There seems to have been some kind of feud going on between Shoemaker's Holiday and Durova over image restorations and something called "the WikiCup". If I understand the gist of the discussions on Talk:Featured picture candidates,

• Shoemaker's Holiday felt that Durova was cheating,
• Durova told him to fuck off during a conversation which had been recorded by Shoemaker's Holiday,
• Shoemaker's Holiday uploaded the recording,
• it was oversighted as copyvio,
• Shoemaker's Holiday started throwing around accusations that "Durova has a corrupt oversighter in her pocket",
• Durova referenced SH's Adam Cuerden account on commons which SH took as outing,
• SH's head explodes all over WP:AN

Here's the short-lived AN discussion in full

Jehochman wisely removed the thread soon after. SH hasn't been active since early November.

Is that a corrupt oversighter in your pocket … or …

Whoa, awesome.

The idea of someone cheating for something called a "Wikicup" is just hilarious.

I'm guessing the "corrupt oversighter" is supposed to be Rlevse (T-C-L-K-R-D) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=322599373

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...alk_page_is_for

So he's actually correct in that respect, but it's understandable that nobody will listen to him. Shoemaker's Holiday (T-C-L-K-R-D) has been showing a penchant for histrionics ever since "health problems" meant he was "unable to go to university this year," which seems to have resulted in "a complete breakdown" that Durova was "fully aware of." There was also that incident over the audio file of the WikiVoices Roundtable session that never got uploaded, for reasons still never publicly explained (though presumably it was because Greg Kohs was involved).

Oddly enough, that conversation leads to a complete tangent where Durova does some OR in discovering her source is wrong.

She seems to prefer Truth, not Verifiability. She won't last long like that. Someone tell Slim quick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=322559840

Oh, the irony.

I wonder how Risker and all the others who were "disappointed" in my having to be re-banned, thanks to my dust-up with this Adam "Shoemaker's Holiday" Cuerden critter, are feeling about backing him as their horse?

Gadzooks, it's actually the Dred Earl Roberts! Our Cluedo guess had formerly been Lord Kitchener, in the library, with a pen. Or at least General Gordon, at Khartoum, with a sword.

QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Fri 20th November 2009, 7:34pm)

The idea of someone cheating for something called a "Wikicup" is just hilarious.

I had to go and G◉◉gle It … and here I didn't even know that Sh♀♀maker's H♀liday was a girl.

Just chalk it up to my education …

Jon

I have to say, this user's behavior is so genuinely weird, with such over-the-top histrionics, I have to wonder if his recent WP activities aren't all some sort of big joke, or what the WP'ers would call "performance art."

The article where he's been having the most trouble (up until this incident, anyway) is List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming (T-H-L-K-D). SH claims to believe in the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming, but believes that this article is being used as a "coat-rack" for WP fringe theorists who are taking quotes from various scientists "out of context" and thus creating an article that's essentially a sneaky anti-GW backdoor into WP, not to mention full of BLP violations. At least that's the impression I got. He might actually be right, but he's in the minority as far as the other WP'ers are concerned, including William M. Connelley (T-C-L-K-R-D) and Polargeo (T-C-L-K-R-D) , who SH accused of "trolling" in an edit summary after he tried to get SH to reconsider this DRV on the article after it had been kept by a less-than-overwhelming majority.

This article even garnered an appearance from SlimVirgin, who after not having done much with it previously, swooped in to remove a whole bunch of POV and other tags from it because she felt there was "no need" for all of them. (To be fair, she was probably right.)

What it looks like to me is that SH has failed to get his way too many times on WP, and he's really, really pissed off about it - but rather than just leave, he seems hell-bent on making sure everyone knows why he's pissed off, and also making sure everyone feels as guilty about opposing him as possible, by his inclusion of multiple references to his recent (unexplained?) medical problems.

Dead wrong, Somey. When he made that accusation onsite he already had an invitation to talk it over with any Oversighter. I had emailed the request to the Oversight list. Perfectly standard and above board.

Sorry, the princess is in another castle.


Milton, the Signpost reported on this in the November 11 issue. That correction came courtesy of Roger Davies, who supplied two separate reliable sources. LoC confirmed Roger's research and is updating their bibliographic records.

