Wales:



http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/195376

Perhaps that explains his choice of images. Wasn't Sanger collecting a list of images to hand out to reporters? I'll bet Wales got a copy of that list (from a reporter perhaps), and I'll further bet that the St. Therese image was on that list.

That's a good theory. It maybe time to compile a new list of images to distribute to the media.

Regarding historical art, the nun masturbating is the not the most outrageous work on commons. Paintings of men having sex with prepubescent boys is something that most parents would cringe at.

You're not suppose to say "I'm doing spin control" when you do spin control.

not bad, Anthony.

Although Jimbo isn't known for his thoughtfulness or deep concentration, I can't believe he's clueless enough to think his deletions will make any difference in the long run. Also, in the past Jimbo hasn't hesitated to de-sysop people for wheel warring, but not this time. There's no way his 'leadership' will stand without whacking a few commons admins. All this suggests that Jimbo had a narrow short term goal.

It doesn't take a genius to repeat a trick that has worked 4 and 20 times before — and we have seen this one at least that many times from Jimbo, even if the MIB mind-eraser has deleted it from most of your memories.

When all the shouting and is over, and 99% of the BLP Defamation, er, Porn is back in place, Jimbo be able to give the same excuse he always gives — "Aw shucks, I tried to do the right thing, but The Community wouldn't let me."

Jon

If you want a good collection of gratuitous nudity with no merit, try Category:Upskirt for starters. Not everything in there is meritless, but quite a few are.

Another possible: Category:Female bottomlessness in photography.

The zelots at wikipedia are blinded in their faith that any and all smut is to be honored for its 'educational' value.

Geez. How can Jimbo say that he's successfully averted a media crisis when there's so much still there? The story can't go on based on those categories you've just presented? What about when they're still there (and more) a couple weeks from now, after the "cleanup" efforts have clearly died off.

Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) - Re-upload Commons artwork that's been deleted by Jimbo Wales




...

Good. That's the secret: make them fight among themselves.

From Foundation-l:




Behold!......the natives are restless!

Now do you faux-geniuses see what kind of person Jimmy Wales really is??

Yes. A less competant version of SlimVirgin.

He had the chance to learn from the best, and he's only doing moderately well at it, even with superior firepower.

Urgh. There's too much happening in the wikiworld for me to stay off of WR.

In any case, the fall of Jimmy Wales would be a very bad thing for Wikipedia. A semi-competent to incompetent god-king is better than complete anarchy. At least there are ways to pressure Wales via donors/the media/public pressure. Take away Wales and there's no way to apply pressure to Wikipedia.

Ooohhh! Even "Mister Deadman" admits there's a problem!
(After accusing Larry Sanger of doing all this to keep Citizendium going, of course....)



And here we go again, with the "Ban Jimbo" crap.....

I hope Jimbo hasn't been deleting furry images on Wikipedia.

I'm not convinced of that; it's more likely that he'd be replaced by local leadership on each project. Most of the projects have people would naturally rise to leadership except for the overlooming presence of Jimmy preventing local leadership from building acceptance. Jimmy's steadfast insistence on maintaining a state of permanent leaderlessness has much to do with the ongoing governance failures.

Also, while it's possible to pressure Jimmy through the press or donors, doing so is extremely hard and has a very low chance of getting the end result one desires.

Je suis d'accord, but honestly, he's incompetent. He deserves kudos for trying, but I think he may have gone past the point of no return here, and I don't think he has the diplomatic abilities to convince the volunteer army to follow his agenda.

It really is a shame: he's a great spokesperson and advocate, but I don't think he's realized yet the nature of the thing he's advocating and speaking for.

Or, if Kelly will allow me to riff on her trademarked phrase: I think the day has been hastened.

What you are seeing in Mr. Wales clamp down on pornography is the heel of The Little Boot. Wales, as Godking, is an entity of "the community" not WMF. He says he has WMF backing. But then the Board responds in an ambiguous fashion. But The Little Boot will be tried first because they are desperately trying to maintain the separation of WMF and "the community." This separation has never been more important than during the night as they wait for law enforcement to come for the servers with warrants.

