(you said it we stink on ice...but not as much as petty tyrants)

King James self-granted founder status is under a serious attack.

This RFC was started back in March over his Wikiversity purge, but was off to a slow and predictable start. As of Cinco de Mayo the proposal to remove his powers had only 23 supports v. 33 opposes.


But over the last 2 days support has soared to a whopping 240 v 77. The Deatheaters are actually getting swamped for a change.

Could this be the start of a long awaited revolution?
I try not to get my hopes up too high...they have been crushed far too many times before.
However, this is unprecedented! Not even during the height of Essjay or Marsden did as many so ardently not only defy King James but call for his removal.

25 to 36. Note that Adambro and R.T.G had stricken my vote and the vote of Emesee...

You have to be careful of revolutions. In 1979 I thought the end of the Shah of Iran was a Good Thing. But you have to look carefully at what replaces it.



My emphasis - this is where the 'revolution' is coming from.

But it won't be televised—not in the states at least.

Classic!

Little tyrants trying to replace the one who is subject to criticism.

Disgusting. By the way, many of those votes have serious problems if you look at the global contribs. The Foundation needs to crack down hard on this anarchist bs if it wants Wikimedia to last the year.

Jimbeau pretends to remove special powers from the founder group (while keeping the power to grant himself all the power he wants).

Trenton, you do realize that right now there are at least 4 people trying to take over Jimbo's spot and they have a far nastier disposition and are not subject to criticism by the media or outsiders. We do not want such things to happen.

Jimbo's not smart enough to have come up with that idea on his own; someone is coaching him. My guess is David Gerard, that's exactly the sort of stunt he'd pull in this situation.

Says you.

"Hasten The Day!™" says me.

Sounds ideal! Bring 'em on!

Well, for people who actually want to use a very prominent system for their work instead of having to turn to alternatives that are almost completely ignored, it isn't a good thing.

That's not what Wikipedia is for. If you want a vanity press service, try a vanity press.

You're probably right. Whoever takes over from Jimbo though will essentially be handed a poison chalice. The issue over the handling of the commons images has divided the community.

They came for Moulton, and we watched. They came for Kohs, and we watched. They blocked and banned and demolished the consensus process necessary for NPOV, and we watched.

But then they came for our porn.

I think 'ol Jimbeau severely overestimated his power and status among non-English projects here. If he were merely meddling in some English projects, I think he'd have made it through (I'd guess support would run around 50%, maybe a bit less). These editors are basically weaned on tales of how Jimbeau single-handedly started Wikipedia, and how he wrote the first million articles and how he so selflessly gave up control to the WMF and graciously let them pay the bills.



Even Gerard hasn't been (publicly) supporting him. The number of jimbophants seem to be on the decline (or rats deserting a sinking ship).

Can you (or someone) translate what that change means? Is "the power to grant himself all the power he wants" something hard coded, or is there a specific permission for it?

"their work"? No-one owns articles on wikipedia though. Given the amount of vandalism and reverts going on, I wouldn't want my work up there.

You're on a roll today, Abd.

I'm no expert, but I believe "globalgrouppermissions", which he specifically added, gives him the ability to give himself any rights he wants.

Um, what are you babbling about? People actually contribute their content there. Just because you don't know how to write anything to add doesn't mean others aren't trying to build an encyclopedia.

So, just as a suggestion, if we were to develop a kind of shorthand for people to say "F*** you, Ottava" without having to tediously type it out each time, is the preferred form of the abbreviation "FYO," or "FUO"? Because "FYO" is also the acronym for "Find Your Own," which could be confusing in his case, since it could easily be taken as meaning "Find Your Own website to impress the Old Guard with how loyal you are to their cause even in the face of near-universal rebuke."

"FUO" is also the acronym for "Fever of Unknown Origin," which may be what Ottava is suffering from, but thankfully we're in no position to make a formal medical diagnosis...?

Jimbo used his power to define the user rights granted to specific user groups to remove most of the user rights from the "founder" group, of which he is the sole member. He did not, however, remove the right to define the user rights granted to specific user groups, which means he can undo that change at any time. Basically what he did was throw a dust cover over his rights, to make it appear as if he didn't have them, but he didn't take away his ability to give them back to himself. I assume he expected people to not notice that he retained the power to set group rights.

His power is not hard-coded; it's a consequence of the groups he's a member of. He could use that power to revoke his own rights such that restoring them would require someone else to act. It's pretty clear that the community wants Jimbo to have to ask for his will to be done, instead of being able to enforce his will on his own, and this action on his part clearly does not effect that result.


Could you add a special button that appears only on Ottava's posts that lets us add this to his posts without the trouble of making a separate post for it? It would save time and screen real estate.

