I have just spotted this. http://www.wittylama.com/2010/03/the-british-museum-and-me/ (see also the official British Museum announcement from the 'Head of Web' at the Department of Learning and Audiences, The British Museum. https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin...0&F=&S=&P=60254 )

Despite several pages of blather, it is hard to understand what the project is meant to be. Liam Wyatt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Witty_lama, who says the project is 'awesome' will be a 'volunteer Wikipedian in residence'. The 'underlying task' will be "to build a relationship between the Museum and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities both internally and public-facing. These will include:

* creating or expanding existing articles about notable items or subjects of specific relevance to the collection and the Museum's expertise
* supporting Wikipedians already editing articles related to the British Museum both locally and internationally;
* working with Museum staff to explain Wikipedia's practices and how they might be able to contribute directly. As this is a pilot project the scope and scale of the activities will necessarily change as the project progresses.

Liam blathers that it will "harness the educative and collaborative potential of the internet in a way that directly speaks to their mission as public collections to teach and share. Equally, it is a great opportunity for the Wikimedia community to get access to best-practice and expertise to help improve its projects and ways of doing things."

I wonder if there is a PR opportunity for Wikipedia Review here? The Museum side of the project is headed by the intriguingly-named Matthew Cock, who can be found at Twitter http://twitter.com/matthewcock

Perhaps there is a common interest as the British Museum has long maintained the famous cabinet 55 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretum_(British_Museum) which contained material "previously deemed to be obscene" but which it is now making public, such as the Warren cup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Cup, which depicts an adult engaging in anal sex with a young boy. I see Haiduc had an interest in this http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=41545018 .

I see the usual agency problems haunting this already ill defined relationship. The British Museum, like other normal non-profits and public institution knows what volunteers are. They are answerable to their principal (the non-profit or public institution) and the principal is responsible for the acts of their agent (the volunteer.) Wikipedia uses the term "volunteer" as it finds convenient. Usually people who they call "volunteers" are mere contributors of content to their interactive computer service. Such contributors have no agency and when problems arise WMF will just shrug its corporate and shoulders. To make matters worse these contributors are implored to "be bold" and have a community of aggressive free culture fanatics to egg them on. So one day images or other material the Museum didn't know was on table is now available for free license use as backdrop for pornography or the proprietary value of an asset that might have sustained the mission of the Museum is appropriated and wasted. I wonder if the called The National Portrait Gallery for a reference?

They're having some sort of event next Friday at the Museum to celebrate the partnership. I imagine more details about what exactly this is will emerge after that. Frankly, I think more than anything else, this is a career move by Liam Wyatt, who is clearly one of those Wikipedians who wants to leverage his Wikipedia work into a job somewhere (many have tried, few will succeed).

Wikipedia is not a registered charity in the United Kingdom. It's previous application to the Tax Office was rejected because "it did not teach or educate". This to me sounds like a move by the foundation to achieve charity status via a "teaching and educating" relationship with an institution like the British Museum. Wonder if any money passed hands to the museum...

For a brief time, Wikiversity was poised to fill the role of a project organized to "teach or educate" but Jimbo scuttled that two summers ago.

Well Jimbo's loss is another project's gain. I imagine there is some other wiki that has developed a teaching and education resource.

Someone pointed out the potential problems this raises back when it was first announced. Unsurprisingly, it went ahead anyway.

I can see where all this is going. At night, when everybody else is asleep, all the stuff in the British Museum will now come alive on the web, rearrange itself, become unhistorical, start fights, and make giant messes.

Yes, Sacagawea will speak English and not Hidatsa, Theodore Roosevelt will start sounding like Mork from Ork, and the bones of a tyrannosaur will play fetch. And of course, there will be some porn.

You mean to tell me (and this committee) that the Post-Modern Theater of the Absurd will be exported to the UK?

It's not a registered charitable trust, no. I assume you're speaking from a position of legal ignorance? An educational relationship with the British Museum would not qualify it as a valid charitable trust if the current goals do not. Charitable trusts are required to have charitable purpose (such as the promotion of education), and those with other purposes are immediately invalid, unless those purposes are ancillary to the charitable one. You're suggesting that the Chapter would be able to argue "ooh, our entire reason for existence is completely ancillary to Wyatt's residence in the British Museum. That's our purpose".

deodand is David Gerard. Thanks for the tip offs people. Looks like the soldier wasp from the hive has invaded WR. No where's that insecticide?