If The Little Boot fails to achieve sufficient cleansing and WMF has to continue to fear what is on its own servers we will see the heel of The Big Boot. This will not come from the Board itself but from their one clear agent in this convoluted mess, Gardner. Of course it is unlikely that she will want to do this with Moeller at her side. If Wales succeeds the status quo will basically remain in tact. WMF will continue to abdicate responsibility for content to the community. If we see the day of heel of The Big Boot it will mark a real departure. Eventually it will lead to policy guidance on content from the Board and enforcement through staff overseen by Gardner.

In terms of achieving long term stable responsibility in respect to content The Big Boot is preferable.

Perhaps a spell of anarchy is what is needed right now. It would point out the lack of governance issue more clearly than the current semi-anarchy.

Actually, I "trademarked" it, but feel free to use. I really don't know if The Great Wiki Ragnarok™ is close at hand, but I have long suspected this was the sort of thing that could serve as a tipping point. As Brandt observed, this is hardly new and we have been banging on about this for years. Only now are significant numbers taking notice.

Yes, obviously the "Big Boot" would be best, but I don't think it will ever happen. The status quo works too well, the WMF can stay out of the day-to-day, which has many advantages while they have Wales to occasionally go in and mop up. I don't think, though, that the Big Boot of the Foundation will ever get involved. They have Section 230 immunity to hide behind, so there's essentially no legal threat (and the official position on this issue is that there is no legal concern). The PR threat is relevant, but there are other ways to manage it.

Gardner would never get involved in content issues without being told to do so by the board, and the current board would never tell her to do that. The day may come when we have an activist board at the WMF. At that time, real change can happen, but I think we're at least 6 years out from that possibility.




We had to destroy the village in order to save it? Yea, maybe.

I remain unconvinced of that. The death of King Jimmy will certainly change things in WIkiland, but improve them? Hard to say. Much depends on who moves into the power vacuum his decoronation will create, assuming that it, in fact, happens. Also, do not for a moment assume that even if he is decoronated on Commons, or even on every project except the English Wikipedia, that he'll give up his Founder privileges on the English Wikipedia without a separate fight.

I don't think Jimbo has much power these days, not like he used to. He can even manage to delete porn and make it stick.

While he doesn't have much power himself, he also prevents anyone else from making any sort of claim of power. His removal would create a power vacuum, or at least remove the main impediment for someone more capable of leadership than Jimbo (which would be nearly anyone) exercising that capability.

We need a time graph of the number of deletions that remain deleted. Does anyone here know how to construct such a graph?

Damn, he got rid of the drawing of Sainte Thérèse, the Disrobed Carmelite. I thought that one came close to being art.

Why is it that we have Jimbo going around deleting erotica and satyrica (I dunno if I'd call that drawing "porn"-- were any of you turned on by it??) And nobody else can seem to do it? The real problem is that Jimbo is here being given credit for doing what the dysfunctional system he set up, cannot do. So he's cleaning up a trash dump he helped construct, and formerly helped block anybody from fixing. And it's the closest he's come to getting the axe, since he's fixed things so everybody is so used to getting their way.



Man, things are screwed up on WP.

He is saying that we have successful crated a meme ... sold the media the idea ... that we fix it.

Fixing this and making the media and public believe they have fixed things are different. Its is like a Queen or President turning up at a disaster site so that the nation knows he is Doing Something and goes back to sleep.


It is interesting to note Mike Godwin's and JzG comments. It is all classic "folk devil and moral panic" on both sides, with a lashing of cult dynamics ... hyserically isn't the 'Wikipedia folk devil' TheKohser gets blamed for it though it was none of his doing ... who started the Ethical Breaching Experiment?



Like a cult, any criticism is polarised into a naive immature dialectic satisfying for naive minds ... the noble faithful versus the evil destroyers of the faith.

Look at the language, it is even religious ... the Alpha and Omega ... "Wikimedia projects are first, last, and everything in between."

