Can someone here, perhaps, explain to me why when a user adds an image of a person taken without permission from Flickr to Twink (gay slang) and I revert and block, I'M the bad guy?

Regardless of the Flickr "twink" with the Santa hat, the Wikipedia article is now protected with a new photo of a "young and smooth" celebrity, who was the star of that blockbuster film, F**k Me Raw.

Wikipedia is such a delightful, encylopedic sum of all human knowledge.

Wikipedia seems to think that "gayness", much like "breasts", are mere commodities of the pornography industry. This seems like it would be offensive to gay people and women. It would take something akin to editorial restraint to restore things to a more healthy perspective. Wikipedia is doomed to be stuck at the level of the lowest common denominator in these matters.

Of course given Mr. Wales background pornography and commodities should be expected I suppose.

Another prime example of why WP must survive, and is an amazing encyclopedia.

A compundium of pop culture, not to mention subpop subculture, necessarily gathers a lot of undocumented folklore and original research into oral traditions.

Er, so to speak.

Nevermind that this violates the Rule Of IgNORants that is elsewhere applied to all that forms the Fund Of Common Knowledge in every other community, say, the Steetwisdom of YourCity, or What Every Nøøb Søøn Finds Out Or Dies (WENSFOOD) in every discipline or field you might name.

What determines the unequal application of the double standard?

The Predilections Of The Target Market — What Else.

Jon

Short answer? It's AnotherSolipist. One of the "I can troll because my opponent trolls" people I don't particularly like. I support the block, because I know too well how much photos in the wrong context can hurt living people.

It's pretty amazing to me (no, wait -- not "amazing", but rather "unsurprising for Wikipedia") that the [[twink (gay slang)]] article has been edited about 600 times; but compare the article about another slang term like [[Kludge]] has been edited only ~230 times, or [[Black sheep]] edited 203 times, or [[Pinko]] edited 112 times.

Fundamentally, the problem is that Wikipedians tend to view blocks as punitive, and as permanent stains on whoever is blocked (even if it's an IP). This is probably because vandalism patrollers use prior blocks as basis for future blocks, without reviewing the reason for the prior block. As a result, the use of blocks as a mechanism to protect the encyclopedia has been undermined, which is why instead of blocking there's a whole panoply of stupid and moronic talk page templates to use in lieu of blocking. Of course, vandalism patrollers use a history of getting moronic talk page templates plastered on your talk page as evidence for future blocks, too.

Fundamentally, the problem is that Wikipedia maintains too much history and is too intolerant of the possibility that someone's actions are well-founded but merely misguided. In my opinion, all history of blocks should be purged a relatively short time after they expire. Other options include changing the block message so that it's far less intimidating and accusatory, altering the behavior of the software so that edits from blocked users are deferred instead of discarded, and allowing more fine-grained control of blocking (e.g. an editor who abuses image uploads gets put in a status where their uploads have to be approved by a reviewer before being allowed, but can otherwise edit unsupervised).

Of course, these changes will never occur; in part because they offend the purity of the "wiki", and in part because the community will never have "consensus" to make the necessary changes.

Why is that surprising? Due to the edit warring, or something else? Articles on homosexuality seem like they're more of a battlefield. Is that what you meant?

Please note the word I used, versus the word you used.

I'm shrugging here. I just don't get why the edit counts on any of these raised any particular eyebrows in any way, shape or form.

I guess it's just my Midwestern, early Generation X social mores shining through. You would think that slang terms that have a long and storied tradition in usage and literature (such as black sheep or pinko) would have garnered more attention and crafting and improvement from a "normal" editorial pool than a very recent, highly-specific term like "twink". Wikipedia doesn't have a "normal" editorial pool, though.

With Wikipedia, I am completely accustomed to it now. Toward the "latest", "buzzworthy" topics, the Wiki-masses gravitate with a magnitude difference in scale than to the "old", "tired" topics that we would normally expect from an encyclopedia.

