.com got blocked?).

If you want any kind of individual data, then you have to go through both Legal and then trial by ordeal with James A. It's remarkable how little information is kept, how painful it is to extract individual information from the logs, and how nearly useless that information is for any purpose except web traffic management. A list of IP addresses and date stamps just doesn't get you very far in the real world.

All of this is about readers. If you edit a page while logged out, then your IP address is permanently displayed in the history tab. Anyone who wants to know who edited Embarrassment or Dispute can go look it up, without needing access to any of the private logs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:15, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Why does this have to be "the story as it reached your ears"? Why can't there be a simple standing order on record: all Wikimedia employees are advised that if they are in possession of IP addresses of readers from more than 30 days previous, they should securely delete them, post in [some public location] why they were in possession of them, or else post in [some public location] what data they have and say low long they need to keep it? Why isn't there a standard clause in every contract awarded by WMF that the contractee has to securely delete the data within a certain time frame, and notify the users in a public location of any errors? Wnt (talk) 14:44, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Because deletions are done as a courtesy and any promise to delete all data after a fixed amount of time is either illegal (Court orders to save a data set), opens up a host of legal problems (what if the process to automatically drop the table is halted), or makes the lives of researchers infinitely harder. --In actu (Guerillero) | My Talk 15:20, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@Guerillero: Can you give me an indication of why I should care if the lives of researchers are easier or harder? I cannot think of one area in which WMF has benefitted by research - all I think of when I think of their research is stuff like how Flow was a good idea. I would go out on a limb and say that from the beginning of Wikipedia to its not-so-distant end, "research" has never accomplished any useful thing. The rare instances when they listen to what the users say, those are useful.

I cannot hold WMF to blame for involuntary and inadvertent issues, but there is a way to say that in the policy, without saying you'll keep the data whenever and however you want. You could also write it to limit liability to something affordable, while promising that disclosure will be made and some penalty paid each time as a way of confirming to the users that the inadvertent events won't be daily. I see no evidence from the text that is actually there that those writing the policy have any intent except to cover themselves for large-scale and intentional breaches. Wnt (talk) 16:32, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Wnt, I thought you were interested in knowing what's involved in getting access to the logs. "Not-getting" access to the logs is much simpler. The rules for most staff, including me, are quite straightforward: "If you touch this, then you're fired" – no delete-within-30-days option involved. (Also, it's in the staff handbook under "Confidentiality Agreement", rather than individual contracts, and it covers quite a bit more than reader privacy.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:47, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I want to read that in a good way, but I am prone to interpret it another. Do you mean that you will be fired if you improperly retain or share confidential data, or you will be fired if you try to have a look see whether it is really being deleted in a timely fashion? Wnt (talk) 16:35, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't even need to "retain" or "share" that reader data to get fired. All I have to do is (intentionally) "obtain" it, no matter how briefly. I have no possible job-related reason to have that confidential information. Therefore, it is my job to not have that confidential data, ever. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:45, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

• I've been involved in a number of network forensics projects as part of my litigation consulting. Even if Wikipedia didn't keep server logs, or deleted them after 30 days, it would be possible to get logs from Wikipedia's ISP(s) which contain much the same info. ISPs keep their logs for a long time. If your connection to Wikipedia is secure (HTTPS), the request is encrypted, including the URL and any parameters. So, if Wikipedia ditches their logs, it would be possible for somebody with sufficient legal access to know that you were accessing Wikipedia, when, and how many times, but they would not know which pages unless they could decrypt SSL. However, by matching HTTPS request timestamps with a page history, they could probably show it was you editing a particular page. It is possible that government actors can decode SSL. One theoretically easy way for them to do this is to install an SSL interception proxy at the ISP. (See [28]) So, it boils down to whether you trust ISPs in general, or you believe that ISPs might be working with government to intercept and decrypt SSL. If you think Chinese ISPs aren't decrypting SSL, I think you are being naive. Jehochman ^Talk 15:06, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

@Jehochman: Privacy issues all depend on the specific threat. People who edit face the most risk from IP tracking, but we shouldn't neglect the importance of people who read. For example, it's possible the next time some idiot sets off a pressure cooker bomb and Boston goes under a lockdown declaring a formal State of Cowardice, they run around bashing in the doors of everyone in town who read pressure cooker bomb in the past six months. It might not lead to serious prosecution, but it would certainly have harmful effects on Boston and on Wikipedia, so it is best to take reasonable precautions to deter and dissuade this from happening. Also note that Wikipedia's ISPs won't have access to an IP address that was stored in a cookie or local storage when a visitor accessed from a different IP. Wnt (talk) 15:28, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Just because you have a list of IP addresses, assuming Wikipedia cooperated instead of fighting the subpoena, doesn't mean you have an physical address. You have to take the IPs to the relevant ISP, along with date and time info, and ask them to dox the user. ISPs generally comply without much fuss, but it can take weeks to get an answer and you have to pay them. The data can be misinterpreted too. Dragnets like you mention are theoretically possible, but aren't easy. You have manage risks according to what's likely. The risk you speak about is probably less likely than other risks. For instance, a hacker could pwn your computer and use it to run a surreptitious web server that distributes kiddie porn. The cops track it down, break in your door and arrest you. This has actually happened to people, and they have a lot of expense and trouble to prove that they weren't running the server, a hacker was. Worry about and manage the big risks, and don't sweat the small ones. Keep your OS patched! Jehochman ^Talk 16:59, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

You're describing the pre-CISPA situation, but does this apply now? How much more readily are the ISPs sharing data now that doing so frees them from potential liability? Wnt (talk) 19:07, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Jehochman may know more about this than I do, but I think you're underestimating the hassle and overestimating the value involved. Let's run a little thought experiment and pretend that you have managed to obtain a complete list of IPs and exact times for every single one of the 20,000+ users who viewed pressure cooker bomb in the last six months (which isn't even possible, because the logs aren't kept even close to that long). Now what?

Now you have to figure out which of the ~7,000 American ISPs (currently) controls each of those IP addresses. No problem, because it's not like you have either a budget or a deadline to meet, right? And you have to figure out which of the thousands of non-US ISPs controls the non-US-based ones. Then you have to figure out how to contact each and every one of those ISPs, confirm that you are with law enforcement, and send them the list of IPs and times. Then you wait for a response. Then – assuming that the ISPs you contact can and do answer your question at all – they'll send back thousands of street and/or billing addresses, from all over the world – many of them to businesses, dormitories, coffee shops, and other multi-user environments. (Also, they'll send back a list of IPs that they didn't control at that time, and now you get to go re-track-down the ISP of record at the time of the viewing, and start over.)

And then what? Are you going to spend the rest of your career walking into coffee shops and saying things like, "Does anyone remember who was using the wifi here, at 10:16:34 a.m. three Thursdays before the bombing?" Phoning up businesses and saying "I need to know which of your 600+ employees was using the internet at work back three days before Halloween?"

This isn't effective, and that's why law enforcement doesn't do that. You may read in the news that a known suspect had been searching the internet for relevant information, but you never read that law enforcement tried to track down thousands of people who read about a subject on the internet, in the hope that one of them would turn out to be suspicious. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:02, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

For the scenario I described, it would be one city. In the U.S. it is common (though I didn't check it's the case in Boston) for cable TV companies to have a "franchise" that gives them de facto monopoly for cable TV lines, and thus to have 30% or so of the total internet business in an area. One or two phone companies may have some similar kind of access to "compete" with them. For the government to track down every coffeeshop patron is ridiculous - they wouldn't bother. They'd say look, we can subpoena three companies - or just review the files of data they already have shared under CISPA - have a computer cross-reference 70% of the Wikipedia requests from within the city, spit out a list of a dozen doors to break down. Bing, bang, boom. Wnt (talk) 02:03, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

If they're interested in a single city – and if they either don't realize or don't care that many of the people accessing the internet inside that city have IP addresses at their provider's corporate headquarters, which could be in a different country (e.g., in the case of a corporate network), and they also either don't realize or don't care that people can, and criminals certainly do, travel between cities – then you're sort of right. They'd have to figure out which of the 20,000+ IP addresses geolocated to that city, and then figure out which ones resolved to non-group addresses, and then get a search warrant, which means convincing a judge that the sole(!) action of loading this article on your computer screen is a good reason to approve of breaking down 12 doors and putting dozens of people at risk of injury or death when both law enforcement and the judge is certain that at least 11 of those locations have only innocent people behind them.

Or, to put it another way: This is not actually a plausible scenario, not even in some hare-brained conspiracy theory. I could imagine reading this article plus more significant factors (e.g., someone read this article + Google says the same person spent three days searching for similar information + the person is involved in a white supremacist group), but not merely reading the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:40, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing:. They can get the information and decide they have a 50%, 30%, 20% chance of catching the criminal and that's enough. To get past the door they may need a warrant, for now, but think of all the *other* "metadata" they have from the reader's IP to other sites, that they can rifle through looking for suspicious-sounding things to tell a judge, during the midst of a Serious Crisis when liberties take a back seat. It is true they may not really bash down all 12 doors - some they'll see the demographics or interests and decide they're not suspects. Eventually they may even settle on just one door, but whoo-ah, think of all the circumstantial evidence they'll have on that person, the Single Most Suspicious Person In The City! Their biggest risk is they may actually get a conviction out of it, then have to think up a story when the real terrorist strikes again. You may think that's paranoid, but isn't France under an Enabling Act paranoid, Poland without constitutional rights paranoid? It's all falling down. Wnt (talk) 22:54, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Historically, Wikipedia did not record page hits at all. The server could not cope with the logging. At some point I believe a tracker was introduced, then full logging was turned on.