Geez, I never realise this guy was such a jerk off. Like a Saul to his Christ Jimmy, he even turns the acknowledgement back onto the God King

Christ Jimmy, the forbearing god, intervenes to save them from external threat and coercion!!!

Meanwhile, dgerard works up a meme to destroy Larry "Judas" Sanger's reputation ... and gives form to the idea that his public concern was an act of jealous vengeance ...like any apostate cult exiter.

It's Armageddon, Ragnarok, and Calgary, all rolled into one.

It seems like a no-brainer--these images are superfluous at best and dangerous at worst, so of course they should be deleted at the first hint of trouble. However, since Jimbo considers me a trouble-maker and troll-enabler, I'm not sure what my support says about him.

It might help if you said the community is flawed, wrong and irresponsible. Coming from you that might actually matter.

Of course, if Jimmy goes down, so does Mike Godwin's career. (He wont lose his job, nor will not be able to get work, many that would pay share his ideal with ... but, obviously, there is a mutual interest in public perception of the Wikipedia and Wales and his own financial worth.

Or should I write, "if Jimmy is not successful resurrected from his current grave ... then Godwin's career will poop".

Christ Jimbo is not buried yet. He has not even been cruxified. We are still just doing the 'Stations of the Cross'.

Even if Jimmy was successfully crucified, and the religion suppressed, some Saul would only come along and reinvent it.

Learning form new religions and cults, as fallible as they are, generally the cultic charismatic phase is the best time of itself life ... just look at what the Romans made of a minor and deluded Jewish millenarianist prophet and his cult.

But, for a certain sort of second class with a business mind, these kinds of groups are ladders up which they can climb much further than they could on their own and so they are often used and sustained for the second class of individual's own self-interests ... the Sues, Eriks and Mikes of the world. Part of the sustenance of the cult is the creation and sustenance of an imaginary Pure Noble God Kid Guide ... a Christ archetype in other worlds.

Even though the primarily WASP following probably thinks of itself as being entirely secular, they would seem to be playing out fairly standard Christian archetypes ... including that of the Christian imperial age, e.g. conquering the world with their values and acquiring a large slave caste.

Give them a few days, they'll figure out a stupid way to blame Greg.

We can only hope, but it's not likely. Mike is a semi-legend in the free-culture crackpot
word, and damaging his fame will take more than the collapse of Wikipedia.

I had no idea you were a Marillion fan. That clip fits Jon's post but I think a better Marillion theme song for this whole thing is "Incommunicado" from "Clutching at Straws"

Any sensible person ought to be able to draw a line here. When Jimbo pops up on other projects to ban someone he doesn't like, or enforce anything related purely to internal wiki affairs, that's completely inappropriate--the community should govern such matters locally. But when he intervenes to take action to avert some kind of PR disaster or legal trouble, well, it's hard to argue with that. If the community doesn't want to deal with such a serious issue, then the community is just wrong--and what's true is still true even when spoken by a liar.

But how can you look at this, flagged revisions and just about any significant reform and see that the characteristics and dynamics of the community itself makes it the most reactionary and broken aspect of the libertarian dystopia that WP has arrived at? It is to the point that you don't have to agree on the issues to see how broken it has become.

Wow, he even admits it.



With the apology immediately followed by:



How can you be sorry for something that was necessary?

He deletes the controversial images, knowing full well that they'll be undeleted?

If the press lets him get away with this, I'll be...

...well, actually, I'll be unsurprised.

Maybe they were even in on it: "Look Jimbo, we love free speech as much as you do. Our business depends on it. But we can't just let this story go - we'll make too much money by reporting it. So how about you create an even bigger story, by deleting the images, and then we can run that story instead?"

Any position of responsibility involves at some point doing something you are sorry you have to do, but which it is necessary to do. Being sorry is a bit different from 'regretting' something, which can imply that if you had the chance again, you would not do it.

You believe that, do you?

Not at all. As I said, I believe nothing.