Google tells me "black sheep" has over 8 million hits; "pinko" more than 6 million. These words came into use in the mid-1700's and the mid-1930's, respectively. "Twink" has nearly 14 million Google hits, but it's only existed for, what, 20 years? So, we see that both Google and Wikipedia have a bias toward recency and probably salaciousness, too. Meh.

A storied tradition in the mainstream literature of the time, sure. And what is a "normal" editorial pool?

Most if not half of the edits on this article are reverts any way for stupid bigotry like "REMOVED FAGGOT COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS, JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE GOING TO HELL DOESN'T MEAN YOU HAVE AN EXCUSE TO BREAK THE LAW" and other gay bashing.



I wouldn't go so far as to call a 30 to 40+ year old phrase from a major minority group latest and buzzworthy. It's not like it came from some place like E! or Idol.



There's nothing in any way salacious about a topic like "Twink". It's simply what it is, a term used to describe young, skinny gay men without a ton of body hair. It's no different than any number of terms used to describe straight people based on their physical assets. It's no different than something like...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenhawk_(sexuality)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar_(slang)#Slang_terms
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MILF

Or anything similar.

As far as "recency", from asking around just now in the local gay community, it appears that this phrase has been in common usage since at a minimum the 1970s, and myself and others recall at least passing references to it in older fiction.

I guess part of this may be just culture, like you alluded to... midwestern or otherwise. I grew up outside NYC, have had gay and trans friends all my life, and now life in one of the cities with one of the largest LGBT populations in the country. I do a double take when I see a big wheel truck go by, but don't even notice a flagrantly gay man walking by me.

I love how "consensus" on Wikipedia means that five or six people (out of....thousands???) have said the same thing.

This block is a means of trying to create a black mark (and why am I suddenly thinking of myself as a child in the confessional waiting for the priest's door to slide open?), but it's not purely as a "maintenance" or "patrol" issue.

The issue is control over the article and hence control over the term. How does one define the terms "twink"? Is the term negative or positive? To whom? And how does this reflect NPOV?

My short answer is that it doesn't: it is, once again, the desire of a certain minority group (and here we are, once again, with sexual minorities dictating their own definitions to terms used within their subcultures) to control the name by which they identify.

Perfectly understandable, yes...but encyclopaedic? NPOV? And couldn't this fall into the category of "unwarranted weight" or whatever it is that you call it?

It's more power-politics. It's got nothing to do with writing an encyclopedia, unfortunately...




The problem with the article is that....their definition of the term is not clear. It could be, according to the discussion of this block on ANI, that "twink" refers to "anyone who gay men find attractive, regardless of their sexual orientation" and that this should be seen as a "compliment".

Now, even the straightest man in World who is completely comfortable with his own sexuality is not going to see being framed as "attractive to homosexual men" in terms as a compliment. I would guess that the range of reactions would vary from "neutral" to "annoyed", with probably more "annoyed" responses than "neutral" ones.

The problem is that this is not the generally accepted definition of the term, which refers specifically to the definition to which you are referring (a skinny, young, hairless gay man).

Now, why the spin?

That's my main question.

As indeed do ArbCom.

I don't see the problem with authorities on a subject defining their own terms in general. An accepted, respected nuclear scientist should have more weight in defining terms related to nuclear physics; a professional puppeteer working for Jim Henson Company should have more weight in defining puppeteering terms; a term used almost exclusively by one culture should also have more weight and authority in defining it's meaning. It's got nothing to do with sex, sexual orientation, or even empowerment. It's common sense. If all the women on earth began calling it the Vajayjay in honor of Oprah, or whoever called it that first (I just heard the term on McHale's The Soup and claim ignorance past that), then by God, its a Vajayjay eventually. Same as if us straights had a lingo subculture, the gays shouldn't be dictating to us what those phrases mean, who am I as a straight to do that to them?