There is no compelling reason that I can see to maintain web logs, certainly no compelling reason to log IPs. If we wanted to it would be a simple hack to log either without IPs altogether, or to replace the P with a geocode.

The trouble is motivating the WMF to do such a thing.

(Note: ISPs can see what DNS records you fetch (up to a point) and which IP addresses you connect to (up to a point) but not the URLs of sites you visit using HTTPS, to a first approximation.)

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:16, 10 January 2016 (UTC).

"Monkey selfie case: judge rules animal cannot own his photo copyright"

The Monkey selfie saga is back in the news today after a San Francisco court ruled that the monkey did not own the copyright on the photo, rejecting a claim brought by Peta. The photographer says "I’m especially unhappy with the way Wikipedia has behaved. They took the view that no-one owned the copyright and allowed visitors to download images from their website. I’m planning to sue the organisations that have infringed my copyright and top of the list is Wikipedia. I want to get them into court over here rather than in America."[29]--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 18:08, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Which appears to be a quite proper course of action on his part - too many here took the view that "intellectual property" was evil in itself - the discussions are readily searchable. Collect (talk) 18:53, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

It looks like the courts in the United States have upheld Wikipedia's position, which is that non-humans cannot hold a copyright. Some supposedly reliable sources have got it wrong, such as the Telegraph here. Wikipedia has never claimed that the monkey owns or should own the copyright, this is an urban legend. The file is licensed as public domain. This saga is destined to run and run, with the photographer hoping for a more favourable result in the UK courts.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 19:02, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately for you, the apparently valid copyright claim lies with the photographer who furnished the camera (who is not a monkey) - which is the position the EU and UK seem to take on this. Collect (talk) 21:16, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

I would argue that too few here take the view that "intellectual property" is evil in itself.[30][31][32][33] --Guy Macon (talk) 20:24, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Surely you are not saying that it's okay just to take other people's work without permission? That is simply madness, it is no different from saying that I can break into your home and take your furniture. If intellectual property ceased to exist, I for one, would immediately stop posting content anywhere online and do my best to get rid of what I've already put out there. And yes, that monkey photo should be deleted. The only possible use it has is to flip the bird at Mr. Slater, which is really not cool. --Jakob (talk) aka Jakec 20:59, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

@Jakec: You are overloading your operators to the point where they look like they make sense, but don't. I have a series of 1's and 0's sent to me online, and you call it an "object". I have it on my screen, in my video card, in my broswer cache, you say I "have" it, but when I save it somewhere else, you say I "took" it. But it's only "taking" it if a judge says "it" is a thing, and who it belongs to, and all those decisions are totally arbitrary - but then people go back and tell me even though the judge says it's not a thing, that it's still a "moral" thing and it's the same as stealing a couch! And you say to think otherwise is madness!

I understand, of course, that you want incentive to post things online. That is a legitimate desire. One method, when books cost a lot of money, to make people write books was to tax each book a few percent of its value, and earmark the tax to the author, and call that a royalty. That used to work -- doesn't now. It doesn't work because people copy the product, but it also doesn't work - and hasn't worked for some time - because those who decide what products to push are the ones who decide who makes money and who doesn't. People don't prove them wrong because they don't get free access to just try whatever product they want, because they're not allowed to. Indeed, had the so-called copyright on that monkey selfie been properly respected, none of us would ever have heard of it because who would fork over money to see it? Unless, that is, someone with a big outlet makes a deal, which is what happens to musicians - they end up as indentured servants, signing away their lives in 30-year contracts because otherwise they think they won't be heard at all, but getting practically none of the profit.

What we need now is a new mechanism to reward authors. One where every single individual has the right to view and copy ANYTHING (and I mean anything). One where people are required to pay a sum, proportional to their income tax, to independent funding organizations of their choice, to fund the arts and sciences, in the proportion they wish. Those organizations then find and reward good content creators, such as by giving you money for decent photos you take. The amount from one donor to one recipient must be capped at a very low value to ensure that a significant proportion of the population can be artists and all get paid, rather than just a few getting all the money and the rest going away disappointed, and also to prevent obvious fraud where people give money in a circle. And that's it! The rest should handle itself. Everything from cancer research to professional karaoke could be put under a single umbrella, a market-driven mechanism where people pay taxes to the deserving organizations of their choice and hence deserving recipients. The funding organizations can decide themselves, after the fact, if setting up the monkey picture is a clever idea, and reward it --- WITHOUT having to cede their rights ever to look at that or similar things. I believe this will work far, far better than copyright. Wnt (talk) 22:47, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Thus making all artists, writers, performers and inventors "wards of the state" dependent on funding essentially from the state, and therefore unlikely to say or do anything contrary to the state's desires. We have seen that. I do not think it a desirable status to wish for. Collect (talk) 23:09, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

@Collect: They are wards of the state. Not one of them can count on income without keeping the threat of lawsuit close at hand. Nobody on Earth could have predicted whether Napster will succeed and Youtube would be banned or the other way around, before the courts ruled. What I describe is a system where people are required to donate money, but can donate it to whom they choose, with the sole limit of not too much per one end-recipient (to count toward the required sum that is). Wnt (talk) 00:14, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

They actually made some pretty good art back before IP was invented. HighInBC 23:14, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Well yes, but a lot of the most famous examples were on commission. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:54, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Might I recommend to you Rick Falkvinge's History of Copyright, which starts in 1350 with the Black Death killing off most of the scribes, followed by Gutenberg's printing press, followed by a law (enacted at the request of the Catholic Church) which forced the closure of all bookshops and stipulated death penalty by hanging for anybody using a printing press? Or, if that's too lengthy for you, here is a short summary. He makes a pretty good case for the claim that the people who have already made it to the top push for copyright monopolies that will lock in their positions as kings of the hill and prevent people who do something better from replacing them. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:40, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

---

And as a balance for those who think copyright should not exist: [34]

. The decalogue says you shall not take away from any man his profit. I don't like to be obliged to use the harsh term. What the decalogue really says is, "Thou shalt not steal," but I am trying to use more polite language. The laws of England and America do take it away, do select but one class, the people who create the literature of the land. They always talk handsomely about the literature of the land, always what a fine, great, monumental thing a great literature is, and in the midst of their enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to discourage it. Collect (talk) 23:16, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

But was he any good with macaques? Martinevans123 (talk) 23:25, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

@Collect: Twain spoke in a day when there was a tax on books to reward authors. Ridding the tax would not have given people more than a few extra books per hundred, so the merit of doing so was less than obvious. Others of his day opposed the abolitionists, calling them Negro-stealers, only they didn't always quite say Negro. You can call anything property, and get worked up about it, if your livelihood appears to depend on it. Wnt (talk) 00:14, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

The PD status is debatable, but I would fall on the side of it being PD rather than not. But the photographer is quite correct in one matter - Wikimedians behaved abominably. It's one thing to say "no" politely, but the whole parading of the photo everywhere was just being WP:DICKs. It was legal yes, but far from a good argument for free culture. -mattbuck (Talk) 23:37, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

This isn't about whether copyright law is good or bad. The case in San Francisco was about the specific point of whether a non-human can hold a copyright, and the court in San Francisco said no. What the courts in Europe might say about this case is another matter, as European copyright law often looks like it has been devised by Franz Kafka.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 03:40, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I am also not sure how the fact that the US court ruled that the monkey did not a copyright on the picture really helps with a Wikipdia lawsuit since the monkey owning the rights to the selfie was never Wikipedia's position nor did the court rule that the photographer owned the image.--65.94.253.160 (talk) 02:44, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't give any indications as to what might happen in Europe, but any further legal action over this in the U.S. courts would be pretty much a waste of money. The Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition says (page 68) "To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable. The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Examples:

• A photograph taken by a monkey.
• A mural painted by an elephant."
The photographer David Slater may take action against WMF in the UK or European courts, and this would be a different ball game. The article Monkey selfie quotes legal experts saying that he may have a better chance in these courts.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 06:55, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

For those interested in Wikimedia/Wikipedia reforms, I highly recommend the following: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal by Dan Luu.

Key quote:

new person #1 joins

new person#1: WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF

old hands: yeah we know we’re concerned about it

new person #1: WTF WTF wTF wtf wtf w…

new person #1 gets used to it

...

new person #2 joins

new person #2: WTF WTF WTF WTF

new person #1: yeah we know. we’re concerned about it.

In my opinion, this describes much of Wikimedia (at least the parts visible to us -- I am sure that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that runs smoothly and doesn't generate any drama) and some parts of Wikipedia. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:49, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't think it describes much about Wikimedia as an organization in particular, which is a much more normal organization than most people hope or fear. Obviously all organizations have that sort of thing. It does, however, pretty accurately describe a lot about Wikipedia and I think one of the reasons does have something to do with Wikimedia. In the past (things are improving) the Foundation underinvested in engineering/product. This means that we are stuck with software that has not improved to keep pace with modern developments and our own learnings.

Let me give just one simple example. To respond to you I had to write ':' before each line. That's not so bad, but after I comment, you'll respond and it'll be '::'. Others will chime in and pretty soon we are up to '::::::' is that 5 or 6? It's madness. Anyone new thinks: WTF WTF WTF. It isn't like a proper threaded message system *even including the features that are special to wiki* (such as that anyone can remove anyone else's comment if they are being sufficiently a jerk, etc.) is impossible. But here we are.