All in all, I think Jimbo played this pretty well. He doesn't need the 'founder' powers that have been removed. He lost them on a point of honor that only the moronic wikipedia crowd would disagree with. He demonstrated that dealing with the worst filth at commons is beyond him, even though he tried his best. He gets to act all righteous and good. So now he basically doesn't need to deal with this shit any more. Any criticism about smut at Wikipedia and Jimbo is off the hook.

But now he is on record having admitted the problem and his attempts to address it has failed. That might be exculpatory for him but it is a very bad state of affairs those around him.

Would it not have been better for Wales to demonstrate some leadership by organizing a responsible discussion?

If the community cannot responsibly discuss, develop and establish a respectable policy and practice regulating content, then WMF-sponsored sites will continue to host meritless and unregulated content of marginal or negligible historical, cultural, or educational value, to the continuing chagrin of the large donors and serious scholars.


That's not a sustainable practice. Proposed content needs to be evaluated in camera before it it published to the children of the world.


He's had a decade to foster the development of a functional set of policies and practices for making responsible editorial judgments regarding appropriate content. Time and again he's acted impulsively to summarily delete content without regard for its educational merit. Previously, it was manifestly educational content on the topic of managerial ethics. This time it was manifestly meritless content that revealed once again the high cost of operating a large project without a functional system of managerial ethics.

See, that's where conventional public libraries had it so much easier. They could sequester materials in rooms not open to the general public before deciding what to put on the open shelves. And then, they could have restricted rooms for scholars and adults to gain access to selected materials not appropriate for children.

Yes, that is undoubtedly true. But then, knowing what we do about Jimbo, do we think that that's a problem for him? Why should he care about the mess he's made for those around him so long as he's in the clear? Ayn Rand and all that.



It's not impossible to do something like that on a Wiki. Indeed, they do exactly that by allowing admins to be able to see deleted files. So you create a "semi-deleted" status. Files with that status can only be viewed by those with a suitable "mature person" bit and you can only get such a bit by proving your identity and age, as for getting Checkuser status. Probably all freshly-uploaded files should have this status until they've been vetted.

Of course, in an ideal world only people with a "mature person" bit could stand for admin, but let's not ask for the moon.

The problem is ... he knows damned fine that is impossible. We know damn fine that the obsessives are far more equipped to return time and time and time again to defend their filth ... who can really be expected to bother spending their lives against that lot ... and facing their wrath elsewhere.

If Jimmy Wales is not lying in bed at night admitting all this to himself and realising that the project is screwed he is not human.

Then go to off and go on stage and do his Guru Jimmy number selling the religion to new adherents ... how can you do it?

The lizard lady in the office grinding out crass denial propaganda I can believe. There are such people.

How do you think this will all blow over historically? Or do you think it is go ing to go down in the anals of the Wikipedia as a major turning point?

How is it going to look on Sue Gardner's CV?

For a minute there, I thought that was another Ottava typo.

It strikes me that Jimbo has been rather foolish in his open pronouncements that this was a tactical deletion to evade a larger problem and he has no intention of making it stick, because if the FBI do decide to diddle around in his web site and decide that they do not like what they see, then he's on record as essentially encouraging the site to keep inappropriate images.

The Labour Government, having had a couple of successful years of spin, then found that the press got rather annoyed when they realised that spin was great for being a lazy journalist but made them look stupid after a time - so the press bit back with avengeance.

In my experience, organisations like the FBI are not as stupid as the press like to make them appear, though I am not so sure about American juries who can become confused and bemused by clever lawyers.

So he is careless on a few counts:

* playing fast and loose with a legal system that may now hold him responsible as he clearly intervened in bad faith;
* he is saying openly he is playing the press - Fox News won't like being taken for saps;
* and he is essentially suggesting to the Wiki-faithful that they need not take any notice of any of his moral pronouncements because he doesn't really mean them, even if he is blustering on about how important they are.

¤ sigh ¤

Smoke and Mirrors

Ayup. Disingenuous bluster and hypocrisy.

Ahaha, Silver is a furfag? That explains much.