Ditto for race, as alluded to with the Redskins example. I was born in a section of the Transylvanian mountains. If some Navajo started going off that all Romanians from that region were all bloodsucking facists that sided with the Nazis, and I shouldn't be offended, and I should accept that, I'd be thinking, "Who the fuck are you to tell me what I am?" The exact same as I'm not entitled to tell some Navajo that they're half-naked dancers who shouldn't be offended that the Dutch or whoever kicked their asses. Real life doesn't work that way.



What weight issues are there involving a very common slang term for one of the larger minority groups? You lost me there. Are you saying if members of that group were given more weight in that article then it's unbalanced? If so, lets see how far we get inserting the Aryan Nation POV into the [[Black people]] article or the [[Fred Phelps]] POV into the [[Gay]] article.



That thread is comically absurd. And 95% of it is about putting some random guy's picture in the article, which WAS a BLP violation.



I'm about as straight as they come, or as one ex called me "American farm boy stock by way of Europe" for my "tastes". The one time a gay guy told ever told me outright that I was cute (his wording was a BIT more impolite) I was like, "Whoa. Cool." I took it as a compliment, but I'm probably atypical in that. I'd agree that most straight guys would either take it totally neutral if not get bugged out by it to some degree, either great or small.



All that needs to happen is someone with time and the inclination needs to dig around for sourcing to just put the article in it's place, and then it's done with. How many times have we seen petty edit wars just stop when someone finally says, "Oh fine, here's a dozen sources that says I'm right"? Most times thats the end.



Power politics, like you said.

Yes, but isn't that kind of like "original research", as in NOR? I mean, if you're just looking into a mirror and saying "a twink is this", then that is definitely original research...or so I say.

The problem is that most studies about sexual minorities are done by....members of the sexual minorities themselves. You can run into anthropologists outside of the sexual minorities who study this type of behavior in "other cultures", but you don't usually run into this kind of thing by "neutral, third-party sources" in the first and second World.




How much weigh would "neutral, third-party sources" give to a subculture in the gay world? I'm guessing that probably, at most, that this would merit a paragraph in the "homosexual" article....or simply a phrase.

The problem with NPOV is that you do indeed have to "insert the Aryan Nation POV into the [[Black people]] article or the [[Fred Phelps]] POV into the [[Gay]] article", in order to provide for "all positions". You don't have to give them their own article, but the positions should indeed be present, as distasteful as they might seem.



Once again, why is this an issue in the creation of an encyclopedia which is supposed to represent a neutral point of view? I say that the entire discussion is completely outside of that subject....



BINGO! That's the long and short of it. You simply have to find the sources and quote them. Wikipedia should not be about validating what anybody thinks (read "the 'consensus' of five or six people who self-identify as the subject of the article and who are manipulating their own image"): it's simply a matter of spitting out the proper sources. Instead, we get "electric carving knives are useful for buttock padding for transvestites" and this kind of thing.

When you contribute on Wikipedia, creativity and "what you think" are beside the point. It's about finding the sources, and digesting the material.

If people would just do this, then most of these kind of issues would simply disappear....

No, "original research" is your opinion or mine, who are not experts on all things gay, putting our unsourced bullshit into an article on gays. If we excluded "insider" sources or authorities--as you posit--then we couldn't have Gay Experts being used as sources on things gay in Wikipedia, we couldn't have global warming scientists used as sources on global warming, and we couldn't have musicians (hint) being used as sources about their school of music. We'd only have rock musicians writing about classic music, software scientists writing about global warming, and straight experts writing about gays. It would be absurd.



...but people are fundamentally lazy, so it won't. I'd bet someone with 5 hours to spare could easily make Twink bulletproof, accurate, and a Good Article to boot.

It is absurd, but the NPOV policy says exactly that: Contributors are not to supposed to allow their own personal points of view to enter into the discussion. A person who self-identifies as a "Twink" probably could be considered as having a COI and therefore a hidden agenda, much as the same way that musicians who have first-hand knowledge to certain subjects are not supposed to edit those articles. Your "hint" simply points out that you are essentially in agreement with me on this point.