Or, imagine that person A just doesn't get along with person B. Anywhere else, A just blocks B, B blocks A, and the software keeps them with minimal visibility of each other, especially in personal discussion spaces. Here, the main solution to that kind of personal conflict is to complain publicly and ratchet up the drama even more. It's madness. Anyone new thinks: WTF WTF WTF. It isn't like 'blocking' is impossible. But here we are.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:31, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Guy, if you consider Wikipedia/Wikimidia to be so dysfunctional, why do you contribute here so much? A serious and sincere question. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 17:24, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Mrjulesd: as Guy has already informed you, this kind of reasoning is fallacious, often referred to as the false dilemma. Ironically, you have unintentionally proven Guy's point about the problem with community decision making, which is mired in fallacies, groupthink, and inflexibility—all of the very things that stand in the way of Wikipedia's growth and evolution. Your mistake is in assuming that Guy's concern is misplaced and unhealthy, when it is exactly the opposite: your black and white thinking is precisely the problem. Viriditas (talk) 20:11, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Well whatever you think, it was a question I was genuinely interested in having an answer to. But to be frank I don't really understand people who are very unhappy with Wikipedia but still wanting to contribute. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 22:48, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

I wish there was an easy way to reach you to help you understand why your thought process is very problematic. Since everyone has to eat to survive, let's use a food analogy: there's a favorite restaurant you go to with your friends and family. You have a good rapport with the staff and they try their best to service you and your needs. One day, you discover to your surprise, your regular order isn't cooked properly. You also notice that the service has changed a bit for the worse since the business let go of the last manager, who ran a very tight ship. The new manager might not be aware that things have gone downhill. What do you do? According to your argument, you should get up out of your comfy seat and walk out the door and never come back. That's simply wrong for a multitude of reasons. One, as a regular, valued customer, the business depends on your patronage and would benefit from criticism. They would also like to know if something is wrong so they can fix it, as a problem usually impacts more than just one person and could damage their reputation and eventually their business itself. There's also the employees who depend on the business for their livelihood. Finally, there's all the other people who enjoy the restaurant. So by not saying anything, by walking out and leaving for good because you we unhappy, you are essentially failing to do your job as a responsible patron, customer, and member of the community. Another way to understand this imperative is to review the fantasy films It's a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day. While both are fiction, they illustrate fundamental philosophical truths about the role each individual plays in the greater fabric of reality. This is best illustrated by the concept of Indra's net. In other words, by arguing that unhappy people should just leave instead of trying to change things, you are failing to take responsibility for yourself and others, because every action you take impacts everyone, and not taking action or ignoring a problem is an action by itself. To summarize, you are compelled to act in every moment, and by failing to act you are directly responsible for the problem. Viriditas (talk) 00:42, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

But by the same token, if I visited a restaurant, and the service and food was invariably poor, my patience would eventually wear thin, and I would less likely to visit, how ever much I cared about any staff members.

Really, the main problem I see is that a lot of criticism seems to me to be non-constructive. I think that's what strikes me a lot reading this page and others. And I suppose that's I'm responding to in a way. When people moan, but don't suggest ways in which things can be improved. Also I see a lot of moaning that I don't really understand either. Obviously some aspects can be improved. But overall, on balance, I see Wikipedia in a fairly positive light. So when people make blanket statements like "everything is dreadful, and the sky's falling" it disheartens me because it doesn't seem to me to be rational, and also doesn't seem like a constructive criticism. I don't believe they really believe that either, because their contributions suggest otherwise, at least to my way of thinking. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 00:52, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

In my experience and erudition, the only people who object to criticism like this are those who subscribe to hardcore cult psychology which promotes conformism as a core value. You see this kind of thinking in political partisanship, in the ranks of sports fans, religious believers, corporate employees, and the military. Viriditas (talk) 02:17, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't object to constructive criticism, only non-constructive criticism and general woe betiding. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 02:23, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Did you read Guy's original comment and external link? It's entirely on point and constructive. Viriditas (talk) 03:12, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I was more responding to you calling my thinking fallacious, and to generalized points on contributors who are unhappy here but still contribute. My responses to Guy are below. But anyway, I think I've said enough on this issue, I probably wont respond any further. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 03:52, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Your question contains an assumption that the only reasonable response to problems in an organization is to leave. It does not consider the possibility that a reasonable response to problems in an organization is to attempt to fix the problems. In addition, as I was careful to point out, many parts of the Wikimedia Foundation are not dysfunctional. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:51, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

OK I suppose I should explain my angle. If I honestly thought that it was seriously dysfunctional here I don't think I would be motivated to continue. But overall I agree with most things that happen here. Not everything, but the majority of decisions seem to make sense to me. But if that stopped being the case I expect that i would probably not want to contribute. My contributions have been modest, but at same time they have taken me some time to achieve.

Following on from your original statement, what do you see as the biggest problems here? --Jules (Mrjulesd) 18:38, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation financial development 2003–2014. Green is revenue, red is expenditure, and black is assets, in millions of US dollars.

The number of admins promotions via RfA per year since 2002

Accountability to the community
Does the Wikimedia fundraising survey address community concerns?
Donate to Wikipedia and Pay for… What Exactly?
Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer
Revolting peasants force Wikipedia to cut'n'paste Visual Editor into the bin
Wikipedia faces revolt over VisualEditor
Flow no longer in active development
--Guy Macon (talk) 19:48, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

What are "Millionen", please? Who prepared the charts with those legends? On my computer it was hard even to see that was the legend, it looked like "MIIIIonen" and I was embarrassed to ask. MPS1992 (talk) 20:46, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

@MPS1992: if you click on the image, you will discover that it was created in the German language. Using Google translate reveals that "millionen" is German for "millions". Viriditas (talk) 01:33, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Image:Wikimedia Foundation financial development-en.svg is now avaialable. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:04, 12 January 2016 (UTC).

OK well that's quite a lot to discuss. But let's start with the revenue/expenditure/assets graph. What do you see particularly wrong with it? --Jules (Mrjulesd) 22:48, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Generalising per se not particularly helpful. All are different. Visual editor well intentioned but clumsy. Having a big asset base makes economic sense, especially if you can use interest for grants etc. Ummm...more specifics? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:20, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Does someone who is brainwashed realize they are brainwashed? There is another way, its called Critical thinking. Also,S. I. Hayakawa wrote that faulty communication is the cause of most human problems and conflicts. Regarding both situations there are degrees. One example, when I was a boy we had civil defense drills and hid under our desks....yeah, really...preparing for "the Russians are coming". Much later I got to know a woman who grew up in communist Poland where, as a girl, they had the same drills and hid under her desk because "the Americans are coming". It was as unthinkable to her as it was to me that our respective side would attack first, yet we both were brainwashed into fearing the other "evil" side. I heard an audio of LBJ telling McNamara about the Vietnam War that "our job there is to train those people, and our training is going good?" Maybe the only important decision any of us really have to make in life is to what degree we think for ourselves. Nocturnalnow (talk) 04:21, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

If Jules cannot see that The WMF spending more and more money every year during a period when readership is down, the number of active editors are down, the number of active administrators are down, and the costs of actually hosting the website are down, further argument is unlikely to enlighten him. Spending $2 million a year for travel (more than $10,000 per employee)[35] is a problem. Refusing to answer reasonable questions about how money is spent [36][37] is a problem. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:13, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Spending more money would be unwise if the biggest problem was getting money. Since the movement does have some problems, most of which are not financial, and it is able to raise money then of course it is appropriate to spend money to try to better understand and ideally solve the problems that face us. The investment in Visual Editor was a prime example of using money to solve a perceived problem. As for your examples of problems, until recently our readership was growing faster than the internet, it may still be doing so, but with a growing proportion of people reading our content via mirrors rather than coming directly to Wikipedia. Numbers of active editors depends on your definition of activity; those who edit 5 or more times in one month are definitely down on 2007, but much of that drop is simply that the edit filters have stopped many vandals who previously would have done five vandalisms and been blocked. Editors who save over 100 edits a month in mainspace did drop between 2007 and 2014, but 2015 saw a recovery and recent months have been between the 2011 and 2010 levels. RFA is a problem and only partially explained by unbundlings such as Rollback. ϢereSpielChequers 10:55, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Disclosure. I was one of the volunteers who got a WMF scholarship including travel costs to attend Wikimania in Mexico, and a partial scholarship to Haifa. I'm also entitled to claim travel costs from Wikimedia UK for various events I have been a volunteer trainer at. Did the $2 million travel costs of "$10,000 per employee" that the article criticises, include the cost of volunteer travel? If so I think the comparison is wrong. Instead of comparing the travel costs to the number of employees it should compare the travel costs to those of other global organisations. ϢereSpielChequers 11:13, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

We got by just fine in 2010 by spending ten million dollars. Why did we need to spend fifty million dollars in 2015? What is the WMF accomplishing now that they failed to accomplish five years ago? --Guy Macon (talk) 12:59, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a spokesperson for the WMF, If you want to ask those questions I'm the wrong person to ask. I know the Commons upload wizard came in since 2010 and I think the second datacentre, for all I know that could be the highlights of the last five years or the petty cash. I haven't looked in detail at either budget and don't have an opinion as to whether the expanded spending is an overall success. Do you have any comment on the points I made? I have been keeping tabs on the numbers of >100 mainspace edits a month editors since my article in the signpost and the trend continues at least as recently as the November data. ϢereSpielChequers 14:49, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia is relatively new (at least to those with long memory). Fewer editors, etc. maybe a widespread realization that encyclopedia writing, a thing known in the last century to have been done by specialists, is not in fact for everyone, but rather specialization is natural to the enterprise (thus the pages and pages this site uses to begin to explain how to do it) -- even when given away for free. Specialization is often attended with higher costs of production, education, recruitment, and presentation. So, turning this topic sideways, it becomes, How Messed Up Practices Evolve, sometimes becoming less or more messed up. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:58, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps our "Completely Messed Up Practices" are subliminal imitation?

