I do actually think that flagged revs will come, but in the meantime I am sure Lar and I and some others are happy to semiprotect vandalised articles if notified. On maybe this is a good idea....a userbox (too bad I am crap at design, amybe I will ask someone.

Yes, I am happy to do that. I won't wheel war if they don't stick, but I'll complain to the unprotector.

Well, do them all then! Just do it. When people start to complain, then maybe some serious discussion will take place.

There's an idea... I'll have to look through my perl code to see whether that function is easily automatable.

But no, I think for the semiprotection to be likely to stick there has to be enough vandalism there to pass a judgment call. (Milton's research in the Protonk thread suggests that it's easy enough to spot the vandalism in vast swaths of articles, if you are a person with some judgement, but it's beyond my skills as a bot coder to write code to spot it)

Since I believe I can do more good for the project with my bits than without them, a spree to turn it on across the board wouldn't be prudent. At least not at this time.

What about you, Cas, are you willing to do the same (semiprotect on request)?

You are not supposed to advertize that you are doing this quite so much. With excessive vandalism, semiprotection of articles is prefectly within policy. Who is to say what is excessive? You are.

Wheel warring is likely to end up being a precedent against you, and the idea. Lar's right - complain, but do not wheel war. But feel free to semi-prot the next article you feel is appropriate.

I'm sure that will do ever so much good. BTW, who is the Lord Unprotector on Wikipedia nowadays?

Done.

Umm, looking at your history that's not quite true. Apparently your threshhold for what constitutes "vandalized" is more than one-vandalism-per-day.

If you have 1000 articles on your watchlist (roughly my number) which are each vandalized once every OTHER day, you still see 500 vandalisms a day. Most fixed already by the time you see them, but some not. And hard to tell which, since some fixbots don't show their reversions. So there's always a hard-to-find residuum.

In another thread I have noted that the study which shows that IP-editors do more good than harm, is a study of the French encyclopedia. A look at edit histories on the French encyclopedia (which I can't believe I didn't do until recently) comparing articles on the same subject with their English counterparts, shows me that IP-vandalism is a tiny fraction of the problem there that it is in en.wiki. And IP editors on fr.wiki are more helpful.

So--- you guys have nothing on this problem but some epidemiological statistics, and even THEY don't apply to your present sample. Duh.

I'm very bullish in this area, but I agree that BLPs should be manually semi-protected--if for no other reason than ensuring that junk isn't protected. Should the oppositions use bots to undue our work, they will look all the more reckless.

On some areas of Wikipedia, nearly 100% of IP edits are vandalism, from what I've seen.

In addition to BLPs, FAs should be semi-protected. What is a random IP editor going to add to an article which is supposed to already be comprehensive? And it might encourage more editors to get articles up to FA, if they knew they wouldn't have to revert garbage edits indefinitely.

We could proactively start wide scale manual protection of BLPs, and I'd be willing to be a part of that, but we have to realize that the end point of that is an Arb Comm decision. Is Arb Comm prepared to step so far outside its traditional role that it would essentially proclaim mandatory semi-protection of BLPs even without a community consensus to that effect? I have some serious doubts.

What I think is important is to do that what you like to do. I do not like vandal-whacking, so I don't. I add content. The problem arises when you feel that you have to protect the articles on your list, but I do not feel that way because I think that WP should have flagged revisions NOW, and the more I buy in to the old system, the longer it takes. What we need is more people who let vandals go their way, because that will increase the embarrassing situations in the press because the next dignitary has been libelled. Unfixed libel is the fastest way to revised revisions.

Liberal?

You needed a policy to protect BLPs years ago.



You failed.

If you'd have implemented the above long ago, all your hard work improving articles on Wikipedia might have been treated with respect. Instead, Wikipedia, and anyone's involvement in it, is increasingly viewed as a sordid embarrassment.

All those who want flagged revisions, here is the userbox to make clear where you stahd:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tal...d_revisions_now

yes.


I think flagged revisions are coming anyway so all we are doing now is helping folks whose articles are at higher risk now.

PS: I have about 5000 articles on my watchlist but the vast majority are very obscure and attract very little attention.

If this plan goes into affect, I'll request my bit back and help out.


Why do you think this? Do you think Jimbo is going to wake up and do it, or do you think the community is going figure out that consensus on the project is a joke and run with the majority?

I read it in my tea leaves...