Dead wrong about which part?

If you're referring to the bit about Rlevse being "corrupt," I didn't necessarily mean that this particular incident (or the specific accusation) proved he was "corrupt." Also, it depends on how you define "corrupt," I suppose. I'm sure he doesn't accept bribes, or anything like that.

Unless you meant that the invitation to talk things over with any Oversighter meant that my suggestion that "nobody would listen to him" is incorrect? You may be right I suppose, but of course an invitation to talk doesn't equal an actual attempt to listen, much less actually address his "concerns" - which are mostly specious regardless, right? It's a no-win situation.

In general there's probably no way you can "win" with someone like Shoemaker's Holiday (T-H-L-K-D), based on what I'm seeing. He's simply going to be a source of interpersonal problems, a "drama-magnet," or both at the same time.

And what did happen to that recording, anyway?

Out of two people, one of whom is Durova, I would never have imagined the other person being labeled the drama-magnet

Just to be clear, I would say Durova is more like a large piece of drama-iron who is irresistibly attracted to drama-magnets, and is such a heavy presence once she arrives on the scene that it's difficult to distinguish between her and the drama-magnet - and indeed, there may be no practical difference at that point.

Still, I don't think she deliberately starts or initiates problems, only deliberately gets involved in them and draws more unnecessary attention to them, often not for the general betterment of all. In some ways she might also compound problems, which some would say is the same thing.

Well, it also depends on how you define the acting oversighter. To the best of my knowledge it wasn't Rlevse. So let Rlevse wriggle off that hook, okay?

As for the latter part of your post, good points there. Shoemaker does fantastic content work and some of his best strengths are in encyclopedic media content where WMF has very few volunteers. It's a shame to see that much talent in someone who--well--can't dispute the negatives. If you'll excuse it, though, after having torn a hole into him that badly in private would rather not pour salt on it here.

Yup. Should be obvious by now.

Durova, now might be a good time to finally disclose -- why exactly was Episode 45 of Wikivoices suppressed by Adam Cuerden?

Just another "great success story" for unorganized crowdsourcing. Things like this happen when you work on the belief that "volunteers can't be told what to do".

You'd be better off getting that from the horse's mouth, Greg. What I had done my best to ensure was to match up the episode to one dedicated editor. WikiVoices had two audio editors who were really on the ball: Privatemusings and Filll. When either of them made a commitment the episode got done, pronto. But Filll moved on to other things and Privatemusings isn't around very much anymore. We've got several other people who have the skills but don't always prioritize, and they got into the habit of "sharing" editing work. Which tends to slow things down even more. X says "Y has it" or "Y's doing that part". A day and a half later Y comes on and responds "I said I'd take a look at it but I didn't make any promises." Then wait for X to log on again...

I've often thought about learning the software and picking up audio editing too. Haven't done so because of the worry that extra recordings would happen without a commitment from me, and the editing would end up in my lap.

We really do need another good dependable editor.

Anthony, sometimes within a pool of volunteer labor you get what you pay for.

No need to denigrate volunteers. Volunteer do wonderful things. They build houses for the homeless and feed the hungry. They are held accountable for their actions. They are vetted and supervised. What we are taking about here is something else...and less. Mere content providers like you and your other Wikipedians are every bit as irresponsible as you indicate here. Not just sometimes either. But there is no reason to soil volunteers with your faults.

And sometimes you get more than you paid for. Volunteers can be productive, and volunteers can be counter-productive. Just because you're a volunteer project doesn't mean you can't weed out the counter-productive individuals.

Productive volunteers *want* to be told what to do. Like any other worker they don't want to be micromanaged - most want a high degree of creative freedom. But you don't tell a bunch of Habitat for Humanity volunteers "there are a bunch of pieces of wood, some nails, and some hammers; go do something cool with it".

I suspect that sooner or later people are going to stop participating in Wikivoices if y'all don't get your act together. These copyright issues should be resolved before the session starts.

I suppose the answer to this is so obvious as to make it a non-question, but why is it that the Wikipedia drama-mongers, drama-whores, etc are all, to some significant degree, bent, damaged, or broken people? I mean, they can't go to college because of some unspecified health problem, or they edit in bizarre 36-hour stretches, they've been disbarred, they're philanderers or they fondle animals, or they're nationalist or religious zealots. It goes on and on.