Maybe the human condition is such that the "practices" of the leadership of societies are imitated at a subconscious level by sub groups within the societies? It is quite humbling to entertain, but what if Wikimedia/Wikipedia "messed up practices" are not self-directed but simply the result of osmosis from the trickling down of the "messed up practices" by those perceived to have the most authority, power and control over all of us? Here is an example of such "messed up practices" that I have been monitoring with wonderment for over 10 years:

See: "Narcotics" section

Mr. Chairman, what concerns me most is the way the threats become intertwined. In this case, there is ample evidence that Islamic extremists such as Usama Bin Ladin use profits from the drug trade to support their terror campaign.

Which is supported by this

And yet we had this, and then this, and then for the most visual representation of this example of "messed up practices becoming normal", Figure 1 on page 12 of this.

So, perhaps our Wikipedia example of Completely Messed Up Practices Becoming Normal is simply a reflection of today's "new normal". Nocturnalnow (talk) 21:13, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Long Response to User:Guy Macon and others

User:Guy Macon has posted a short statement on How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal followed by multiple links and two charts, which have provoked lengthy commentary, but it doesn’t appear that the commentary is getting anywhere. As to the two charts, I think that they are essentially unrelated, because one has to do with the English Wikipedia, and the other has to do with the WMF.

As to the second chart, the WMF financial profile, it is characteristic of successful non-profits. Income (mostly from contributions), expenses, and cash all tend to increase. As we see, WMF is a very successful non-profit. The flip side to that is that, as available money increases, if mission is not very clearly defined, and it isn’t that clearly defined for Wikimedia, there isn’t enough scrutiny as to whether the money is being spent wisely. Does Guy Macon or anyone else have any specific suggestions as to how the money ought to be retargeted? I would favor spending less on large software development efforts, which have included impressive failures, and more of the development budget on fixes and maintenance to existing software. I would also suggest reducing the overall development budget. I would also suggest spending money (something User:Jimbo Wales has mentioned in the past) on professional mediators to supplement the corps of volunteers in dispute resolution. I am sure that other suggestions can be made for where more money should be spent and for where less money should be spent. I would also suggest that one use of the cash reserve would be to deal with legal threats against specific editors, to establish that the WMF, with millions in reserves, will indemnify and defend individual editors against the occasional legal troll. (Legal trolls know better than to threaten defamation actions against the WMF, because it not only will throw money at the lawsuits, but recover its own costs.) That is just one thought. The multi-year profile of WMF finances indicates a successful non-profit, and so indicates that it needs to consider how to use its financial resources. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:41, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

The other chart is RFA. Either RFA was too easy in 2007, or it has become toxic, or both. I think both. At the same time, nothing is likely to be done about it in the next few years, because the WMF has a policy that each of the language Wikipedias is self-governing, and the WMF does not plan to solve any problems specific to specific language Wikipedias. However, the English Wikipedia is too diverse and fractious to be capable of self-government in its present quasi-anarchic form. It needs some sort of governance reform, but the WMF policy of non-intervention mean that a community that needs governance reform but can’t agree on anything won’t get governance reform. The English Wikipedia won’t and can’t solve the RFA problem. The WMF can but won’t solve the governance problem. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:41, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I would like to ask Guy Macon, who is normally a problem-solver, to explain whether he thinks that anything in particular is dysfunctional and can be solved. There are some editors who like to say that the English Wikipedia is a toxic environment. Do they mean that it is toxic and should be abandoned, or that it is toxic and something should be done? If so, what? I disagree with the statement that the English Wikipedia is a toxic environment, and I think that Guy Macon also at least partly disagrees, because he does still try to solve problems rather than just complaining. I would say that the English Wikipedia has toxic editors, and that some of the editors who see a toxic environment are looking in a mirror because they are toxic. What in particular does Guy Macon think should be addressed for problem-solving? Robert McClenon (talk) 17:41, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Comments by Guy Macon

My previous comment was addressed to those who think that there is no problem. If you are in that group, please respond there. This is addressed to those who [A] agree that problems exist, and [B] would like to solve them. These are my personal opinions, and I may very well be wrong, but I do have a lot of experience solving organizational problems, and there are a couple of well-known organizations who have repeatedly called me in as a consultant when things start going off the rails in their engineering departments.

Wikipedia (For the Wikimedia Foundation, see the section below).

In general, I think Wikipedia is not broken, and does not need fixing. There are a few areas that do need fixing, but mostly the things we are doing now is the right things to do. I certainly don't think Wikipedia is "toxic" and I suggest that those who think that try getting away from those parts of Wikipedia that attract problem editors and try editing any article chosen at random. In most of the encyclopedia, everyone gets along and articles get written and improved with little or no drama.

One area that needs fixing is RfA. The core problem is that pretty much everyone agrees that it is broken, but whenever a particular solution is proposed there is a strong consensus against trying it, even on a limited-time trial basis. This is true for every proposal, good, bad, major, or minor. I don't have an answer to this problem and am uninterested in suggesting any solutions that are certain to get shot down.

The Wikimedia Foundation

The main problem at WMF is detailed in this chart:

Wikimedia Foundation financial development 2003–2014. Green is revenue, red is expenditure, and black is assets, in millions of US dollars.

What you are seeing is a runaway train that just entered a tunnel at full speed while halfway through the mountain the tunnel-diggers are working as fast as they can.

So what happens if the economy turns sour or there are a couple of highly-publicized scandals and the revenues stop growing ever-larger? I think we all know what the WMF will do when the inevitable happens, based on past behavior.

Unlike other charities, there is no obvious way to expand the scope of the good work that the WMF is doing, If the Red Cross gets a lot more income, they can increase the number of people they help. If the Nature Conservancy gets a lot more income, they can increase the amount of land that they keep wild. But if the WMF gets a lot more income, they can only spend a tiny portion of it on hosting Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. All of the core functions of WMF put together add up to a tiny portion of how much they are spending.

In 2005 Jimbo Wales said

"So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that's essentially our main cost." [38] (time code 4:35)

Let's be generous and assume that the core costs for 2015 are a hundred times larger than they were in 2005. That would be $500,000 dollars - 1% of the $50,000,000 the WMF spent in 2015. And let's give the WMF an extra $10,000,000 -- roughly 20 times my estimate of the current operating costs -- so they can have Wikimanias all over the world, buy furniture, hire lawyers, etc., etc. That's how much they spent in 2010, so I am pretty sure that with a bit of belt tightening they can get by with that much in 2015. The result of doing that would be that by 2020 The WMF could cover all expenses from the interest on their assets -- in other words, an endowment. The WMF could then stop asking for money. A subtle donate link on the main page would allow those who really want to to keep giving.

Finally, why are the details of what gets spent where a closely guarded secret? Seriously, take a close look at page 11 of this PDF and then look at this discussion. Why can't I get an answer? We are talking about fifty million dollars a year. We should be able to see, in detail, what was bought with that money. We should be able to see, in detail, how much was spent on furniture, computers, hosting, software development, paying lawyers, travel, etc. We are better than this. We can be open and transparent and give an accounting of what that fiftty million dollars a year is buying for us.

Solutions? I don't see any. I suppose that I could try to get elected to the Board of Trustees (and no, I am not going to discuss Doc James here, and advise all reading this to ignore any attempts to hijack this discussion in that direction). I suppose that someone could attempt to sue them into more financial disclosure, but that really looks like a loser case to me; no law says that they have to tell me what gets spent where. I am just saying that responding -- even if the answer is no -- would be the right thing to do.

If anyone is interested, I can detail my failure to get any WMF developer to discuss my proposal to reduce page weight, but it's the same story; I ask reasonable questions, WMF stonewalls me. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:10, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

• I have a solution. Strike. The situation will have to get much, much worse before it will ever get better. --MurderByDeletionism^"bang!" 23:50, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Your argument about RFA is incorrect. Several minor changes just passed. Townlake (talk) 17:27, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

• Too little though.. and it's still slim pickings editors from long standing editors with failed AfD's! --MurderByDeletionism^"bang!" 23:50, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

In the UK, the government regulator of charities, the Charity Commission, recommends that all charities aim to build up reserves (an endowment) of twice annual expenditure, which the WMF is still some way short of. You ask "So what happens if the economy turns sour or there are a couple of highly-publicized scandals and the revenues stop growing ever-larger?" Well, they can use their reserves, to the degree they think necessary. I wasn't sure what you meant by "I think we all know what the WMF will do when the inevitable happens, based on past behavior", given that they have never yet had a serious revenue shortfall. I do agree that their financial reporting is remarkably untransparent, even by commercial standards, and it should not be. Johnbod (talk) 17:43, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi John, I've just reread the advice and nowadays it is a bit more nuanced than that, perhaps it has changed since you were treasurer of WMUK. I'm aware of one UK grant giving charity that doesn't normally give grants to charities who are sitting on more than 12 months reserves unless they have a very clear plan as to what they are doing with them. That said assets are more than just free reserves, assets should include the capital value of things such as the servers that the WMF owns. I don't know how much that would change the chart or whether the chart is in American English and their definition of assets is closer to what I would call free reserves. But the picture may not be quite as portrayed. ϢereSpielChequers 14:49, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

I am pretty sure in the event of a downturn and the WMF shows the impeccable management skills it has so far, Wikipedia & associated projects would *not* be a problem. Fork + a genuine legitimate 'the sky is falling' donation drive would cover the encyclopedia costs for a few years. Hell if the WMF continues its fantastic track record, I am pretty sure a good business case could be made to fork the entire thing a lot sooner. Google wouldnt exactly care, if another competitor can provide the same content for their search engine, they would bump it to the top of their lists. Although as an exercise, has anyone done a study of how long it would take to fork the 5-million article en-wp? Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:03, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Forking is not a problem from a technical standpoint. See Wikipedia:Database download#Where do I get.. I could do it myself -- one of my consulting clients has T5 line I can use if I need to. Hosting to serve such a large number of readers would be a much bigger challenge, but it's a challenge easily solved if you have enough money at hand.