Hmmm...I reckon one could start looking at most female actresses and any with any controversy and make a case for it pretty quickly. Might be worth a discussion on WP:RFPP too.

If a few admins are willing to do this, I'd return also. Until I was desysopped of course.

I wonder if the bits would be returned, given the intention here.

Kevin

I think that's a good idea, but I can't see it happening. It's become an institution now, forcing an article's main editors to stand on guard duty during the onslaught of vandalism provoked by an obscure article being featured on the main page. But there's just no sane argument against semi-protecting BLPs. If a critical mass of administrators just started doing it, then it might just rouse whatever powers that be out of their torpor.

Consensus be damned. What's right is right, and bugger the consequences. What's the worst that can happen? A mass desysopping? The rucktions that would cause would be "interesting" to see.

Yes. Or was there something pending when you were desysopped that I'm not aware of? If it was uncoerced and voluntary, you'll get your bit back. Please do.

No, there was nothing else happening. It needs to be more than just one or two though, or else it's not worth it.

Kevin

There's like four on this thread. Tell you what, I'll start a Wikiproject next week. If four other admins sign up, can I count on your help?

WP:REVOLUTION?

Sounds good to me.

Kevin

There are some very obvious ones which had been unprotected. All one has to do is think of anyone vaguely contorversial and chances are there has been some silliness on their page. The trouble is when there is a large article and there are a couple of IPs in a row, and then backtracking can be annoying rather than just a simple hit of rollback

I'm down for anything reasonable that'll improve blp coverage. I don't care much for the admin bit either, so maybe I'll be down for a bit more.

Well, sonny, there's a big fat stinky one on this other thread......

Sign me up if you need numbers – I'm due to desysop myself in September when I hit the two year mark (it would be dishonest of me to agitate for it to be made policy without butting my money where my mouth is) so the worst that happens is it comes a few months early. Although One, it may be worth asking the rest of Arbcom what their stance will be; there's no point us martyring ourselves and handing the project over to the Kiddy Kabal if we're all going to be blocked-and-reverted in seconds, unless creating Martyrs For The Cause is the aim in and of itself.

I would urge every admin who reads here who has given up their bit to request it back and semi-protect BLPs. Don't do wide swaths. Start with less controversial ones.

Just be liberal with it and don't skimp on the durations.

Remember Can't sleep, clown will eat me? He protected a tremendous amount and they stayed protected for a long time.

That's exactly what I was doing, largely ... until I woke up to the fact that it's all a pointless wasted exercise. For every one BLP I scrubbed and prot'd, there were another thousand waiiting in the wings. The problem is quite clearly systemic.

that's where I disagree. Just because there is a large amount of problematic BLPs doesn't mean doing your part doesn't help.

I don't like the idea of giving up just because there are problems you can't solve by yourself.

Make no mistake, I didn't "[give] up just because there are problems I can't solve by [myself]" - I've been dealing with BLP nonsense for long enough and right now, it's actually getting cumulatively worse. It requires a massive change of collective heart to fix that and, given that even the simplest, most minimal implementation of Flagged Revisions was greeted with cries of outrage, I can't see things changing any time soon. I'm worn down by the sheer mountain of crap and, after working on that stuff for years, I just don't have any more to give. To prove a point, I have the most edits to WP:RFPP than any other single editor, other than the bot[1], and I worked on page prots for almost two years. I'm "giving up", as you put it, for my own sanity, because life is far too short, because I've much more interesting things to do in RL and because it's largely a futile exercise. Good admins who care about this stuff are just beating their heads against a brick wall, to be honest.

I think it's more because you couldn't be partially in.

If you deal with too much, you get burnout. The idea is to limit your involvement. Some people need to be all the way in or out, it seems.

Apparently you're not reading it carefully.

She said:
and

Do you get brownie points from a top admin, in return for spewing this
"Fear not, ALL IS WELL" Wiki-Happy Juice all over this forum?

Sorry if this annoys you, but COME ON NOW........

bullshit.

I am not spewing all is well rhetoric.

I am simply saying that to quit and give in your tools does not make sense unless you simply cannot control your level of participating otherwise.

Do not relinquish something that could be of use later.

Some of did not quit to control our participation, but to protest against a crap system of governance. The BLP problem is one symptom of this crap system. Saying it makes no sense is very narrow minded.

Kevin

It's not about me at all, and that's what I'm saying here. It's systemic, and getting worse. Please stop pushing this back onto my apparent lack of application or whatever.