I'll answer my own question: I suppose the bizarre, broken, damaged people drive the normal ones out, and any normal people who persist can be expected to keep a low profile, out of natural reticence and also self-preservation. But still. It's so much worse than one would expect.

This why I like the word "monster" to describe Ms. Durova and other like her. The word has two important aspects. First the idea of deformity and distortion. Second, most related to the words origin, the making a show or display. Almost a perfect word to describe them.

Dehumanizing people isn't a very effective way to develop insight. The reason I stood up for Shoemaker's Holiday, at first, was simple: his arbitration was a nonemergency case that began voting twelve hours after it opened while he was requesting time to study for university exams. Not to get into all the ins and outs of why it was a bad case, it's one of only two in site history that ArbCom has vacated (the other was Orangemarlin).

Before that arbitration case he had never been in formal dispute resolution and had been basically uncontroversial. The only area where he had locked horns with other editors had been homeopathy--and pretty much anybody gets into conflict there (homeopaths and allopaths playing tug o' war with the NPOV rope).

So during arbitration I got to know the fellow, discovered some of our editing interests overlapped, and was truly impressed with his work. He writes featured articles about Gilbert and Sullivan; he restores eighteenth century engravings. What's not to respect about that? The arbitration case had obviously taken a lot out of him. I was angry about how his case had gone and worried about what WMF had nearly lost, especially in terms of audio restoration: due to copyright laws, public domain audio often means restoring wax cylinders. This dude restored Enrico Caruso's singing. There was no other volunteer who who had those skills until Shoemaker trained more people.

I hoped the outbursts would subside, especially after the arbitration got vacated. Didn't happen. Am not sure whether he was always that way but it just hadn't surfaced or whether the arbitration changed him. That prospect might seem silly from a distance, but Wikipedia's arbitration process really is tough on the people who sit in the hot seat. One of the ways arbitration works is by putting people through so much stress that some of them become erratic and demonstrate that sanctions are necessary. That's not an intentional feature of the system, but no Wikipedia arbitrator has ever been on the short end of a case. They haven't walked a mile in the moccasins.

Your humanness is part of what makes you a monster. But not to worry. I will not be taking you out with a predator drone, cruise missile or massive B52 bomb drop. Only criticizing you.

Because Wikipedia is the only "hobby site" that will have them?

If you ran a forum about some obscure subject, would you let someone like Lise Broer have the run of the place, or give her sysop powers? I might let her in, but wouldn't ever in hell give her the keys to the place. The way Jimbo's Magical Flea Circus did.

(And to be complete and equable, I'd treat Shoemaker's Holiday in a similar fashion. Don't trust either of them.)

I don't think I can concede that Wikipedia's poor/non-existent governance is unique or even unusual among online communities. When you combine it with the stated goal, financial backing, and general prominence, it probably becomes somewhat more so, but online communities as a whole tend to be extremely poorly governed. They also tend to attract people who don't function so well in offline communities, so Wikipedia's not unique there either.

What? You're looking at a few high-profile examples out of maybe 50,000[*] accounts? How is this a valid conclusion to draw? Wouldn't the people who come to your attention on this site almost necessarily be the atypical and crazier of the bunch? I would certainly think so.

[*] Special:Statistics says 150,000-ish active users, but I'm willing to knock off 100,000.

Once again, you minimize and you deflect. We had two people perfectly willing and able to edit the audio file, if only it had been released. Instead, it was deliberately withheld. And you continued to welcome that sniveling critter within your ranks, enamored with his Gilbert & Sullivan bullcrap that nobody cares about in this century.

To continue the Habitat for Humanity comparison, imagine a crew of 15 unskilled and skilled volunteer builders arrives at a construction site. Adam Cuerden pulls up in the pick-up truck with all the tools, locked in the tool bin in the back. As he gets out of the truck, he feels like he has a severe headache and he just knows that today he will not be able to do any productive building. So, he drives home, telling the 15 other workers that he'll try to come back another day, but it might be a few days. A week later, someone politely asks if he feels ready to come to the site again. He says, "No, my headaches are too awful", but then people notice he's painting his house, and he's finishing his neighbor's basement, so they point this out. He becomes offended. Then someone says, "Look, if you can't bring yourself to drive the truck to the site, I'll be happy to do it, or Ross over here would also be willing to give it a shot." Cuerden cries back, "No, no, no! One or two of the workers asked me that I not bring the truck -- ever -- to this construction site, because they're afraid that they'll hammer the nails backwards and look silly. So, this house is never going to get built."