So, let's assume that we have a shiny new fork and a great domain name, and some sort of new organization to manage the new encyclopedia. Start with an exact copy of Wikipedia, constantly updated so that an edit made on Wikipedia happens on the fork.

So, what changes could we make? Clearly we could add pages -- new pages for the new organization to manage the new encyclopedia is an obvious place to start. And we would have to make it clear that the fork is not the original, which requires more changes. The problem is, what do we do if someone edits a page on the fork? Try to get Wikipedia to automatically accept the edit? Good luck with that one. Lose all edits made on the page on Wikipedia from then on? This needs a solution before forking becomes viable. --Guy Macon (talk) 10:50, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

God no, my plan would be to transfer the administrator and bot-operator corps en-masse and just dont look back. You think Google will continue to promote wikipedia links once it becomes known its open-day for vandalism on ENWP? Given the EU's laws, once a few high profile libel/defamation threats hit, I estimate 3-6 months before a comprehensive fork would overtake wikipedia in the rankings. Hell, it would really only take the bot and automated operators who combat vandalism to stop work for a month and wikipedia would have to go into full page lockdown. Imagine 6 months of it... Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:02, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

What's your plan for making that "transfer the administrator and bot-operator corps en-masse" actually happen? I doubt that you could get 1% of them to move voluntarily. --Guy Macon (talk) 11:12, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I would say the WMF is making that happen all by itself at the moment. Its not there yet, but I can see it reaching the tipping point in the next 2 or 3 years unless there is a major governance turnaround. It would only take a relatively small amount of high-value people to become disaffected enough with the status quo to consider an alternative, then presented with a ready-made alternative, I suspect they would give it a trial. Fork first - present complete encyclopedia with new saner procedures, governance etc (I know you and I actually have had similar ideas in the past on what we would consider proper due process, so I assume others out there do too) to disaffected population, see what happens. You cant 'make' people do something they dont want to do, you can enable them to do something they do want to do. Especially when they are angry and disaffected. Only in death does duty end (talk) 11:59, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Imagine an encyclopedia where *all* BLP's are on the highest form of protection. Enticing for a lot of BLP noticeboard regulars. You could probably get a significant sign-on from some of the most prolific vandal-fighting editors/admins by requiring registering to edit. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:02, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Several version of Wikipedia including the German language Wikipedia have flagged revisions on all articles, not just BLPs. I'm pretty sure the WMF would let us switch that on here if we had consensus. As for jettisoning our openness for a citizendium style wiki of registered editors only, you have two problems, firstly most of the community won't want that, secondly if you did fork ultimately you would be doomed to lose to a Wikipedia that still allowed IPs to edit. There are some things that would give a fork an advantage over the WMF version, most obviously a commitment to only make software changes that have at least majority support, and to invest money in development according to community priorities. But forking to do things that only a minority support would not be the best way to start. ϢereSpielChequers 15:42, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers:I don't know how you're doing it, I don't think it's on purpose, but you're always wreaking havoc witrh the chart with your edits. See my revert with this edit. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 16:21, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

very strange, seems to be a problem with editing via my new Windows PC. Thanks for telling me. ϢereSpielChequers 08:51, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

@Only in death and Guy Macon: As appealing as the talk of forking is, it is all too easy to meet a new boss same as the old boss. The biggest problem with Wikipedia is that it was built around centralized control, and that medium is becoming the message. Some time ago I made a suggestion at Meta:Usenetpedia - the precise methods aren't really very important, but the idea is, we need to create a completely decentralized 'pedia in which edits are shared over a network and different people are free to set themselves up independently as authorities on which version should be served as "the most current version", according to what set of rules. Wnt (talk) 13:45, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Absolutely, Guy Macon. I first donated because (and this is on record) of the open accounting that existed at the time. The situation now feels like a betrayal. --Elvey^(t•c) 21:42, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Comments on Reply by User:Guy Macon

Thank you for explaining. It wasn’t clear from your previous comments what audience you were speaking to, and so it wasn’t clear to what extent you were talking about complainers or to wht extent you were complaining. I now understand better. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:20, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

As to RFA, I agree that the process has become broken. On the one hand, it probably was too easy in 2007, but it is definitely broken and toxic since 2012. It won’t be fixed in the foreseeable future because of a more general problem with the English Wikipedia, which is that it can’t address problems that polarize and divide the community. RFA is a visible symptom of this more underlying and less obvious problem. The English Wikipedia doesn’t have a workable form of self-governance, and, because it doesn’t have a workable form of self-governance, it won’t fix its processes by its own processes. RFA isn’t the only process in the English Wikipedia that is broken, only a highly visible example. For another example, there isn’t any mechanism short of the ArbCom of dealing with toxic editors (except for trolls and vandals), and the ArbCom has too many functions beyond dealing with toxic areas and toxic editors, and so is very slow (which it hasn’t always been). Proposals to do anything about the ArbCom bottleneck, likewise, do not go anywhere, because the English Wikipedia doesn’t have a workable mechanism of self-governance. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:20, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Much as I agree with the "RFA is broken" meme and one of my charts is frequently trotted out to evidence it, the truth is that if we charted the numbers of both admins and rollbackers the pattern would look very different. We now have over 5,400 rollbackers, all appointed since Rollback was unbundled in early 2008. When Rollback was unbundled the number of RFAs collapsed and it ceased to be possible to pass RFA simply because you were a "good vandalfighter". Most of our 1300 or so admins are from before that unbundling. Yes RFA has changed in other ways and I do consider it in need of much reform. But the biggest change took place by consensus and I for one would not reverse it. ϢereSpielChequers 15:01, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

When the WMF is asked to address any issue about the English Wikipedia, they reply with a statement that it, like the other services, is self-governing. That statement is a ‘’myth’’ in two senses. It is a myth in the philosophical sense that it illustrates something about the beliefs of a culture (in this case, the WMF), but it is also a myth in the common sense that it is not true. As long as the WMF continues to think that the English Wikipedia can reform itself, nothing will happen. Maybe they (most of whom are Americans and so can read and write English) need to take a better look at what is actually going on in the English Wikipedia, which is that the encyclopedia continues to evolve but that its governance processes don’t work, and the insistence that the English Wikipedia can reform itself is a delusion. Maybe they are too busy raising money that isn’t needed and isn’t disclosed and traveling around the world promoting themselves. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:20, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

This gets us back to the WMF. I agree that they don’t need all of that money that they aren’t accounting for. I agree that they need to provide a better breakdown of their finances. The PDF is compliant with IRS rules, but isn’t sufficient. What is the $12M in other operating expenses, for instance? What are the numbers and functions of the employees who get paid $20M? What are they doing that actually does or doesn’t have anything to do with the encyclopedias and other Wikis? Also, is there any way of estimating how much of the $50M really has to do with the English Wikipedia (as opposed to other web sites)? Robert McClenon (talk) 18:20, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

A short statement on recent comments by James Heilman

Recently, James Heilman wrote, regarding his removal from the Wikimedia Foundation Board: "It had in part to do with me wanting there to be public discussion on our long term strategy." diff.

I wrote the following statement, which has been agreed to by the entire board at the time, names below: "The removal of James as a board member was not due to any disagreement about public discussion of our long term strategy. The board unanimously supports public discussion of our long term strategy, has offered no objections to any board member discussing long term strategy with the community at any time, and strongly supports that the Wikimedia Foundation should develop long term strategy in consultation with the community."

• Dariusz Jemielniak
• Frieda Brioschi
• Denny Vrandecic
• Patricio Lorente
• Alice Wiegand
• Guy Kawasaki
• Jan-Bart de Vreede
• Stu West
• Jimmy Wales

I would like to add to this, speaking for myself only, that the loss of trust that I felt in James was in no small part due to this kind of statement on his part, in which the thinking of other board members is being misrepresented to the community and to the staff. James apologized to the board for certain actions which he has chosen not to share with the community, which is his right. He asked for a second chance, and the board declined to give it. My own preference, as expressed to him repeatedly, is that he live up to the values of honesty and transparency that are core to our community, and certainly that he not continue to misrepresent what happened.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:31, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

James's statement (the diff) was made after you voted him out. That's a tough way to prove your point. Next, those "certain actions" (pre-vote, I must understand) as mentioned do not form part of a misrepresentation towards the community because they were not shared. And of course you could state whether the Board did accept those excuses, or did undertake any other action to solve the issue(s). -DePiep (talk) 09:42, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

As I said, this is an example of the type of thing that caused the board to lose trust. I view it as a pattern of behavior that, it seems, is likely to continue.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:42, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I do not understand Jimbo writing here "live up to the values of honesty and transparency that are core to our community" while this case is kept under Board and Legal secrecy: no community involved to be honest & transparent with. -DePiep (talk) 11:11, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I was chatting with Patricio after my removal wondering about further details regarding justification and one of the few things he mentioned was my email to the group were I suggested I would be happy to write about the Knowledge Engine in the Signpost. You Jimbo responded very negatively when I made this suggestion. You Jimbo brought it up again a few weeks latter. We now have a community member asking for further details here

With respect to my apology, what I apologized for was going out of process, ie speaking with staff. However in my defense, both the chair and vice chair were aware of these conversations. And nearly all other board members were also having conversations with staff.