To your point, I had been semi-retired for over four months during which time, I dealt almost solely with Oversight and egregious BLP issues. I'd been 'partially in' for months, and I'd focused on BLP issues and Oversight/personal info problems only.

I 'limited my involvement' already and, as I said, the problem is systemic.


Also nonsense. There are far more options and permutations than you appear to be aware of. And if WP gets it's act together, I could likely re-request the tools back anyway. So if they "could be of use later", then I'll request them later. That simple

Handing up your tools is also a symbolic act, and one that people like you seem to take notice of. However, you associate it with weakness of character, for some reason, and not strength.

Edit: Keyword above is 'also'. It's not about resigning in protest, at least not in my case.

and what exactly is this supposed to accomplish? Sorry, but resigning in protest doesn't make things get better.

It is far better to stay in the system and use whatever influence you have than to simply quit. If you quit, people may talk about it for a few days, and then they'll forget about you, as just about everyone else has been forgotten. I didn't even know that you quit.

Handing in your admin tools is simply illogical and yes, Alison, I regard it as a weakness rather than a strength.

As for being able to request them back, yeah you usually can, but it's just another hurdle. What if I went to you tomorrow and asked you to please protect an article and that I can't find another admin to do it. You'd tell me "Sorry, I'm not an admin, and I'm not going to request my tools back simply to protect your article." Or what if you were casually reading Wikipedia and noticed a huge problem with a BLP? "Oh, I would look silly to request my tools back so soon after I gave them up." You will find that many things that would have gotten done will not get done simply due to a reluctance to ask for your tools back. You think I'm just spewing? I know of that which I speak in this situation.

I have never been one to say all is well and that BLPs aren't a systemic problem. Once again, though, a systemic problem is not a reason to simply get rid of your bits, which accomplishes nothing.

Alison, I don't know why you're so upset. I've always been supportive of you, appreciated your actions on Wikipedia, and I like you. I just find your actions here to be quite wrong. Pointing out to me how much shit you dealt with is no help. I'm well aware of it, and there are solutions to that problem other than "I quit, take away all my tools and full-protect my talk."

It's probably a good thing that weak minded illogical people are no longer admins, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Kevin

Dude, I appreciate the support an' all that and you're a nice guy (whoever you are on WP - I've no idea), but you're flat-out wrong right now. Frankly, you know nothing about, for example, the issues around Oversight; you've neither access nor experience. Also, you know very little about my private, personal life. I'm not upset, I'm just getting annoyed by your second-guessing of my motives and your attribution of it to some 'weakness' on my part. I'm stronger than most, to be honest, and you have no idea as to the extent of the 'shit' I deal with both on and off-wiki. I'd fairly serious abdominal surgery on Monday, the sort that puts people out of work for weeks, but I was back on the day-job on Wednesday. One small example. My life is chock-full of stuff and Wikipedia is a minor, minor part of the whole picture. Trust me on that one

Given that you know "how much shit I dealt with", I'm curious as to what your solutions are given that you clearly don't even know what the problems are.


.. lol. Only if you don't have the full picture, and you don't, sir.

ok, what the hell? What do personal problems have anything to do with handing in your Wikipedia tools? No, I don't know what shit you deal with in your personal life. I deal with a lot of shit too.

When I talked about shit I was talking about Wikipedia, not whether you had surgery. I'm sorry to hear it, but it has nothing to do with what I was saying.

And what does Oversight stuff have to do with resigning your adminship tools?



I never said any different. None of this seems to apply to my post.

There are few people who the lines would not apply to. I guess it wouldn't apply to Jon Awbrey and Grawp and some of the addicted people on Wikipedia, but it would apply to over 95% of the editors. It always applied to me, whether I was editing or not.

Hey - you're the one who brought it to the level of the personal, going so far as to call it a sign of weakness and lack of personal control. For example, "I think it's more because you couldn't be partially in" - that's just bollocks, to be honest.


Oversight is deeply, inextricably linked to BLP and BLP is one of the inherent problems of the WP system as it is now. People who work within it know what the worst of the 'potential libel / problematic edits' issue is, especially when they have to directly deal with the subjects of the articles themselves. Like I said, you've no idea, and I cannot reveal. Oversight deals with the rock-bottom of BLP.


