http://durova.blogspot.com/2009/06/biograp...s-ingenius.html

Durova gives "thanks to the folks at WikiVoices for the brainstorm that led to this idea". Even though we've been demanding these obvious measures for years.

See also: The usual snarky crap from BLP extremist JoshuaZ in the comments section.

I think he is skeptical that a vague gray area could exist, in which an article is not good enough to index, but not bad enough to delete. It's difficult to envision right now I know.

If flagged revs is ever turned on, this close to how I'd hope it would work. That is, only last known-good version would be indexed, and a page without any would not be indexed at all, BLP or not. I realize this wouldn't do much good as the approved parameters are weak (otherwise they wouldn't have gotten 51+% support), but it should at least keep defamatory material from being preserved in the cached page excerpts appearing on the search engine screen. All along I've been wanting the configuration used at the German WP but I keep getting attacked for that on the basis that I should know better than to think anyone else would support that. I probably should.

Also I don't know if it's already been discussed here but somebody did asked me to post a link to this.

For the record, that's August 26–28. This year's exotic location is Buenos Aires.

I guess the next step would be to ask Brion what the fuck is taking so long. Last time somebody (Cla68) posed this question it was immediately followed by an OMG-please-don't-turn-it-on comment from User:Iceflow.

Might be a good time to ask again.

Anyway if "ingenius" actually was a word I'm not sure whether it would be a synonym like "inflammable" or an antonym like "insane".

"Essentially an external concern" like the lives of people living out there in the real world.

When NOINDEX came out, I slapped it on some BLPs highlighted (and not much improved) from old BLP/N posts. Then someone told me that it's ineffective in the mainspace.

CW: the German Wikipedia is the boogy man in these debates ("three week backlog, no sir!"). Refusing to accept anything less was not productive. Besides, protecting BLPs does the most good because BLPs necessarily have more Google juice cued by the name than other random articles. As far as compromises go, turning on the feature with the understanding that we focus on BLPs is a savvy move. Once it's on we can spread it.

"Hear, hear!!"

I don't think this should be used on a permanent basis, only for pages which have no approved version. If we have users trying to add content which fails review as it isn't fit to publish we can get rid of these users. If we have reviewers who approve content which should have failed review (because it isn't fit to publish), we can get rid of these reviewers. If we have articles where no version is fit to approve because nobody has added anything fit to publish we can get rid of the article.

Adding a tag that suggests that the problem is solved if google ignores it isn't productive either.


I know most of my edits to der deutschsprachigenwiki have been approved within a few hours. The statistics page says average wait is "81h57m41s" and the median is "5h30m22s" which isn't bad at all. But even if it is three weeks I can live with that.

I agree actually. When you look at the stats, something like 98% of the articles are flagged up-to-date at any moment. Just a small minority fall through the cracks. And frankly, if no one ever reviews them and they're so low-traffic, I think the edits should stay out until someone looks.

I think we agree on ends, but not on means. In those debates we needed was to have it flipped on. It was counter-productive to oppose policies that could be later rewritten in practice. Just turn it on, and we'll hash out better policies as we go--after all, we can edit those. Not so with the software.

I suppose it's conceivable that someone connected to "WikiVoices" had this "idea" four long years ago, at which point us WR folks got it from them? And Durova is only now noticing it, after all this time...?

More likely she just doesn't want to give the "trolls" any credit for, well, anything whatsoever.

I realize that any form of positive change is unpalatable to WP'ers, and intolerable if it doesn't originate "internally" - but frankly, I wouldn't even call this an idea, I'd call it "common sense." (Which is why it'll probably never be implemented.)

In addition to sharp BLP criticism, this site ironically provided a platform for viciously false attacks on named living people, notably Durova herself.

I wouldn't acknowledge this place either.

Durova is a moron and so are you. That's the Jon's Honest Truth.

Imagine how inconvenient it would be for you if the Jon's Honest Truth about you were published for all the world to see in the guise of your Wikipedia Bio.

Moron.

Ja Ja

Yeah, it would have been better to flip on the software as soon at was developed and flip off those (including at least one of your fellow arbcombatants) who condemned it as The End Of Wikipedia As We Know It.

Even if this is going to be enabled "before August 26–28" I still worry that it will be super-glued at a useless setting in which (as with semi-protection) all users are equal again after four days and ten edits.

Jayvdb mentions on wikien-l that this idea isn't original and has been discussed here and elsewhere before.

I question Durova's sincerity on the BLP issue. She scraped my bio and all I did was list her Facebook friends — info that was privacy-unprotected and already available to a few hundred million people!

A cynical read of her proposal goes like this: Let's fuck someone over, and then if they complain we'll hide it out of sight. Surely the answer lies in Wikipedia actually publishing decent bios in the first place, rather than restricting access to the crap ones.

This can go with all the other failed attempts to fix the BLP issue.

But in effect, we're simply accepting the fact that "Wikipedia actually publishing decent bios in the first place" is an impossibility. And since "Wikipedia vanishing off the face of the internet forever and ever" is almost as unrealistic, well... there you go.

Remember, at least 90 percent of BLP subjects actually want to have those articles appear in Wikipedia and have little or no problem with them being at the top of Google results. (In fact, it may be more like 97 percent.) There's really no reason to "noindex" all BLP articles just to be "consistent" or to "err on the side of caution," all on behalf of just a few thousand people (i.e., legitimate BLP "victims") at most. And it also should not be necessary for the article subject to intervene in all, or even most, cases - a simple agreement among WP users that the article is too biased or inaccurate, or is the target of too much vandalism or edit-warring, should be perfectly sufficient to allow for this.

I suppose there are other things they could do too, like make all new articles "noindex" by default until an admin comes along and "approves" them for indexing - it's a little excessive, but it might also help with the mass-stub-creation problem, actually.

Remember, perfectionism is the enemy of progress...


Well, as long as it's OK if I don't acknowledge Wikipedia itself as being a source of ideas for positive change, that's perfectly fair then.

More than fair. Positive change--any change at all, for that matter--is not received well under "consensus" governance.

There is nothing ironic about self defence or retribution. Not in the least.

Thus, criticism of the Pearl Harbor attack by anyone in the US is not "ironic" in light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We didn't start that fight. We merely ended it. Complaints by Japan about "war attrocities" against them, are ironic.

Justice often, in fact usually, comes down to who throws the first punch. If you stumble on a good fistfight in the middle of it, you can't tell the good-guy from the bad-guy. Or indeed if these labels even apply (though they well may). But there is a difference.

Wikipedia started the privacy-invasion, revenge-defamation mill. The only "irony" is when they (or somebody with authority over there) complains about it being returned upon them. Your message above, for example, is ironic.

I agree, but in retrospect, we probably should have deleted most of those "Durova is an FBI agent who's out to destroy me" threads as soon as they were started. It may have been just one or two people, but after a while it starts to get a little ridiculous.