WikiEN-l August 2006

133 participants
174 discussions

Defamation policy
by Steve Bennett 28 Oct '06

28 Oct '06

So our "living persons" banner contains the following text: "This article is about or directly concerns one or more living people and therefore must adhere to the biographies of living persons policy. Specifically, unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about living persons should not be posted to this article *or its talk page(s)*. Such material must be removed without hesitation. " (emphasis in original) I'm particularly concerned about the "or its talk page" bit. Is someone just confused, or should we actually *not* move material from the talk page like this: I have removed the following text because it sounds defamatory and probably isn't true: "John B Smith was busted twice for frequenting prostitutes in the 1970s". Anyone have a source? How can we realistically work with potentially defamatory statements - eg, requesting sources for them - if we can't even repeat them on talk pages? Steve

18 65

Using social networking sites as sources
by Andrew Gray 28 Sep '06

28 Sep '06

This may be of interest to some people, given our occasional habit of fleshing out articles by raiding the personal sites of subjects: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003211808_fancher20.html It's a brief report of a discussion at the Seattle Times about the reliability and ethical appropriateness of using (say) the Myspace page of a murder victim in reporting on them. Not much content, but it's good to see people are asking themselves these questions. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

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Unblock request
by abu hamza 26 Sep '06

26 Sep '06

Hi, my wiki name is saladin1970. I joined just 3 days but find myself banned. i was banned by Jayjg . He cited the following reasons 1) 3RR rule 2) No useful edits 3) Copyright violoations 4) attacks on talk pages They all seem very serious. yet when we look into each of the reasons, they really have no substance. 1) I have two pc's one is shared at work - hence the same ip address and editor the othe is my home pc. I only reverted 3 times, as did my collegue at work. 2) I have made many contributions, including a section on moors in the spanish inquisition, additions to the islam in china section, background info on harold shipman and contributions to alan harts page and zionism page, and turkic. 3) There have been NO copyright violations. Every post was referenced to a website or to a book. All of whom allow references to as part of their copyright. So there was NO copy right violation 4) there were no personal attacks on talk pages. The worst that could be said was that i called someone a 'zionist'. Clearly there is something more to this than the above, as these at best are minor violations that would carry warnings. however I contend that this blocking falls under the "not advised to block rule". my posts in the zionism forum have illicited strong responses . Including the person that banned me jayjg. These posts included a) a section on the talmudic three oaths - which is the reason behind orthodox jews who oppose political zionism. This was reverted many times by jayjg amongst others also i added a further reading section book entitled "zionism the enemy of the jews by alan hart", who was a itv corrospondent during the 80's. His book is well researched 'historical and political' of the lead up to the creation of israel. Given that Jayjg was part of this debate, i can see no other reason for my ban (as the reasons given are spurious) other than to eliminate a user who has a different view of zionism. for this reason i am asking a moderator to look at the material posted by me, and make a fair decisions as to whether i should be banned indefinately thanks saladin _________________________________________________________________ Are you using the latest version of MSN Messenger? Download MSN Messenger 7.5 today! http://join.msn.com/messenger/overview

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Re: [WikiEN-l] WTF Have I Missed?
by dmehkeri＠swi.com 11 Sep '06

11 Sep '06

> In this variation, stubs/new articles/obscure articles that a few > people read each year all get shown at the latest version, because > nobody will have bothered to mark a particular revision with the flag; > it's only on higher-traffic pages -- which, for the most part, would > be the ones where vandalism is more prevalent -- that the use of the > flag would come into play. Vandalism may occur more often on higher-traffic pages, but then again, I doubt it is anything near to the majority of defacement. I think "Bob si a fag0rt" actually gets fairly widely distributed, and most of that crap would still go live immediately under this proposal. Perhaps that is not a problem, if we are mostly concerned with higher-traffic pages. > Will this fragment Wikipedia? Will there be different rules for > Japanese, French, Polish, Dutch.... and the rest? It seems to me there already are. I don't believe fr.wp restricts anon page creation, for instance.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] More about PR firms
by Sydney aka FloNight 06 Sep '06