I hardly think Jon Awbrey is "addicted to Wikipedia", given he's hardly bothered socking over there in the longest time. Grawp - now he is hopelessly addicted but what can ya do. He's a big child.

I got that from you in the first place. You said you tried semi-retirement and it didn't work, so you had to quit entirely.




The point is that you could've asked for removal of Oversight, and not removal of the admin bit.



The question wasn't addicted to Wikipedia. It was "My life is chock-full of stuff and Wikipedia is a minor, minor part of the whole picture." One doesn't have to edit Wikipedia to make that invalid. I've no idea whether Awbrey edits Wikipedia and I really don't give a damn. Another good example would be Daniel Brandt.

bother. I just burnt my rice and curry reading this thread (well, by not keeping an eye on the stove...)

You're not listening. Not one bit. As I said, the problem is systemic - no amount of involvement from me is going to fix it, let alone scratch the surface of the problem. I went into semi-retirement to focus on the serious issues, amongst other things. That should be clear.

Calling me out for personal weakness or inability just presses my wrong buttons, especially after all the fucking work I put into this and having WP issues spill very much out into my real world. Well done!

Why?? What's so special about the admin bit (or any other, for that matter). I left all that not out of weakness, because I couldn't handle it or whatever, but partly from the sheer, utter futility of it all, working away at stuff like this without the necessary structural backup - without even the backup of the community. Hey, even my oversight work wasn't good enough for some, and I had people calling for removal of that bit, and bitching about me on the admins channel on IRC.

The vast part of the community doesn't care about BLP. A large part of the admin group doesn't care about BLP - all that matters is notability and verifiability and the rules as they currently are. ArbCom, old and new, largely does care about BLP and I know they're working hard on fixing it right now, but those wheels turn slowly. WMF? Certain members of WMF don't give a damn about BLP issues. Sorry, but I know it to be true and I'm waaay closer to the source than you are.

One small, petty example; the Mary Yang article. All that poor subject ever wanted was for the damn thing to go away. I AfD'd it, and watched as all these people came out of the woodwork to debate just whether WP:NOT, applied and how many angels danced upon the head of that WikiPin. And in the midst of all this, Jeremy Frickin' Hanson - Wikipedia addict extraordinaire - pagemoved the article to say that she was also a molestor of children (thus, ironically, proving my point). I oversighted that, too. And that AfD couldn't end fast enough, as I cajoled and reassured the subject that it would soon (I hope, I think, who knows, really) be gone. Check my edits from around then. And most if not all of the people voting in the AfD had no idea as to 1) the background to all that, 2) the oversight issue nor 3), the personal anguish of the subject. I even ended up courtesy-blanking the AfD, and now wait for the over-zealous admin to come along and reveal it again, for 'accountability' or somesuch.

One, tiny, minor example. It's all seriously fucked up, and on a number of levels.


And now Daniel Brandt? Good grief! This is going absolutely nowhere. Hey - speaking of. In my last few weeks on there, I did my damndest to undo some of the Brandt-related nonsense that went on. I added {{NOINDEX}} tags to a lot of stuff mentioning him and guess what?? Some idiot anon(s) just decided to go along and revert all the tags I was adding to old AfDs, etc. Why????

I swear, the amount of hate-filled revenge merchants there are on WP is unbelievable. I've seen it all. And y'know what? Almost every single one of them is anonymous. 99% of 'potential libel' I saw on Oversight was added by anon editors. Jesus!

To what purpose? She said the whole damn thing is going to hell, and having admin tools
won't mean anything. There's just too much crap going on.

Instead of criticizing admins like her who have quit, why don't you go out and find more people
willing to give up a large chunk of their lives to fix that ever-growing tidal wave of crap?
For no pay and very little recognition? Good luck, smartguy.

The BLP mess is only the most obvious of the many problems. Alison quit, because she sees that
it is becoming unrecoverable. The "grand experiment" in unoversighted governance is coming to
a close--and it will be a very slow, ugly, unpleasant train wreck.

Yup, and other people are waking up to the impossibility of fixing this. Has anybody noticed that my old nemesis Moreschi hasn't edited in almost two months?

Going back to my mp3.com story, when it became clear that Universal was going to sell mp3.com and that there was no hope in trying to fix that site, they just stopped moderating the Artist Area bulletin boards. It very quickly became the biggest foodfight you've ever seen. It all seemed like harmless fun back then, because everybody knew that the site was going away. And the only people who were getting hit were other artists on the site, most of whom deserved whatever they were getting...