Thanks Kelly. I see the current list of permissions is here. The two key ones would be globalgroupmembership (he can add himself as a member of any group, e.g. he could make himself a steward) and globalgrouppermissions (he can change the permissions of any group, e.g. he can add any permissions back to "founder").

Is there any way he can still *directly* block or desysop someone? Or would he have to go through multiple steps to do so?

He has to go through a two-step process to do so. This creates a slight impediment to rash action, I suppose, but not much of one. It reminds me of Jack Swigert taping a card over the LEM jettison actuators on Apollo 13.

Welp, it looks like he's now removed them. He'd have to go through a sysadmin now, right? (That's not to say that this wouldn't be easy, but we've moved from a two-step process to a two-person process, a la How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, err, WarGames, err, The Hunt for Red October or something.)

Unlike a moderator, I can put Kelly on ignore. What do you say, Somey? Does she have anything worth me bothering to look at, because all of her posts seem exactly the same.

Unless there's some other secret backdoor that he has access to that I'm not aware of, yes, he can no longer exercise admin rights on any project where they have not been granted locally.

What is the final score ... and are they really, really, really going to expect him to de-flower himself, or whatever it is called?

I thought her explanation of Jimbo's reassignment of access rights, particularly with regard to the group permissions flag, was quite useful indeed?

I mean, let's face it, Ottava - you won't want to hear this, particularly from me, but lately you've been turning into precisely that thing you yourself most despise: Everyking.

Look up the article on Stockholm Syndrome (T-H-L-K-D) - it's all there, except for the physical kidnapping aspect.

Headline: Nine years after creation, website turns on both parents on the same day.

Mother's Day.

Larry, Jimbo, WP will be sending you virtual flowers later. Right now they just had some ... issues they had to address. It'a not that they don't love you both. But they need space, okay? They're not babies any more, and they feel like they're not being treated as young men.

Who need pron. But this is a phase, and they'll get though it.

In about 15 years.

But they think about you. They really want your respect; you know they do. They'll call you later. Promise.


All the best! xxxxoooooxxxx

Is Founder the same as founder? Even the software seems confused:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?titl...h=-1&tagfilter=

and

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?titl...h=-1&tagfilter=

Jimbeau changed his rights on english wikipedia; does this carry over to everywhere else?

edit: it appears that Founder was renamed to founder some time back...

I would bet you good money that a backdoor exists, that Jimbo asked for it to be installed years ago, and that possibly, no one else except the MediaWiki developer responsible is aware of it.

Jimbo has had NINE YEARS to add such things, and given his paranoid and egotistical behaviour in the past, I feel it is a reasonable assumption that a backdoor is available to him.

There's only one way to tell. Ottava has to unban me and Greg on Wikiversity and restored all the stuff there that Jimbo deleted from the first day he set foot there.

If Jimbo just goes, "Harrumph," and says, "Curse you, Ottava Rima!" we'll know he's really and truly castrated himself.

But if...

Never mind, it's too gory to even think about.

Really? I don't remember whining about no longer having adminship.

And Everyking attacked people in a nasty way. Remember, I had a problem with him and LessHeard for their comments about Durova and others. I don't like nastiness. People can be heated in discussion but just attacking someone for no reason like they did for Durova and others was just cruel.

And Everyking was very anti Catholic, don't forget about that.

And I've always been adamant that Jimbo should desysop people. After all, he is the only one with the real power and at least he is under media scrutiny. Tyranny comes in the shadows.

Wow, it's amazing how deftly you let that go in one ear and out the other. Did you get surgery to help you do that, or is it just a natural endowment?

Jimbo is still in the founder global group (1, 2), and therefore has access to the following permissions of importance:

suppressrevision, suppressionlog, oversight, deletedtext and deletedhistory, checkuser-log, browsearchive, autopatrol, all abusefilter permissions

So interestingly, he can suppress information the way oversighters do it now, but he cannot delete it normally. He also cannot undelete material, but he can view all logs and undeleted pages. In addition to checkuser, oversight, and sysop on enwiki, those are all the permissions he has across Wikimedia.

I explained what attributes about Everyking I despise. They don't apply to me. So, I don't really care about any comparison.

Eh, whatever. Anyone with root shell access (10 people) or anyone with steward access (33 people) could give him the powers back.

If none of those 43 people are willing to support him on an issue, what good would it be to have a backdoor?

By the way, it seems like a terrible idea to give so many people so much access. And likely access that they can exercise from anywhere in the world. One compromised password, one disgruntled roommate, one trojan on a home desktop machine...

I guess there are backups for most of the things that could be deleted. An attack from someone looking for information, on the other hand...