Ooh, I got a real-name mention! Yet another notch in my WP belt.

Well, Gerard gets some points from me for using his own name on WP. And for not pretending to be anybody but his own weird self. I said that years ago.

Even if his Dec. 2007 Broadweave ISP rangeblock to get at Judd Bagley did show him with his thumb up his butt.

Er, Mr. Gerard, Earth to Mr. Gerard. Bagley was a newbie who showed up on WP to complain that one Gary Weiss was unfairly manipulating the WP system by writing COI articles on topics of his interest, and editing his own bio and those of others in nasty way, using the name "Mantanmoreland." Nobody ever listened to Bagley about Mantanmoreland's identity and his many socks. Although Mantan did have many socks, and was just as conflicted as Bagley said he was. Nobody ever explained to Bagley about the home-court advantage-- they just tried to shut him down and shut him off. Starting with SlimVirgin, of course.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wi...tock/print.html

Alas, since WP does not own the internet, it didn't work. Nevertheless, Gerard's monster rangeblock STILL to this day stands as the peak of WP trying to get back at somebody in the real world who is thumbing their nose at it. It's a bigger rangeblock, covering more IP addresses used by real people, than WP ever tried to imiplement even against GRAWP. And it was all against a guy who wasn't even a vandal, but turned up on WP just to complain about somebody else's unfair treatment of his boss and the company he worked for. Damn. Especially since he was right.

You made it happen, Gerard! You can be proud! Perhaps there's something about the British Museum you can screw up that will be just as embarassing.

I don't know if that's right or not. It would be interesting because DG is such a lackey to Mr.Wales, at least to his face, and when he slips off his leash (perhaps literally):

Jimbo has previously described himself as an objectivist.

God bless Google archives.

You can't be that surprised. You're the stock example I always use when Jimbo's encouraging someone with a glaring COI to continue on Wikipedia. (Something with this much potential for a high-profile screwup, I assume would have been approved by the mother-ship.) I don't dispute the WMF's right to boot you off—they own the thing, after all—but they could at least be consistent in applying their own rules.

Hahaha. I'm David Gerard now? A Jimbo lackey? Considering I can't stand Jimbo and use Gerard as a standard example (along with Pauline Hanson) of "how the aussies always seem to send us the batshit expats) that's kinda surprising. Still, I've been called worse things than Gerard (although few worse things than a Jimbo lackey).

How do those compare to the rangeblocks against me? Mike Umbricht blocked something like a quarter-million IPv4 addresses in Greater Boston, Mike Lifeguard blocked half a million IPv4 addresses nationwide, and Ottava block an astronomical number of IPv6 addresses worldwide to silence me.

I wish I was that kind of deodand; being handsome and muscular would be nice. A deodand is a piece of personalty that kills someone, such as a horse kicking someone in the face. In the Good Ol Days ™ these deodands would be confiscated by a representative of the King and sold off, the money being used to pay for charitable or beneficial purposes to make up for the harm caused by the whole "death" thing. All nice and smiley, except it being the 16th century the money was normally spent on hookers, wine and the good life.

And I was trying to stay out of this conversation.

The keys to the Deodand lock aren't difficult to sort out. In fact, the choice of the "deodand" as a name pretty much gives it away.

Well, yes. If one was paying attention to the identified user's recent editing activity, his (my?) choice of commenting here would also be explained.

How does a horse work locks?

For that “unfresh” feeling …



Jon

Ottava, you really are an incredible prick.

At the time I understood Gerard's rangeblock to be on of those IPv4/8 blocks (class B), which means that it potentially blocks something like 255^3 = 16.58 million addresses. Of course, how many it really gets depends on who owns the blocks.

That's a Class A network. Class B is IPv4/16.

I believe Class B is 24 bits. The range of a rangeblock isn't counted the same way as the range of the network itself. One of these slash numbers is 32 bits minus the other. Thus, a block against a /24 Class B range (IPv4/24) would be a 32 bits - 24 bits = a "/8" rangeblock (the biggest WP allows its admins).

I know it's counterintitive, but the larger the /N number is for the range, the larger the range is, but the SMALLER the /N bit number of the rangeblock, the wider the rangeblock. Not the least of the problem is that "block" here is being used in two senses of the word, as in an (edit)block against a (number)block (bloc).