I am willing to have my actions and inaction in relation to those of my fellow board members subjected to independent review. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 10:06, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

You have a clear statement from every single member of the board that this has nothing to do with your removal. Time to drop it, no one is going to buy it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:42, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I would be willing to be part of the team doing the reviewing. Right now I have no position on any of this because I don't have enough data. I have already signed our confidentiality agreement when I was elected as one of three 2015 arbcom election commissioners. --Guy Macon (talk) 11:22, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

If it's really about the long term strategy, and whether to make them public: To not make such stuff public is a clear message against the community, as only the community has the legitimate right to develop a long term strategy, the service organisation WMF can help with this, as it's the duty with a service organisation, but is has absolute no right to do so behind closed doors. --Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 11:42, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

It is not about the long term strategy, and we have a unanimous statement from the board that it is completely false. We absolutely believe 100% in the community approach to long term strategy. I also believe that it is not possible to work constructively on a board with someone who completely misleads the community about such a thing.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:42, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Count me among those wanting to know a lot more about this "Knowledge Engine," and the long-term strategy mentioned by Doc James, and his removal from the Board "for cause." DePiep, above, also speaks for me. The removal of a community-elected member of the WMF Board is a matter of urgent concern, especially when Doc James states that he was attempting to bring important information to the attention of the community and was effectively retaliated against. By God, Jimmy, this issue now appears extremely ugly. Something appears terribly wrong in the way this is being handled. I suggest that making a clean breast of this entire subject has become crucial. Jusdafax 11:45, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

agree w/ Jusdafax--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:22, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

You now have a clear statement from the board that there is absolutely no truth to his claims. He is free to talk about long term strategy with the community, just as he always has been. I don't know how to be more clear: you have 100% of the board - community members, appointed members, longterm members, everyone saying the same thing: it just is not true. Why is he pushing this narrative? I don't know.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:42, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

What do you expect when all that has come through from the board is some vague statement with generalities that does nothing to enlighten anyone? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:49, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

(ec) Then why not take him up on his offer of submitting the situation to an independent review? If the review agrees with you, that could really help to settle this. If you're confident that the Board's view of this is the right one, you've got nothing to lose and everything to gain from that, and James has already agreed to it. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 12:51, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

However, the Devil's in the details. Who would select the review panel? How many would be on it? Who would determine what documents are to be reviewed? What kind of time frame would be allowed? And many more. Jimmy, you and the Board are saying Dr. Heilman is lying. This is another stunning development. Jusdafax 13:06, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Count me among the clean breast lovers, because surely, this is not the better way from any perspective. Ladling out hints in dribs and drabs, leaving it to conspiracy theorists to try to figure out what happened for the lack of any better option, this doesn't look good in any way. Even if you end up telling the whole story over time, no one will be sure if it's a work of interactive fiction. You might as well just face the music, tell the whole story, if it costs you a grant it costs you a grant, if it makes you look like a corporate appendage, well, I bet the new board will figure out a way to do that anyway soon enough. At least you'll have closure. Wnt (talk) 14:15, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

We were discussing the grant application to the Knight foundation for funding for the Knowledge Engine and the documents associated with it back in Oct. During that conversation I stated I would be happy to write a Signpost piece about it as these documents gave the clearest idea I have seen about what was being proposed. I stated that I wanted to see clear community discussion before we accept these restricted funds for a new and very ambitious long term project. You responded negatively to that proposal. Patricio mentioned this as one reason for my removal in a gchat. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:11, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

(ec) re Jimbo Wales: "no truth to his [James's] claims" - so Jimbo, these statement are not true: "[Patricio and I, James chatting] details regarding justification [...] my email to the group [...] about the Knowledge Engine"; "You Jimbo responded very negatively"; "You Jimbo brought it up again a few weeks latter"; "what I apologized for was going out of process, ie speaking with staff"; "However [...] both the chair and vice chair were aware of these conversations"; "And nearly all other board members were also having conversations with staff".

You Jimbo may choose to keep silent about Board's motivation (turn silent actually, because initially the Board was willing to publish a statement), and you may choose to follow WMF Legal advise into this. But then don't spin around words like 'honesty, transparency, NPOV explanation, very clear, misleading, is not about [topic X], ', and especially not 'community'. What you are actually saying, and will say after Legal clears this for outing, is: this is a Board thing and we will not assume responsibility vis-a-vis the community. -DePiep (talk) 13:15, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Be careful about the misdirection - you're still falling into the trap that I'm warning against. James' removal from the board had absolutely nothing to do with any disagreement about transparency regarding the long term strategy of the Foundation. I am a much stronger advocate of transparency than James, so if there were a serious board disagreement about that, I would have been on James' side on that one. That's not relevant - he's raising it for reasons that I leave you to conclude... a narrative that he was kicked off the board for wanting to bring some crucial information to the community is exciting and makes him look heroic. But it simply isn't true.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:23, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Based on the nonreply above I don't think I was entirely wrong to look for conspiratorial issues, even if they had nothing to do with this. Wnt (talk) 14:30, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry about that. I am not subject to a National Security Letter.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:55, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

re Jimbo. The 'this is not about'-statement is quite specific, and so leaves open a huge space for what it does could be about: Talking with staff? A *short* term strategy thing then? Jimbo twice, over weeks, objecting to an open discussion of Knights Foundation/Knowledge Engine for a non-strategic reason? And no I am not "falling into the trap" of "misdirection" (by James). I am testing your statements. You call James a liar and distrustworthy in public without putting the proof in public. This does not make James "heroic". It does make you something else. At least you could admit that WMF is hiding behind Legal. -DePiep (talk) 16:33, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

You have a statement from the entire board, signed by every member, indicating that what he said about why he was dismissed was simply not true. What further proof do you want? This is not a rhetorical question - what is it that you really want to see? I was there, I was on the phone call, and what he's claiming as a reason for dismissal is was never even mentioned by anyone as a reason for the dismissal. He now says - latest story - that it was for "talking to staff" - we all talk to staff in various ways. He knows that isn't the reason, either. Ask him why he's not telling you the full story.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:17, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

"Ask him why ..." - could be the same reason you don't: Legal advises silence ("WMF legal has asked the board to refrain from further comment until they've reviewed what can be said - this is analogous in some ways to personnel issues." you wrote above, Dec 29th). The Board's declaration is a reply to James's outing, and so was made up after the fact (another Legal Dept fingerprint). By personally accusing him of lying, ("My own preference, ... honesty") is another 'personnel issues' trick Legal Dept supported. "what he's claiming as a reason for dismissal" -- "a" as in singular? He published three Jan 2 (iow, what are you talking about? Exactly which statements by James are you actually calling upon being lies?). "He now says - latest story - that it was for "talking to staff" " - He already said so on Jan 2nd (same link), not a January 8th 'latest'. And in there, he added it was about "expectations". Since you somehow do not remember this one, the question again exactly which statement is not true. Next, in that James Jan 2 statement there is another after-vote issue you bring up: was or was he not aware that & invited for the Board was to discuss the joint declaration? The 'he choose to do' is another after-the-fact found problem; always useful in 'personnel issues'. All in all, this a lot of Legal/HR Dept speech. -DePiep (talk) 21:12, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

By now we are supposed to see by interpolation the Unmentionable Point we are being circled around. For now, no more questions. -DePiep (talk) 16:24, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Doc, Jimmy, I find myself scrambling to get up to speed in this discussion. I had heard of the Knight Foundation but knew little else about this deep pockets org until today. Review of their history leaves me uneasy. At this point I'm assuming nothing. I get the feeling, however, that there are questions here I don't even know to ask. Jusdafax 13:49, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

• I'm not sure the "one of us is lying, and since I have the better track record in transparency and telling the truth, everyone will just see that" approach is going to work very well here, because it is based on an incorrect premise. --Floquenbeam (talk) 15:13, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

If you mean James is trying that argument, then I agree with you. If you mean that I'm trying that argument... well, I'm confused why you should think that. I bought you testimony unanimously agreed to by the entire board - 9 people. They are all very well known to the community in various ways.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:17, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Well yes, thats rather the point. I think your view of the community's opinion of the board is at odds with the community's actual opinion on the board. I am not sure relying on 'these people are trustworthy' when there are quite a few skeletons lurking in closets that the community is aware of is the right tack to be taking. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:23, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

None of those people are known to me, and I'm the one deciding what my opinion is on this. There's one person who I have reason to think (based on observing past behavior) is generally honest and interested in transparency. There are 8 people I know nothing about, except that they are pretty much a walled garden issuing generally content-free statements (this last one excepted). And one person I know has been less than honest in the past, but who is using a "he's lying because I/we say he's lying" strategy. This is not going to work for me (which I acknowledge is meaningless to you). Your problem is, I don't think it's going to work for a much larger proportion of editors than you seem to think (which might be meaningless to you too). --Floquenbeam (talk) 15:28, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Most of this board were already members when it deceived the community by not acting against rogue developers and their mischievous actions in the superprotect disaster. How do you think is their standing within the community, that they failed so blatantly? And as long as absolutely no reason beyond I don't like him is brought to the front (and up to now there is nothing else), ask yourself who will be trusted by the community. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 15:39, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

As Tim Starling pointed out recently, the overall narrative of the situation makes James' story seem more credible. Even if we ignore James' dismissal, we have an unusual restricted grant announced long after it was awarded. It is described as "phase one" by Knight but we have no idea what the other phases look like or how much money is involved. Given that it exceeds $100k, we would expect it to be specifically approved per the Gift policy. We have an employee survey which shows shocking discontent, and which has not been revealed unlike previous surveys. I dug up mention of that survey on my own, with no help from anyone. If you could at least tell us whether the board is working on a response to these questions, it would make us feel maybe a bit more comfortable. II | (t - c) 16:08, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Jimmy, I agree with the above assessment by the ironically-named Imperfectly Informed. Given the shock of the current article in the Signpost regarding astonishingly high levels of mistrust in rank and file employee morale, the ongoing lack of transparency and demonstrable hostility towards the fired community-emplaced Board member, and the trend towards corporate funding of Wikimedia, with Google having deep and dubious ties in the WMF Board, I'm not convinced by the "trust us against Doc James" approach. And it has taken a lot to shake my blind faith, speaking as a former WMF volunteer in the San Francisco office in 2009-2010, working with the now-legendary Cary Bass and next to the great Mike Godwin. You know who I am, I've disclosed my identity. It has taken this avalanche of Dark News to force me into this corner of saying this here and now in this dramatic manner, but... God damn it man, you have got to do better than this. Jusdafax 17:09, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

What we have here, is a failure of communication. The only close-to-concrete thing we have from the Board side is Jimbo's note above that:

• "James apologized to the board for certain actions which he has chosen not to share with the community, which is his right. He asked for a second chance, and the board declined to give it."