The intention seems to have been to allow Jimbo continued full read access to the database; but in the case of suppressrevision, the right to suppress was not separable from the right to read, so apparently he was left with that permission, and it was mentioned that there is a bug report in on this, to make the read and write permissions separate, which makes sense.

This was a stunning reversal of the position Jimbo took just a short time ago. He blinked. He has my warm congratulations for that. It takes maturity to back down after making so many strong statements. I've suggested that Larry Sanger might now be given the founder bit as well, I assume he would be willing to be bound by the appropriate restrictions about disclosure.

You're optimistic.

Well, this is the guy who thinks cold fusion is just a few years away, after all.

Anyway, there's no point in going overboard and making all sorts of wacky suggestions that have no chance of being adopted. This isn't glasnost - if Jimbo does a good thing every once in a while, even if it's reversible, it's best to just congratulate him and move on. Besides, what would Larry Sanger do with those kinds of access rights?

Okay, that's actually a good question, but like I say, it's a step-by-step process. They do something right, people see that the whole edifice doesn't suddenly collapse, maybe it gets them thinking that doing things right isn't such a bad idea. It's how progress is made!

Just a few years away from what? It was discovered in 1989, by the mid 1990's the evidence was overwhelming (heat/helium ratio, especially, which answered the major objections that had been raised). What some Wikipedia editors and others who don't read the journals think doesn't matter. But as to commercial viability, it might never be viable. It's difficult. Fleischmann said it would take a Manhattan-scale project to make this practical, and he may have been underestimating the difficulty.
I don't care. I suggested it for the symbolism, a courtesy. What will Jimbo do with them?
If the survival of the WMF family of wikis depended on Jimbo going in and pressing Delete, it was lost already. I'm suspecting plan here. Conscious or subconscious.

No shit. A corporation which depended on a serverfarm for its very existence would have very strict controls on sysop access. Wikimedia violates a long list of good, industry-established IT practices every minute of every day....because they "trust people". Weird people, for the most part. Random anonymous freaks, political and religious cranks, paid shills, POV pushers, you name it.

This is where the libertarian ideal meets the hacker ethos.

Remember, we have NO WAY of knowing how many times WMF servers have been compromised in the past. They do not report such intrusions, and I feel it is damned certain they have had some. It's like breaking into Google servers--a big fat world-famous target. You could ask the people who run ED, for instance.


He can crash it. Even if the developers rode shotgun on the servers 24/7, they probably couldn't keep it going in the face of a determined vandal with root access.

No need to be so sensitive, Abd! He said "optimistic," not "delusional." I guess I meant a few years away from being a major part of the power grid, but I've probably misunderstood your position on that, so I apologize.


Right, I was just concerned that it might be taken as a form of... dang, I'm not even sure there's a word for it, or even a viable analogy. It just seems a bit untoward, is all I'm sayin'.


It's a positive step, Abd - that's all it is, if you ask me. Now, they can choose to take more steps forward, or a step or two back like they usually do, or maybe nothing whatsoever. Actually, they could choose to do quite a lot of things, but I doubt anyone really believes this is some sort of major turning point. So... basically, I'm adopting a "wait-and-see attitude."

You are absolutely correct.

If the WMF really want to 'win' in PR stakes, it is precisely what they should do ... to be seen to adopt and incorporate their sternest critic and "heal" the wound.

As with Cold Fusion, it is all classical alchemic stuff ... separation, purification, re-amalgamation

Pollyanish?

Apocalypse soon.


He had no choice but to blink. He wasn't working from a position of integrity on the fundamental values or from a realistic model of prevailing community politics.

So where are we now? Many of the images that Wales deleted have now been restored per 'community consensus'.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...es&month=&year=

And many that have not yet deleted are likely to be restored per discussion among the 'community' here

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...&oldid=39031916

Where does this leave Wales? His main concern, as I reported yesterday, seems to be the threat by Fox news to contact actual or potential donors to Wikipedia. There is also the concern (which is much more of a threat) that school boards could enable filtering on Wikipedia so it is no longer accessible in primary (grade school) or secondary schools. This would have a seriously damaging effect on donations, as well as on Wikipedia's user base, of course.

So, given the actions of the previous two days, his concerns are likely to remain.

I figure a drop-off in juvenile participation will be interpreted as one less argument against filling the servers with more porn, frankly.

Nice shot, man.

For the collection of images which were on Jimbo's list of deletions, we need a graph of net deletions as a function of time.

For example, of the 77 deletions Jimbo made on May 7th (some of which may be duplicates), 48 are currently still redlinked as of this moment.

What's needed is to construct a graph of the net number of redlinked images as a function of time.