06 Sep '06

---- Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Lets look at the possibilities: -In a world we where tell PR Firms not to edit: * PR firm follows the rules, doesn't edit. **Pool of editing people decreased **Harm of biased insertions avoided or * PR firm ignores the rules, secretly inserts biased material. **We detect it: Harm is mitigated. **We fail to detect it: harm remains. ===================================================== Hello Greg, Overall agree with your post with the exception of PR firms staying in business to keep their clients. I think this type of business is perfect for con artists that open and close businesses at a rapid pace in different US states or around the world. They bill the customers and then move on to a new company name, leaving businesses angry at us for not putting their article on Wikipedia. I think this type of illegal activity is a real possibility and is another reason that we should ban PR firms from our site. With this policy we will not be caught up in the illegal activity. Take care, Sydney aka FloNight

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Anons banned from creating articles
by John Lee 06 Sep '06

06 Sep '06

http://news.com.com/Growing+pains+for+Wikipedia/2100-1025_3-5981119.html?ta… "Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so. That change will go into effect Monday, he said, adding that anonymous users will still be able to edit existing entries." Why were Wikipedians the last to know about this? I only saw some discussion on the mailing list about this, but nothing final. Why do we have to learn of this from the media instead of straight from Jimbo? This is really disturbing. John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])

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USGS maps are liberated!
by cohesion 06 Sep '06

06 Sep '06

Jared Benedict bought all of the USGS maps for $1600 and then had a fund raiser to recoup the money. That has been done and now they are being uploaded to the Internet Archive. Project info is here http://ransom.redjar.org/ Just letting people know, I'm sure there are a lot of cartographers eager to get these into wikipedia :D Judson

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Fighting over (R) and (tm) symbols
by Daniel R. Tobias 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

There seems to be ongoing fighting over at the [[Certified Financial Planner]] page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_Financial_Planner over whether the page should be festooned with (r) and (tm) symbols everywhere the trademarked title of the article occurs, including as part of the article's title itself. It is my impression (IANAL) that such usages are not necessary, nor are they standard in English-language writing style, when the usage is of a journalistic or encyclopedic nature rather than as part of marketing materials. After all, Wikipedia has many articles, like [[Coca-Cola]], that are named after trademarks, but don't display the symbols demanded by the lawyers. At any rate, if such symbols do remain in the article, they ought to be done with proper Unicode characters (technically feasible now that the site is entirely in UTF-8) rather than their ugly ASCII imitations. -- Dan Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/

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Asteroids (first Wikipedia post)
by David Mestel 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

I think that the key question you have to ask yourself, and indeed in many ways the fundamental criteria for inclusion of everything, is "is anyone going to want to actually read this article?". If you believe, as I do, that no-one is for the 20,000 very short stubs, we shouldn't have them. -- David

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Pop culture articles (was WP:LIVING and "sensitivity" again)
by Sean Black 04 Sep '06

04 Sep '06

> Message: 5 > Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:44:20 -0400 > From: Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] WP:LIVING and "sensitivity" again > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org> > Message-ID: <AE950BBF-4D5A-4038-9A37-3B6734D40931(a)gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed > > > > On Aug 29, 2006, at 6:37 PM, geni wrote: > > > On 8/29/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> Yes. Bluntly, most of our articles about pop cultural figures need > >> an enema. > > > > Evedences? > > Have you ever READ a popular culture article? > > Particularly one about a fictional character, where you've got better- > than-even chances of being right to add {{cleanup fiction-as-fact}} > to it before you even start to deal with its other problems, of which > there will be many. And have you ever considerd trying to fix that and improve the articles instead of complaining about it on some mailing list? It's amazing how often the people who have virtually no experience actually editing articles and creating content are the ones who complain the most. ~~ Sean

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WikiEN-l August 2006