In the same way that Rachael Marsden is not supposed to edit her own article, those who "self-identify" as "Twinks" should probably not be editing that article as well, following the same logic. COI, NOR and NPOV are all policies which would be violated by such activity.

According to the NOR policy, you can't even put the sources back together in "original ways"; you're supposed to spit them back out without any reasoning. Wikipedia is not about thinking: it's about collecting sources. You're supposed to leave your brain with the hatcheck girl at the door...




If they could just figure out that they need to START articles this way, instead of simply writing things which aren't sourced, then this kind of thing wouldn't happen....

I think our wires just crossed here. Your comments about the independent sources seemed to be implying that "gay sources" shouldn't be given authority over "gay topics" in Wikipedia, and I was rejecting that because, well... it's silly to say that a source somehow tied to the subject matter is not valid. I'm working on an article to get it to FA status for a bluegrass band. Should I not use sources from Bluegrass magazines? Or scholarly works on bluegrass music, because they may be biased? How is that any different? Should we not use a New York newspaper as a source for an article about New York as it may be biased? Should New Yorkers not edit [[New York]]? Should I not edit [[Seattle]] or [[White people]]?

I if understand your PoV, TFA, Wikipedia's dominant ad hoc ochlocracy would be debarred from editing the Wikipedia article on ochlocracy. Is that right?

For an additional example, I ended up chatting with a band whose article I was working on before a show recently. I even got photographic proof and drank a beer with them while chatting.



Am I excluded from working on their article anymore because of this association?

There was no conflict here, as I understood exactly what you were saying, but I think that the most important point that can be made here is that the core policies at work are patently absurd.

Of course, you can't understand anything about gay subculture if you aren't gay. But according to the way these policies read, that is a COI problem....and using those sources could be framed in terms of NOR and having a biased POV.

So, probably (at least for the time being) you can use Bluegrass-oriented sources to discuss a bluegrass band....until somebody decides to twist these policies and make that a violation too.

It's simply a case of how these policies read at any given time and what the layers and layers of Arb-com decisions, "community sanctions" and the like have done to change that particular meaning.

The whole thing could be avoided by 1. allowing people to have original thoughts, 2. allowing experts (who all have a COI by definition) to freely act as such and
3. by accepting that there is not such thing as a neutral point of view.

Until this happens, we're stuck with stuff like this....






....well, that depends on how they see this...admission of guilt.....We shall certainly see, shan't we?




Only if they followed their own COI policy, Moulton, which they obviously don't....

Indeed, one of the more idiotic things Wikipedia does is to insist that the only people who should writing about any given topic are those who are completely ignorant of it. I've raised this issue several times; the response has typically been a mix of "That's not what policy requires" and "Yes, but that's a good thing, don't you think?"

This was actually one of the reasons I stopped editing content on Wikipedia; anything that I had special knowledge would tend to lead me into accusations of bias, and so I only edited content about garden-variety stuff like cities and dams, and nothing about any of the many topics that I have studied to a level beyond that of the ordinary citizen. Unfortunately, that too is unfulfilling, because those articles tend both to get vandalized all to hell, and also to be subjected to well-meaning but clueless edits by people who appear incapable of expressing a coherent thought in English but nonetheless feel qualified to edit an encyclopedia. And should you revert one of the latter ones and it turns out that the idiot in question is friends of one of Wikipedia's innumerable powerbrokers and, bam, you have people screaming at you on your talk page just like that.

I suppose some people must enjoy that game, but I don't see much fun to it. The only thing that made Wikipedia fun for me while I was there was pushing people around, and then trolling them mercilessly, and even that grew stale after a while.

And sadly, it's the lesser of two evils (just from talking about sourcing). Lets say you and I are both working on [[Some classical music]]. You say, "But Joe, that's not a valid statement. I'm an expert."