Now, what's going to happen when WP gets to that point, with about 250,000 articles of living persons?

What he said... what she says too:


You're a moron, Anonymous editor, and I'm going to tell you why.

1/ You're arguing with Alison about shit you have no idea about. I'm sure if someone pmed you the details (which I'm not), you'd shit your pants and shut the fuck up.

2/ Whining about admins resigning their bit and basically begging them to come back is retarded. If you've got problematic articles in desperate need of immediate protection, how about you pull your shit together and successfully complete an RFA? Plenty of other morons have gotten adminship. I see no reason why you'd be an exception.

3/ Unless you plan to whip out your checkbook and start writing out some paychecks to those of us who are to go back and do all this BLP work despite thinking it's pointless, you should probably put the club down and step away from the dead horse.

You've gone about this in all the wrong way. I just can't believe that people do this all the time. It's so stupid. You don't go into a situation like an asshole, talking down the people you want or need something from. That's seriously like the most stupid approach possible. How does anyone with common sense think that's a good idea? Maybe it works with people who are truly weak; people who would be hurt by comments calling them weak and silly or whatever, but for those of us who stand firmly behind our decision to retire in protest, pulling ourselves away from an admitted addiction, know it's far from a weak move, and we're not going to fold under disagreement and return because some dumbass says we're weak.

As for me, I'll get my bit back and start mass protecting BLPs when we get a movement going, but it's not going to be a movement organized by some random kid who won't even reveal his Wikipedia user name, much less his real name.

Or maybe I'll ask for my bit back today and unblock the_undertow and hour early, if I'm not too late.

Look, here's why this just doesn't matter.

Consensus.

The second that any of this "Semi-protect BLP" movement gets started, it will be tied up in eternal debate, and there will be enough "Anyone Can Edit True Believers" screaming as loud and as disruptively as possible that this goes against Wikipedia's core "Anyone can edit" mission that they will be able to claim that there's no consensus for this.

Anyone who continues from that point will quickly be dragged through RFC/RFArb hell.

There is a lot of people who parse the statement that "Wikipedia is the Encyclopedia that anyone can edit"

They place the emphasis on the 2nd part of the statement, and not the first.

Wikipedia is, in a way, a victim of its own success. They have become so big that needed changes can't happen, because there will always be enough outliers or people with vested interests in stopping any such changes that the encyclopedia becomes stultified.


Recently, a Wikipedia administrator I've worked with came to me to look over a proposal they had planned to put forward. to try to reduce the "repeat offenders" on low-visibility BLP's. That if an administrator finds significant, long term vandalism to a low-visibility BLP article (something like less then 1 edit per month from registered users), that the admin's within his rights to immediately stub and full protect the article indefinitely, because it's proven not to have people watchlisting it.

I thought it was at least a step, but a lot of it fell short.. the damage has already been done to the person in question, for example (at least it would prevent the same vandalism from reoccuring).

But even something like this would be argued and held up in red tape to be useless. The argument of the folks I mention above is never "less people can edit", it's always "more eyes will fix this". They'll say to take it to a BLP noticeboard, etcetera. So even the tiniest step along the path can't be taken.

Because giving up the admin bit doesn't accomplish anything. I'm still waiting for you to explain what giving it up does.

Giving up oversight and checkuser made sense, given the situation.



I know.



Whatever. You can stop bragging about your knowledge and power now. Saying I'm clueless about the inner workings, even if it were true, doesn't change a damn thing in this argument.



I know. I watched it happen. The Mary Yang thing, too. You're not telling me anything I don't know.



Jenna, or LaraLove, or LaraHate, or whatever you're calling yourself now:
I'm not reading the rest of your post, because your argument is based on a false premise. I'm a moron? Would like to compare IQ results? Tell me how I can prove I'm not a moron.

It's terrific that all the admins who gave up their bits are now coming after me like a bunch of angry hornets, but I don't care. I didn't expect anything else.

But I don't give a damn that you left. I was talking about Alison, because that matters. I didn't even know that Kevin left.



Yes and as has been said before, there's no way to gain the mythical "consensus" on anything, including the huge BLP problem.

Don't see why that means people have to give up their admin bits. Leave. There are what, 600 admins that left, many years ago, and they still have their bits.

Oh, Anonymous editor, I'm sure they will return when the revolution comes. Lay off them until then.