Then you invite this critter to drive the truck to another home site.

It's downright sinister how you've reframed the whole story, Durova. And you know it. And it tickles your little witchy feet in your wicked witchy shoes to click them together and cackle, knowing full well that you're minimizing and deflecting, once again.

One might even say monstrous.

The structure of WikiVoices is less top-down than that analogy implies. He wasn't the original audio editor. I had very strongly advised the original editor against attempting to share the responsibility with anybody else. To the point of saying if that were going to happen then I wouldn't host. But of course after the recording was made I couldn't prevent people from trying it anyway. Believe me, a couple of people got reamed out in private over that.

The horse has had a nice horse funeral and doesn't need another beating.

During the aftermath of this some people have wondered why you pushed the issue so hard and so long, Greg. Yes, you did make a positive impression during the recording. I could understand why you'd want that published. But the manner in which you've followed up has more than undone that good impression. Somebody (not from WikiVoices) linked me to this thread a moment ago and said your post is the kind of thing that makes them lose interest in helping you get unblocked.

Ah, yes. It's all my fault, once again. I suppose I've got nothing left to live for now, except maybe to give misleading information to journalists that will be published in the mainstream press.

Good grief, Man, you just got through lecturing PD about wasting his time.

Put her on your ignore list and get on with your life.

Wikipediots ain't good for nuttin if they aint good for comedy, and this one has become too big a bore to even be funny anymore.

Jon

Greg lectures me about being terrible sock-finder, too.

BTW, I don't see ol' Happy Drinker around much these days...

Jon's right. I really have to finish my e-book!

But, this is just so darn funny, too.

P.S. Oh dear.

Sometimes a typo is just a typo …

Cuerden creates the sock puppet Vainished User

Not this time …

Jon

Great advice, Jon. Let's see if either of you take it.

Buzzin' back to Ye Olde Hive to work on content.


And y'know, throughout this thread I grit my teeth in anticipation of Now she's talking about me on Wikipedia Review!

Can't please everyone.

Yeah, but how many times can you cheat, dissemble, cover-up, smear, or grossly exaggerate, followed by consistently saying the problem really lies with the people who point these things out and the "manner" in which they do so, before they won't let you do it again?

On Wikipedia I assume they'll let you keep it up indefinitely, but here we have so-called "standards"...

You'd be the expert on that.

More seriously, I made a public apology to Greg at the Foundation list months ago. If he doesn't want to accept it that's up to him. We goofed up that episode at WikiVoices, no doubt about it. I won't don a hairshirt forever about it, and that doesn't mean his conduct is perfect.

Really, one of the things I was telling the audio editors when I was trying to get this episode done was that I really didn't want to antagonize Greg especially. He's intelligent and charming, but we all have our strengths and our weaknesses. He tends to be less charming when he isn't getting what he wants.

Well, that's a quality uniquely Greg's.

Look at Jimbo. They don't let him siphon money off WP in any way, and he's still never grumpy. They even took away his editing privileges, and yet, he still smiles....



I think Jimbo takes happy pills. Greg is just a old sourpuss for nothing. Suck it up, Greg.

That's nice.

PUBLISH THE DAMN FILE.

Silly question: if the file is gone-trashed-deleted, would both yourself and Greg be amenable to re-running the interview (PITA, I know, to do it again, but it's important to Greg), with a different recording engineer?

Or if it is available still, could someone else get it ready to put live?

I'm coming in late into this and don't have the full facts, most likely. I'm just thinking of a solution, is all ...

I believe that Adam still holds the file. He refuses to turn it over to anyone (yet he is still welcomed on the Wikivoices project). (Durova describes his treachery as a "goof up".) The other guy who originally was assigned the file editing job (or treacherous friend Promethean) says that he deleted it from his hard drive, but I strongly suspect that is a lie. People don't delete highly controversial property when there's even a chance that it could bear fruit for them in the future either via blackmail or adulation.