Assuming OR was allowed, lets run with this. I pull up another music person in a source that contradicts you. You say you're right. I go with the other source. How does this get settled? You have your OR statement, I have my "OR" statement by another guy with a similar CV as yours. What then? Lets get another person involved. He pulls up a source by [[Another Composer]] that contradicts you. Or me. Or both.

Its a stupid system, but sadly its the best there is, as insane as that is, for sorting all that out. Blanket disallowing ALL "unsourced" OR is the best way to go about it. If you're an expert, go get your opinion published in a paper, journal, or source that isn't ran by you, and off we go. That's not OR. OR in this context would be something like Chip Berlet ever inserting sources to his or his group's writings, for example.

Excluding sources as OR by broad strokes isn't going to work. High Times is a fine source for marijuana; Bassmasters is a fine source for fishing.



Oh shit, I've watched television before, and I have a Doctor Who DVD from Netflix in the messenger bag sitting two feet from me! I guess I can't edit articles about television or Doctor Who now.

Wait, I've used the Internet. Even worse, I've fixed the Internet before. On a statewide, even coast-wide level before at a previous job!!! I guess I can't edit Wikipedia via the Internet now, because of my COI. Shit.

Can I call one of you to edit by proxy for me over the phone, or is that a COI too somehow?

It is also because POV warriors will inevitably use any block history on an opponent's part as a weapon against him.

All of which should be deleted. Articles about "terms" are a plague on the project. Aren't they prohibited anyhow by WP:NOT? Ah, but "consensus"…a consensus of the people who hang around such articles to begin with.

With political topics, they are invariably platforms to make a point. "Islamofascism!" "Islamophobia!" "Israeli Apartheid!" starting with the title itself.

With these other ones, I don't know how to categorize it…exhibitionism? Let us demonstrate how queer-positive we think society should be by loading Wikipedia with this kind of thing. Then when anyone complains, pop up on AN like this Duncan Hill fellow and pretend others are "homophobic" for suggesting that there's anything disreputable about the word/concept "twink" or that average people wouldn't be offended to be called a "twink."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adm...ck_by_User:Neil

You seemed to genuinely enjoy editing Chicago-related articles, though. You really were only there to push people around?

Do you really mean that, or is that very straight-faced humor?

I don't think that it occurs to most people to really consider what these policies mean when they start editing. Most people probably see it as a "creative" activity, and according to these policies, that's the last thing that it's supposed to be. You're supposed to find the material in sources (and once you have judged that the source is "reliable", you're really not supposed to make any judgements about whether the information is true or not) and spit it back out without adding anything that resembles an opinion.

If more people actually read and understood these policies, I think that contributions to WP would go WAYYYYY down. Who wants to do this? It's just "donkey work". I suppose if one really truly believed the "poor child in Africa" rhetoric, then it might make some sense to "help out", but if one is even a little cynical and factors in "vandalism", then it all seems to be ultimately a huge waste of everybody's time.



In musicology (or archeology, or physics, or English Literature, or pretty much anything), this is Standard Operating Procedure. You put two musicologists in a room and you've got two positions. You add a third and you've got another.

How do you settle these issues? You have to go back to....the sources. What are the sources? They may be any number of things: including manuscriipts of works, letters by the people concerned, first-hand accounts, second-hand accounts by those indirectly involved and existing criticism of of the works during their time of creation.

What do these things mean? Who knows. You generally get more questions than you get answers in this type of process: Is Mrs. X saying that her grandfather was a great musician because she wants to make more money in performance rights? Probably, but this may or may not have relevance to the discussion of the work itself. Is Mr. Y saying that he was responsible for the work's title and has the letter to back it up? Maybe. You have to read the letter and see. Did the work succeed or fail because it was a great work/horrible work or was something else going on?

Are there many yes/no answers to these kind of questions? Usually not and as things are studied, there will be as many opinions about the meaning of the sources as there are pairs of eyes looking at them.