James wrote:

• "With respect to my apology, what I apologized for was going out of process, ie speaking with staff. However in my defense, both the chair and vice chair were aware of these conversations. And nearly all other board members were also having conversations with staff."

Jimbo replied directly to that:

• "You have a clear statement from every single member of the board that this has nothing to do with your removal." (I will point out, Jimbo, that the statement at the top of this thread says nothing about out of process actions or speaking with staff, so your reply doesn't make any sense to me. Do you see what i mean? Do you maybe want to strike and respond to what he actually wrote?)

But apparently Jimbo and James are not talking about the same events or they have very different perceptions of the same events. What would be useful for the community would be if each of Jimbo and James gave each other permission to define what they believe the "certain actions" were that led to the loss of the board's trust and the dismissal. Rather than making accusations of lying, why not AGF and try to understand how you are perceiving things differently? That is something best done in private (of course) but you would each set an amazing example for the community if you worked it out here. I don't think either of you are liars, and both of you are very important to the community. Jytdog (talk) 16:50, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. It is very difficult, but I am happy to try.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:17, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

That is good of you. I hope you do try. The inability of the board and James to make a joint statement is causing a lot of drama, as lack of consensus often does around here. This is exactly the kind of leadership that it would be useful for you all (James too) to show - that you can reach consensus even on something as difficult as this. Jytdog (talk) 23:44, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Given the history, but also the absolute bungling mess and total lack of professionalism that the board has shown since these events, you will find, Jimbo, that there is a significant proportion of the people who voted for James who are unwilling to believe a single word of what the board continues to try not to say. This comes on top of a long list of disasters that others have summarized above. As for your claim to be a bigger champion for transparency, please back it up with the details on the restricted grant from the Knight foundation immediately. Talk is cheap, actions speak volumes. MLauba ^(Talk) 18:02, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

What sort of details do you want? I'll have to talk to others to make sure there are no contractual reasons not to do so, but in my opinion the grant letter should be published on meta. The Knight Grant is a red herring here, so it would be best to clear the air around that completely as soon as possible.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:19, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

@Jimbo Wales: - if contractural reasons present a barrier to fully disclosing the details around the grant, the grant should be returned. This grant is for $250,000. WMF has over $70,000,000 in reserves - the missing grant money could be replaced without any other part of WMF's programmatic work suffering. I could understand accepting some contractual limitations associated with much larger grant or if we were a much smaller organization, but there's absolutely no reason at all why we should give up any fraction of our ideals re: transparency over a grant that could easily be replaced from our reserves and that barely represents one day of WMF's normal operating budget. There's precedent in the movement for returning grant money that's believed to come with strings attached - WEF fully refunded their entire startup grant as soon as they had their own funding sources in place. User:Kevin Gorman | ^{talk page} 22:34, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

The mindset, that could even think keeping this secret is absolutely not compatible with the wikiverse. It should have been made open in September, better even before that. Keeping such things secret is an offence towards the community. If some donor expects secrecy about such things, he's the wrong one and should be put on a black list of rogue people/companies. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(talk) 18:24, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you completely on the general principle. I would like to remind you, however, that it doesn't make sense for the staff to report publicly every single conversation they have with potential donors or every single proposal that people make to them. Only when something rises to a certain level of importance does it make sense. In this case, the overall thinking has been openly published since at least *May* of last year. diff. A grant to support further exploration and R&D in this area is hardly controversial and certainly not something that would require secrecy.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:32, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

So then you would not object to James sharing with the community via a Signpost article about the so-called "knowledge engine" project, everything that he knows about the project? He seems to think that you object to that, but now here as you say "hardly controversial and certainly not something that would require secrecy" it sounds to me like you would not object to James writing about it in the next Signpost. Wbm1058 (talk) 17:13, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Speaking for The Signpost, we would definitely be interested in such a piece from Doc James. There are a lot of questions from the community regarding this project and this would be an excellent chance for the Board to clarify whatever misconceptions exist in the community about this matter. Does he have the Board's permission to do so? If not, will someone from the Board or the WMF be willing to write such a piece to inform the community what this matter is about? Gamaliel (talk) 17:44, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Would be great. Should also solve the mystery that James's proposal to discuss this Knowledge Engine/Knight Foundation long term strategic issue in the community was not allowed in September, and the same proposing mail later was made an issue once again by a Board member, and was discussed with Patricio WMF-Chair last week for absolutely not being related to the voting-out, and again on this page was ruled out again as unrelated. While the Knights earmarked contribution was only announced last week, so in September would have been a big scoop for James! Oh and we all want to know if this relates to James's stand re Undisclosed paid editing, of which he is aware both by professional background and by editing area. -DePiep (talk) 18:18, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

That is a good idea, but perhaps what's needed is a good, clear article simply stating the facts. DePiep, thanks for drawing our attention to his paid editing contributions. Don't agree with all of them but by and large very thoughtful. Makes me saddened about this recent turn of events. I wasn't acquainted with him from Adam. Again, I'm distressed that his integrity has been called into question. This is a person who chooses to use his real name, and it bothers me that this is happening to him. I'm not expressing an opinion on his removal, just the way it has been characterized. Coretheapple (talk) 20:01, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Am still happy to write something if given permission to do so. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:58, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I am having a hard time reconiling Jimbo's statement ("...certain actions which he has chosen not to share with the community, which is his right."[39]) with the above. Are you free to reveal exactly what happened or have you been asked not to do so? --Guy Macon (talk) 03:07, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

"have you been asked not to do so?" - or advised not to do so? Remember, Guy, at the moment WMF Legal dept has taken over communication (as Jimbo said, above). This might as well mean that anything James says, may/will be turned against him, (btw, JW & the Board already did here, calling James a liar by untestable private judgement). Another Legal fingerprint (/Human Resources, as a "personnel issue" not Board workings) is that Jimbo, cleared by Legal, keeps injecting after the vote-statements (including the 'liar' claims). A trick to paint James without having to take responsibility for the vote itself, and a trick to get James into self-criminalising etc. Actually, the Board nor Jimbo has made any statement about the reasons that were present in the voting. By now, these vote reasons might as well be spinned 180 degrees for Legal reasons. We only know one thing for sure: the Board will not take responsibility in face of the community. -DePiep (talk) 09:44, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that unless a board member has signed an NDA he or she is perfectly free to speak his mind concerning a nonprofit board from which he has departed. Indeed, given the "lost my trust" comments that have been made by the founder, which reflect upon his character, I find it hard to believe that he wouldn't be well within his rights to speak his mind. Coretheapple (talk) 17:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

This has the feeling of Richard Feynman and the Challenger disaster. A blue ribbon panel was appointed to review the tragedy. There was a scripted pat for the panel to follow but Feynman, ( being Feynman) ignored the script to the chagrin of Rogers. He started talking to employees and engineers. He discovered the disconnect between management and employees in addition to finding the fault part. Going off script is not necessarily bad when the script is poorly written. --DHeyward (talk) 07:26, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

A review of governance

We have a WMF board member on Google's payroll and seemingly (I'm not certain because he won't answer my questions either at The Signpost or on wikimedia-l) not recusing from discussions and decisions that may commercially impact Google, and another on Tesla Motors' payroll who is accused of serious wrong-doing on Google's behalf. And others with very close ties to Google and Tesla. Then there's the dismissal of a community-nominated trustee that many have concerns about.

Three years ago the WMF commissioned a review of governance at WMUK over perceived conflict of interest at board level [40]. Is it time for an independent review of WMF's governance and the loyalties of the individual board members? Or would a really well-informed article in the Telegraph or New York Times shame them into sorting this out, and save the donors the expense of an independent review? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 14:39, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Wow! "well-informed article" and "the Telegraph" used together in a sentence. That's unusual.....

