I see that Elanthia (who she?) has made a "statement of human rights", describing the "no rights" mantra as a meme which she wants to challenge, especially in the context of Coren's sarcastic dismissal of Fahrenheit451's assertion of rights as an illusion.

Is this going to go anywhere? Coren astutely avoided the trap of blocking Elanthia for putting a statement of human rights on her user page but what happens if this catches on? Will there be tumbrils at dawn and the King's head in a basket? Or is this a Cultural Revolution aimed at purging the old guard while the Emperor continues to pull the strings? Is Jimbo Wales actually happy to be able to show this to funding bodies unhappy about the game-playing with their money? Is Elanthia a revolutionary, a troll or Madame Mao?

The diffs and user pages are fine but linking to Wikipedia articles for common cultural allusions is annoying.

Very interesting. Thank you for posting it.

Luckily, everyone, for quite cheap, can have their own wiki, and have all the "Wrights" they want. And there are other wikis out there, right now, that give people more reasonable, logical, and fair "Wrights". Or at least they actually attempt to be much less yucky.

Eh, not that you know of. Obviously you haven't been watching your screen closely enough.

Of course since the log pages aren't google-cached, it is generally impossible to prove that anything has disappeared, unless you've manually used webcite or whatever. But knowing when and where to point the camera would require some serious ivy league voodoo (or exceptionally well-honed clairvoyant prognosticative skills or whatever).

Sure I could create a permanent local cache of every page I look at but I simply don't have the space for that, not more than a couple of weeks-worth anyway. Plus the noise ratio would be abysmal as I wouldn't know which ten or twelve pages out of a million would later be singular evidence of some recently un-happened event. Plus anything that's spent a year or two in a private vault is heresy at best and hearsay at worst.

Sorta like... I dunno... IRC logs.

It's unclear to me exactly what she hopes to accomplish.

I have fond memories of the effort back in 2005 to establish a Wikipedia Bill of Rights, mainly because I enjoyed watching the Cabal types soil themselves with rage. They ultimately renamed it "User prerogatives," then buried it. There was also my own humble proposal, Wikipedia:Ombudsmen, which met a similar fate.

An Ombudsperson might be valuable, especially if s/he was empowered to intervene on behalf of persons outside "the community" such as semi-notable BLP victims or over parental concerns. The "rights of Wikipedians" brings to mind Jeff Goldblum's remarks concerning "insect politics"in The Fly.

Which "funding bodies" do you think are unhappy with whatever the unpaid labourers are grumbling about this week?

As long as you all keep slaving, this kind of semi-incoherent beating of chests remains meaningless.

A handy tool just to have in your back pocket.. Firefox Addon: Abduction!

It allows you to _quickly_ capture webpages as images and save them as PNG's.

These may not quite be the "proof" that you speak of, but, oh well.

Pointless. As long as the current Bastard Squad runs the place, all the "evidence" in the world
will mean nothing in a major dispute. Diffs are disappeared usually to prevent public
embarrassment to some or other mucky-muck.

Get rid of Jimbo, and Gerard, and Slimmy, and Jayjg, and a few others.
THEN you may come back, and talk about "ombudsmen".

Thats all well and good, get the popcorn and watch Elanthia get banned for making a legal threat, ie saying she (all wikipidiots) have rights... that a legal threat and she will be banned, her diffs wiped from the face of the the wiki server farm of sludge. The banhammer sees all nails as somthing to wack.

Is that lovely hyperbole, or do you know of something that has been hidden and not resulted in a scandal? If so, we now have a Audit subcommittee that would like to investigate it.

The only case I know about resulted in the diffs being unhidden quite promptly! It required 30 odd emails over the course of a week, but that is "prompt" in comparison to typical arbcom style. It was obviously well intended, but not appropriate, and no .. the diffs were not embarrassing to anyone.

I've often thought that the FT2 edits should be unhidden as well, but others were of the opinion that it was over and done with, and keeping the edits hidden was appropriate in order to avoid tampering with the history yet again.

Naught. Confusion and lack of understanding are already endemic, so it'd just be more of the same.

I welcome intelligent discussion about governance and constitutive authority, but that wasn't it. To be honest, being unable to comprehend the difference between putative intrinsic human rights and rules limiting the powers of a specific government doesn't start on a good foot.

-- Coren

Oh come now, you're too hard on yourself. After all, you did admit that you weren't even attempting to respond seriously.

Well, a satisfactory way has been found of dealing with Elanthia's insolent assertion of rights, and punishing her adequately for besting an admin in debate.

Icestorm815 decided that she must be a sockpuppet of DavidYork71 and blocked her indefinitely, deleting all that pestiferous rights nonsense from her user page. Of course just to twist the knife, he decided not to give her the right privilege of hearing the allegations against her, nor of appealing them. In an even more hilarious twist the block is for being a "suspected" puppet.

So we now have a precedent that being suspected is already punishable.

This is a pretty clear assertion that admins will do what they want, when to want, to whomsoever they want, and that they will not let any nonsense about process (due or otherwise) stand in their way.

Of course, Elanthia's real crime was in not getting any support for her crazy notions.

I would say that that has been a core principle for some time.

But! Jayjg will now lose CU access.