The point is that it's nearly impossible to know anything at all about anything in an objective way...and this is true even if you were the person responsible for something. This is simply reality COI, POV and OR are simply going to be part of the process of examining and defining anything. I don't see any way around this. You can't suddenly decide that you're going to think outside of your own brain. It doesn't work that way.

Why not simply accept that these things are part of reality and that there's no getting around them?

That was before I discovered how fun it was to bully people around. There's an addictive rush to that which I enjoyed at the time, but it grew old quickly. And I can't bring myself to go back to editing content, not when I know that some idiot will come along and turn my carefully-crafted prose into word salad. I'd rather write content on my own blog or somewhere else where everything I write doesn't turn into a rear-guard action defending it against the Huns of the Internet. Argue with me, fine; but don't slice and dice my words without at least talking to me first.


If I had to identify the most fun I had on Wikipedia, it would be a close call between when I ran for the ArbCom in December, 2006, or my "three fools" RfA last year. I am perpetually amused at how easy it is to whip Wikipedians into a froth.

And the sad thing is, that's not what writing an encyclopedia is. Wikipedia's policies, if slavishly followed, don't lead to encyclopedic articles; they lead to a jumbled mishmash of disconnected snippets stolen from other works smooshed together haphazardly into an incoherent pastiche. I suppose that this is because writing an encyclopedia is actually quite hard (and quite tedious, to boot), beyond the capabilities of most of the people who write at Wikipedia, and so in keeping with Wikipedia's egalitarian spirit the policies have been written so as to prohibit anyone who does have that rare talent from actually exercising it, lest they gain too much prestige by doing so. Not that anyone did this on purpose; it's more a result of the policies being shaped by those who have absolutely no clue what they're doing.

The best writing on Wikipedia occurs when creative, intelligent people ignore all the rules and actually write a good article. Sadly, creative, intelligent people are rare on Wikipedia, and all too frequently there's some half-wit rulemonger hovering about ready to beat the poor soul into submission for daring to show spark of genius.

It's been noted many times that Wikipedia's content is inconsistently mediocre; I don't think many Wikipedians have reflected on how their editorial and human-resources policies tend to encourage and entrench mediocrity.

Back to the original issue of "Twink", the removal of the photo and the discussion: here's Durova's take on this mess.

I think that she was right in deleting the original image from commons (the "Santatwink" picture) as there wasn't a model release.

Durova's been making some very "on the mark" points about copyright and permissions in her blog in the past few weeks, which she seems to be carrying into her "commons" work.

Word of the Day


In a word, it's a Gallimaufrey.

If what you're saying is true (and since you were around at the beginning, your perspective is probably pretty close to what actually did go down), what structural changes in policy (if any) could have been made at the beginning to counter this? How can an online project "that anybody can edit" be encouraged to create quality without bringing a hierarchy and elitist concepts?

Do you see points at which the initial idea went wrong or is this an inherent structural flaw of the underlying idea?

I'm sure Kelly will be along shortly to respond.

I had posted my response to the same question in the RfC/Moulton that Filll, ConfuciusOrnis, and their allies in the WikiClique on ID filed against me last September.

Point of information: I wasn't around from the beginning; I didn't join Wikipedia until late 2004, at which point it was nearly four years old.

The problem with being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is related to something known in Agora Nomic as "Kelly's Fallacy": "I say I do, therefore I do". (Yes, it is named after me.) Wikipedia is not the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit"; there is no such thing and can never be such a thing. Setting aside things like blocking and protection, Wikipedia is, at best, the encyclopedia that anyone may edit. A mere tagline cannot grant capability.

Fundamentally, the problem is that most people are simply not capable of writing an encyclopedia. To be certain, many of the people working at Wikipedia are capable of writing an encyclopedia, or of developing those capabilities with time and practice. However, many of them are not. There is a natural hierarchy here: those who can are obviously of greater value than those who cannot. Those who cannot, but think they can, need to be discouraged, forcibly if required.