But seriously, I'd be interested to know what specific actions the WMF board is taking that commercially impacts either Google or Tesla. NickCT (talk) 15:55, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

So would I.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:20, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo: So would I. - Then why not have some Board members with knowledge open a community discussion about this long term strategic issue? Could also solve your ignorance, while having 5/9 Board members from Google by now. What were you thinking inviting those? -DePiep (talk) 11:03, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

@DePiep: - Hey man! Don't hate on the Jimbo. Jimbo needs Wikilove too. NickCT (talk) 17:48, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Saying 'you hate' is the new Godwin? Glad I missed that. -DePiep (talk) 19:39, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

How about discussions and decisions around the development of the knowledge engine, "a system for discovering reliable and trustworthy public information on the Internet", and the development of WikiData? Both of these directly impact Google. Do you think it would be appropriate for him to influence board discussions or decisions about these things, or even be present when they're being discussed or decided? I'm not saying Denny is anything but highly principled. He seems to be. This is about recognising a classic financial conflict of interest and acting appropriately. Has either of these projects been discussed at board level since Denny was appointed? Was he present for those discussions? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 23:27, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

If we are going to be that broad with our view of what "directly impacts Google" then virtually everything we do impacts Google. Denny has always been excellent about recusing himself from anything having to do with Google and indeed has been quite keen to bend over backwards to do the right thing. I think it very appropriate for him to give input and advice to the board and the staff and the community about issues relating to discovery on the website.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:13, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

NickCT, maybe making some new sort of modified browser search, which won't show ads? :p --Ochilov (talk) 21:00, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Just imagine: New search engine, made my WMF. All Wikimedia website pages are indexed faster than ever, Wikimedia sites pages are showed in priority, instead of ads - nice invitations to join some edit-a-thons :p --Ochilov (talk) 21:12, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

• Jimmy, read these emails. They were penned by Arnnon, who was just appointed a trustee. They speak to pretty significantly illegal behavior (that has resulted in one $435m settlement so far,) and are the type of thing that you would expect to be turned up in a normal due diligence review before appointing a trustee to an organization as large as WMF - but it seems that his involvement in that series of incidents wasn't known to the board before his appointment was announced. Combining the fact that at least from the outside it looks like their was a failure of due diligence w/r/t Arnnon's appointment and to many Wikimedians it looks like an individual we trusted and who seems inherently very unlikely to intentionally disclose confidential information because his professional career relies on it was removed from board, can you understand why some of us feel a review of governance is warranted? User:Kevin Gorman | ^{talk page} 23:36, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

those emails don't paint a good picture of this individual...IMO--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:47, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Remember, as Neryorkbrad points out on Wikimedia-l, Arnnon hasn't had a chance to put his case to us. If he's learned and grown from this experience, I'm sure many would forgive him. But, while there is still active litigation, we are unlikely to hear Arnnon's current perspective. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 22:50, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Another New Year ready to change the world

I have more ideas to improve WP but, of course, I remember every new advanced template will get deleted if mentioned here, so we need some type of "users union" or "working groups" to support new software or policies. The typical forums seem to be very negative, perhaps because people are so busy they want to discourage anything more on their plates. Anyway, some specifics:

• Multilevel wikilinks: I still see people want to wikilink individual names in a webpage title, so I wonder if we could underline the first letter in a 2nd-level wikilink, such as "The writings of Thomas Jefferson on Methods of Farm Irrigation after 1800" where the wikilinks have an underlined first-letter, while the webpage links are regular text, and users with all-underlined links would notice the separate links already. Anyway people want something like that.
• Measurements in words: WP has over 50,000 pages with phrases like "several miles" or "ten kilometers" or "a few litres" and so perhaps we could undelete Template:Convert/words (from 5 Jan 2014) to show {convert/words |several|miles} as "several miles (dozen km)" or also { convert/words |a few|litres} as "a few litres (a few US quarts)". Although that was 2 years ago, something like that could still help users.

Because it now only takes 1 or 2 people to delete an advanced template, then we need a working group to support long-term improvements. There is hope for the future. Things to ponder. -Wikid77 (talk) 01:24, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Several miles is most usually not a dozen kilometres. Several miles is most usually six to ten kilometres. I do not think that converting "several miles" to anything would be helpful. I do not know about your fluid volumes example.

I am not sure about the second level wikilinks. Which people want something like that? MPS1992 (talk) 01:33, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Many people have tried to wikilink words in webpage titles, but I don't want to name specific people due to hounding. As for "several miles" as a rough figure, in U.S. culture the word "several" is typically treated as 6-8 so the range of miles would be "6–8 miles (9.7–12.9 km)" as closer to a "dozen km" rather than 6 km, but perhaps a parameter could be added for other cultural subjects where "several" might be considered as only 4-5. For other units, a few cm would be {convert/words |a few|cm} to show "a few centimetres (a couple of inches)". Anyway, your reply illustrates exactly why the phrase "several miles" needs to be converted in words, lest people imagine several miles as only 6 km (~3 miles), but a working group could decide the specific phrases. For example, in some cultures, a zero number '0' is called, "naught" (or "nought") rather than "zero" and the template would need some cultural options. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:42, revised 23:18, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Hounding?

Which sources say that in U.S. culture the word "several" is typically treated as 6-8? MPS1992 (talk) 13:07, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

There are discussions about quantities in words: couple (2~3), few (3-5), several (more than a few), dozen (12-13), many (not as high as 'most'), but the word "several" can also mean "various" as in legal terms to denote more than one, so the issue is to consider several as more than a few in terms of miles. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:18, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

I ask again, which sources say that in U.S. culture the word "several" is typically treated as 6-8? MPS1992 (talk) 23:28, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

If several does mean 6-8 in US culture does that mean we should take that meaning here, or only in articles written in American English? Other versions of English may well use other definitions such as more than two but less than many or more than two or three but less than many, or even more than a couple but in the context not too many to count if I could have been bothered. Wouldn't it be clearest to leave a vague term vague rather than ascribe a more definitive appearing but quite likely incorrect meaning? ϢereSpielChequers 13:32, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes. MPS1992 (talk) 14:50, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Congratulations Wikid; your suggestion that some kind of working group of Wikipedians will be able to define the word "several" is by far the funniest thing I have heard this year. Hopefully when you convene it it will be able to rule on "a few" and "some" and nail down precise meanings for other non-specific quantities too. pablo 22:01, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Glad to make you happy again, Pablo. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:18, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

• Looks like forumshopping to me, re the quantity-wording. I've met Wikid77 mainly at Template talk:Convert. Two years ago Wikid's parsing template set was replaced by Module:Convert. (btw, since then, the number of transclusions has doubled). A very few functionalities were not migrated, mostly because they were complicated_to_use/isolated/disputed_grammar. The grammar issues, including several wording issues, repeatedly are brought up at the talkpage (and usually answered adequately by module-maintaineer Johnuniq). A dozen abandoned parsing templates were deleted recently in batches: TfD, TfD, TfD, TfD.

"undelete Template:Convert/words" -- well, there is a process for this.

"it now only takes 1 or 2 people to delete an advanced template" -- 'Advanced'? About a pre-Lua parsing template that was superseded two years ago? Anyway, each TfD has more than two contributors, and there are some excellent reasonings for deletion in there, that would make even a second !voter not even needed.

So, forumshopping. -DePiep (talk) 05:36, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Word 'several' now means more than a few/some

Scholarly research, by interviewing English speakers in central Europe, has revealed the general meaning of word 'several' as being more than some or a few, despite older dictionary definitions that considered it as merely "more than two but not many" (as if similar to "a few"). See book pages: Joseph Smied (2008), English Projects in Teaching and Research in Central Europe, pages 85-86. Those pages compare various studies of quantifier terms (a few/handful, some, several, many), during 1969 to 2006, and strongly conclude the word 'several' (in modern usage) is ranked much more than 'some' or 'a few'. Hence, Wikipedia should definitely explain terms such as 'several miles' lest people imagine the amount as only ~6 km (3.7 mi) or half of modern notions about several miles. Again, a working group could focus usage for each measurement, rather than avoid explanations for readers. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:20, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Legally it means "more than one". That source itself states that opinions of lexicographers differ. Vague quantities like these are used deliberately, and meaning depends on context. pablo 11:48, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Clearly, there are several definitions of the word. How is this important again? Carrite (talk) 19:08, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Pablo noted the issues where 'several' could be mistaken in another context. In fact, because opinions of lexicographers differed then that is why the study interviewed people for actual usage, and they found the modern meaning of 'several' (in a quantity) as meaning more than a few/some but less than many, in both English and the Czech language. This study thus also emphasizes the danger of relying on dictionaries as a source, precisely because the context usage is difficult to convey in the limited scope of a dictionary, where the context of "several miles" would be very different than "several parties" in a legal document (as merely more than one party). Again because most people in this discussion think 'several' could mean as little as "2 miles" (3.2 km) rather than a dozen kilometres, then it is crucial to convert for context (as a measurement) when miles is a primary unit. There is little danger of misguided values because each editor is responsible for using a template in the text. Meanwhile one source recommended a phrase such as "around 10" when a conversion centers near 10. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:16, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

• As a highly experienced rook shooter, I know 'several' means more than a rook can count, which is up to two, and less than a normal man can count to in the blink of an eye. I have read this somewhere years ago; God knows where; but does it really matter because it's obviously true. Giano (talk) 19:19, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

The working group proposed would need to include rook shooters in order to be sure of proper cultural thoroughness. Would you be prepared to serve on the working group? MPS1992 (talk) 20:15, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

• While I cannot resist saying that a couple is always, or should always be two, the value of User:Wikid77's suggestion lies in the meat, not the detail of the examples. For example "several miles (a mile is 1.6 km)" might be a better solution, but the actual idea is sound. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:36, 12 January 2016 (UTC).
  

Благодарность

Спасибо вам за то, что основали Википедию. --DENAMAX (talk) 20:36, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Translated: Title "Thanks", and "Thank you for founding Wikipedia" SQL^{Query me!} 20:52, 12 January 2016 (UTC)