Milton

[Edit] Okay, looking up the class system, I see that a /8 CIDR bloc covering a 24 bit range can either be labeled "256 B" or "1 A." So call the rangeblock of that whatever you like. It basically blocks IPv4 addresses of NNN.xxx.xxx.xxx for any x.

MIT has a Class A network, 18.xxx.xxx.xxx. The MIT Media Lab has a Class B Subnet, 18.85.xxx.xxx.

At home I use two Class C Subnets, 192.168.181.xxx and 192.168.182.xxx, of the Class B Private Network, 192.168.xxx.xxx.

That's only 10 addresses.

In other words, the population of Utah.

Jon

Don't confuse and mislead us with your dark IPv4 arts, necromancer!

Confusion is the first step toward Enlightenment.

I'm installing one of these on Saturday, hooked up to a wireless access point, and accessed remotely with the help of dyndns.com.

But I'm just a sorcerer's apprentice.

The default setting (below) does not appear to be over-ridden on any project.

Have you seen any blocks larger than /16? That would imply some kind of duplicity and skulduggery.

Well, I have heard some apocryphal anecdotes about an admin blocking 0.0.0.0/0 on a bad day, evidently before Feb. 2004 (and perhaps immediately so).


Yet somehow the button will block the same range denoted by the numbers you enter, so your sentence doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.

Having been a victim of "collateral damage" myself I decided one day to figure out how they work. The simplest explanation is that blocking A.B.C.D/N affects all addresses which have the first N bits in common with A.B.C.D.

So if (WXYZ & RRRR) == (ABCD & RRRR)—where "&" is the bitwise AND (or "B&" jajaja) operator and RRRR is a bit-mask composed of N ones and (32 − N) zeroes—then W.X.Y.Z cannot edit.

The A.B.C.D in question need not be first IP in the range denoted by A.B.C.D/N, but it is customary to write it that way.

Ragnablök Calculator

… J n …

He'll have to get a whole lot prickier to even approach Gerard's staggering levels of prick.
(And don't forget that Gerard's "wife" still plays with dolls.)

The link didn't work for me, but that sounds like something I would have said in response. Moulton was freaking out that night when I blocked IPv6 and my response was just to go: "Mwah ha ha ha ha ha!"

I sent you the post in a PM.

My PMs were disabled in the process of a moderator trying to humiliate me by disabling any ability for me to defend myself as I was lied about. So, I don't have any.

Here.

Whoops! Real world intervenes on the FreeWikiInfoLoveFest:

That security person deserves the thanks of a someday grateful nation.

The reek of hypocrisy is almost tangible. That's £500 (or $750, if you prefer) of my tax, going to subsidize Jimbo and his boys. I don't have any particular issue with paid editing on Wikipedia or anywhere else, provided it's not blatant spamming and POV pushing; I sure as hell have an issue with direct government subsidy to pay people to write advertorial on Wikipedia.

Comes the dawn where the sun never set before …

J☼N

Not surprisingly, there has been no answer to this question.

Things are picking up -- the True Believers are making their case:



"an paid", "benifit", indeed!

So, Liam states matter-of-factly that "Wikipedia Review was an attempt to use Wikipedia as an paid advertising platform for commercial organisations." According to the Wikipedia article about Wikipedia Review, there is no mention of its being advertising related, whatsoever.

I wonder if Liam could describe how the following was an advertisement?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=76592206

What portion of that "advertisement" included a promotional offer, a call to action to the consumer, or a "reason to believe" proposition? I'm having trouble finding it. Looks just like any other old Wikipedia article about a Fortune 1000 company.

Wikipedia defines advertising as such: "intended to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to purchase or take some action upon products, ideals, or services. It includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade a target market to purchase or to consume that particular brand."

Were any of you persuaded to purchase coal from Arch Coal by that article of mine?

I wonder if Liam is constructing a straw man, so that he may knock it down.

And let me share some personal e-mail with you all.

Here's how a 19-year-old Mediawiki coder under contract with the Wikimedia Foundation responds to criticism:



19-year-olds just hate being called "child".

Personally, I'm surprised that you're not taking more pride in becoming "troll-in-chief" I think it has a lovely ring to it.

Well, he wasn't responding to your rather well-reasoned criticism as much as he was responding to the insulting paragraph tacked on at the end.