This is where Wikipedia fails: it allows those who cannot, but think they can, not only to continue trying and failing, and worse, allows them to have influence over the rest of the project proportional not to their skill or competency but proportional to their ability to influence others, and to a degree proportional to the amount of effort they expend, whether or not that effort is actually fruitful. In short, Wikipedia is elitist, granting influence and authority based not on merit (that is, ability to write an encyclopedia), but on social factors.

Of course, there are never pure meritocracies, because most skills are difficult to measure objectively (how does one objectively measure someone else's ability to write an encyclopedia?) and so social factors will play a greater or lesser role in determining one's place in any hierarchy. But Wikipedia, by deliberately rejecting any formal power structure, invited the creation of a wholly informal, but just as potent, informal one. And since that informal power structure was never intentionally coupled to anything having to do with Wikipedia's mission, it assigns rank and power almost completely without regard to the project's mission, at least at this point.

Wikipedia got run over by Dunbar's Law: it scaled beyond the capability of unstructured governance to direct its efforts. The fundamental failure was not to establish structured governance as Wikipedia transitioned past the point where Jimmy knew every editor personally. Jimmy didn't introduce any form of structured governance until he grew tired of doing it all himself, and by that point it was far far far too late.

I don't think so. I've written about people I know and I've written about organizations I've belonged to (although I've never written about an organization that's currently employing me or that I'm currently on the board of directors of), and I've never run into any problems there. Much more frequently, and more analogously to your story, I've written about people who I don't really know, but who I have met and/or exchanged e-mails with. I've never had any problem with any of this. It's quite possible to abide by NOR and NPOV (both of which I think are fundamentally good policies, by the way) while writing about subjects with which you're familiar for reasons other than reading about them in Reliable Sources™.

And what was introduced was far too limited. If you look at ArbComm's recent forays into de facto policy development, I find it odd that more people aren't stating the obvious: the reason ArbComm feels the need to broaden its own mandate like this is that there is no other practicable way for even remotely contentious policy to be developed. For example, you'll notice that English Wikipedia doesn't currently use flagged revisions (which have themselves been cited by many editors opposed to BLP reform). Why not? Well, the community hasn't yet developed consensus on how to implement them. Go figure.

For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of ArbComm making policy. But dammit, somebody should be.

Before this gets too far off-topic, has anyone stopped to consider the effect this might have on society in general? If the Interstate Bakeries Corporation, makers of Hostess Twinkies™, were to change the name of their flagship product merely in order to avoid connotations with the gay subculture, just imagine the amount of disruption that would cause throughout the food industry - which is already reeling from the effects of a worldwide grain shortage and skyrocketing transportation costs. The impact this could have on the morbidly-obese demographic alone would be absolutely devastating.

When will Wikipedia wake (hey, alliteration!) up to the need for socially-responsible content throughout the range of covered topics and terminology?

I noted in my reviews of the articles on "wiki" and "Wikipedia" that both articles are protected and that this protection tends to alter the bias on these articles to be more focused on/favorable to Wikipedia.

Strictly speaking, the article on Wikipedia should be restricted to editing only by non-Wikipedians. It would make for a far more interesting article, although probably not a more accurate one.

In other words, you got away with it because you didn't get caught. If people had known of your COI, the story might have ended differently.

Now, please define NOR and NPOV, if they're such good concepts. I have yet to find a convincing definition for either term and I doubt that a concise description is possible.

(I'm not commenting yet on Kelly's brilliant analysis of the fundamental structural flaw of Wikipedia, since there's nothing more to say....but the idea is indeed compelling and merits reflection!)



Come on, Somey? Have you ever actually, like, eaten a twinkie? They're disgusting. That's why I moved to France in the first place. No twinkies here!