I think re-running the interview is a splendid idea, but I give it a 50-50 chance of being suppressed again, somehow. The Wikivoices team is exactly that treacherous.

I've offered to host the "roundtable interview" if no one else is brave enough to do it. I'll make the same offer with regard to the Broer/Cuerden battle (though in the latter case I'd want permission of either Broer or Cuerden).

I realize this is a tangent, and maybe deserves its own thread or even a blog posting, but the whole issue of restored audio content on Wikipedia is a fairly interesting one from an outside perspective. It does take considerable skill to do it properly, but the software is getting easier and easier to use, and IMO more people have these skills (and these programs) than some might think.

These days it's very common for people to have programs with "scratch removal" filters to clean up vinyl conversions, though it's far less common for people to actually use them or even know how, of course. More serious home audio restorers can buy something like Diamond Cut Millenium, which is only about $60. Diamond Cut also sells CD's of restored public-domain Edison wax cylinder recordings, which were mostly done in 2005, just around the time when WP began embedding audio files. (You could always up/download them, IIRC, just not embed them.)

But audio restoration doesn't attract the sort of person Wikipedia would normally be expected to attract. Audio doesn't take up a lot of space on a page, and at the moment I don't see Featured Audio on the Main Page (though that might be an aberration - I don't look at the Main Page very often). It can be very time-consuming if you do it right, and it's not a good way to increase your edit-count (given that you're not going to upload 80 versions of the same file, each with one less pop or click in it). And whereas clicking on an image takes you to a page on which credit for the image is spelled out in excruciating detail, clicking on an audio link simply plays the audio; you have to click "About this file" to see any credits. Moreover, when you hear an old recording that's been restored, you don't think "hey, what an awesome restoration job," because you probably haven't heard the unrestored version. In fact, the cleaner it is, the less you think about how much effort it took to restore it.

So it's something of a thankless job, isn't it? I can easily see why people don't want to do it, and why they'd feel underappreciated after a while - possibly even to the point of developing a complex about it.

If WP had the manpower, I'd suggest that they try to avoid situations where people who do audio restoration work are made responsible for things like "WikiVoices." But of course, they don't have the manpower, because nobody wants to do thankless tasks for free. It may be that Shoemaker's Holiday (T-C-L-K-R-D) is the sort of person who likes to take on thankless tasks for the purpose of complaining about how little thanks he's getting, and if so, that might explain a few things. But I'd be completely irresponsible to draw that kind of conclusion in any sort of formal way, obviously...

As to whether or not someone like Durova should be involved in it, that's another issue - she might well be too ego-driven to work effectively with people who do thankless tasks. That is to say, she'll probably thank them (which is good), and maybe even be the only one thanking them (which is bad). At the same time she might be unable to avoid the appearance of taking credit in some cases, even if she isn't actually doing so, simply because of the way she interacts with people in general (i.e., she tends to "take over"). The worst thing you can do with (or to) someone like Shoemaker's Holiday, I suspect, is be perceived as taking credit for whatever specialized work he does, particularly if it's voluntary.

Ultimately I don't want to appear (myself) to be too critical of Wikipedia's efforts to provide audio content, or the people who provide it - there's a lot of material there, they're reasonably good about copyrights, and some of the restoration work is quite well-done. (Also, dissemination is a major aid to preservation, as they say.) But if they're going to really make a go of it, they should come up with a way to make it less thankless - assuming there even is a way.

Actually, Durova has made they exact same arguments about the place images are given in WP (low edit count, time to restore, etc) dozens of times before. Frankly I'd encourage most audio or image buffs to head over to commons, where at least the primary focus is on low-edit count media work.

So you have time for this crap between your all-important photo restorations, but not to even spend fifteen minutes to properly read the explanation you asked me to make?


May I have permission to release your PMs to me?



This is the sort of argument that would be a whole lot more legitimate if the file were published now and Thekohser was still complaining about it. My understanding is that this is not the case.

Find another cliche, toots -- this one is getting long in the tooth.

How about getting it from the horse's ass?