I always declare the conflict of interest on the talk page, where I perceive a conflict to exist. This has been true, for example, of the articles on Mike Hudema and Don Iveson. I didn't declare it on the talk page of the single edit I've made to The Gateway (newspaper), but I did declare it in the edit summary. In my experience (not just with my own editing, but with other editing I've observed) conflict of interest alone doesn't get people in trouble, unless it's combined with policy violations (real or perceived).

Kelly both has a good point and is making a straw man argument.

Yes, it's true that if all the rules of Wikipedia, especially those on original research and conflict of interest, were absolutely, strictly enforced in a totally draconian, zero-tolerance way, with complete literalness, then it would indeed put a stop to anybody with the slightest clue about any subject editing anything about it, and prevent anybody who does edit from doing anything but mindlessly parroting sources without the slightest creativity... but then that would probably be a copyvio, so editing would come to a standstill with the exception of incorporating public domain sources like pre-1923 encyclopedias, unchanged.

But, fortunately, the rules aren't actually applied that way. What does happen can be infuriating at times, when the rules are selectively enforced depending on what axes people have to grind and on the relative standing of the combatants in the social network; however, enough of what might technically be regarded as original research or conflicts of interest is still allowed to take place that the encyclopedia does not grind to a standstill. There is a profusion of rules, often contradictory, and which pretty much every editor is in violation of at least some of... but nevertheless, the site keeps going on anyway.

Heavens, no! But you do have raclette.

Pretty much correct. But besides that, there's no rule against editing under a CoI - there's a guideline that says, basically, that it can be difficult to adhere to NOR and NPOV when you're doing so.

Well, hasn't David Sedaris moved back from Japan?

There is actually something grosser than a Twinkie. It's.... the machine that makes Twinkies. Or the final stage of making them, before they are packaged. Saw one on a tour of a Hostess factory about 35 years ago. At that time, the virgin sponge cakes came fresh out of the oven, all warm and golden and light as air, and as they go whizzing along on a conveyor minding their own business, they are snagged by this special triple-fanged Twinkie machine that is like something out of Kafka . There's this automatic harrow thing which is filled with white cream, and it grabs these little cakes and stabs each one with three little tines and injects them with about half an ounce of creme. Hooh ah. Then they go on their way, but some of the cream remains all around, since it goes in under pressure.

After a day of injecting thousands of Twinkies, this machine is dripping with white cream from every mechanical nook and crannie. It looks like something from an exceedingly bad robot fetish movie. It requires complete steam-cleaning and semi-sterilization before the next day's run, to get all the microbes which doubtless go crazy to grow in warm Twinkie cream filling.

I hope this has been helpful information?

You know, decades after this, it occured to me in a hallucinogenic haze (I think I was eating Twinkies after ingesting something that made me crave them), that they are probably named because there are TWO of them in a package? TWIN-kies. Get it? GET it? It's all connected. Like, have you ever looked at one closely? There's a universe in there.

I don't see what all the fuss is about, that image was shot and free licensed. The caption should be made to be respectful of the subject by saying something to the effect:
"This person has an appearance which is similar to the body type the word twink describes." That's it, nothing defaming about that.

Unfortunately for the hand wringers, there are no laws to prevent the use of freely licensed photos of living people in any form or fashion. Copyright law is clear that human beings cannot copyright themselves. This is why the paparazzi get to be the paparazzi. There's not a damn thing to be done about it and quite frankly the objections on ethical grounds are stretching it. The only person that individual should be mad at is the photographer themselves. If he has a problem, that's the person he should complain to.

EDIT: I was mistaken.

No, actually. The use of the name or likeness of a living person (or, in some jurisdictions, a recently deceased person) for commercial purposes requires consent in most places. Wikipedia claims to avoid this issue by not being commercial, while paparazzi claim that their activity is "news gathering" (which is exempted). In any case, make no mistake, there are definitely laws that relate to this issue.

That's interesting, thanks for that information. I was mistaken then and take it back. Anyway, the photo was not properly licensed on commons, so Durova rightfully deleted it.

Wikipedia's article on the subject isn't great, but it's a start.