According to Cary Bass

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikie...ust/102667.html



What was the recent Board Resolution on BLPs?

The board resolution was this one from April

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolu...f_living_people

Only four months to move on that, eh?

Maybe in another year we'll get a decision from the Task Force that it might be worth looking into this Bacon, Lettuce, and Parmesan issue. Oh, what, that's not what BLP stands for? Well, fuck that then. Bye.

I continue to believe that they're never going to do anything about BLPs because Jimmy enjoys the attention that he gets every time someone's article gets run over by a truck, and if they actually did something about them he'd stop getting as much attention.

That is pretty standard IT behaviour - have a known problem that has some way of being fixed by manual intervention and claim the hero points every time you manage to patch the thing up again.

One of my earliest experiences of this was the overnight batch run that a girl fixed every morning, taking a couple of hours or so. Another person spotted the thing to do was simply run the job again and that got rid of 95% of the errors, just leaving the real ones. The girl was furious at her loss of status - and having to do real work.

Which brings me back to Jimbo. Perhaps one of the real problems is that Jimbo doesn't really have a proper job - he is just keeping himself busy. If he actually had something important to do with his time, aside from laying bimbos which I would not tend to count as fulfilling employment, perhaps he would have a more rational view on what to do about Wiki-problems as he'd be less inclined to be bothered by the crap.

His proper job should have been visionary leadership, but he lacks the requisite skills to play that role.

Meanwhile, he foolishly blocks the opportunity for a qualified person to assume that essential role.

I sincerely hope that they realize that BLP issues don't come up on biography pages only. WP is full of BLP violations on other pages, including talk and user pages.

Admins?

It's pretty much the whole of Wikipedia, isn't it (though I'd bet a load of admins are wannabee* IT geeks)? Another case in point, flagged revisions, where you could have all sorts of different methods for managing the publication of sane versions of an article, but first there was no software, then when they did produce the fix, people would rather run around reverting, banning and generally doing 100 times more work than needed to keep the public view of the encyclopedia sanitised. Same for WikiPorn, rather than working out a solution to allow it to exist while not being automatically exposed to the public, Wikipedians would much rather expend far more effort arguing about censorship.

Everywhere you look, Wikipedia could have been made so much better, but I guess They, whoever They may be, are terrified of losing the magic. Unfortunately, the signs are that by doing nothing and letting Wikipedia sink further into being a cesspit of politics and game-playing, They've lost the magic anyhow.

If Jimbo had vision, he would see that taking actions that made people perceive Wikipedia as a quality product would protect it in the long term. Although it does not have any credible competitors at the moment, you can't help feeling someone like Microsoft, trying to energize their web presence and looking to Google-bash Knol, will send a few thousand code warriors over the top to do battle, come up with a better product and suck the whole of Wikipedia into it, leaving Wikipedia festering with the old guard battling the trolls. You can bet M$ wouldn't leave managing it to swinging in the wind methodology.

That M$ thing might not be so stupid, given that they've killed Encarta.




*Most are too young to be fully fledged IT geeks.

What really gets me: the calmness surrounding this. I don't see any news reports of
angry protesters in front of that stupid little office on Stillman Street.

Despite WP's importance and popularity, I don't see scores of people starting criticism
websites, or writing books about the problems. And I don't see news reports of Jimbo
being harassed, picketed, beaten up, or having his house vandalized. Never before have
I seen a techno-celebrity with so few public critics. (You guys don't count. I don't see
any of you picketing the WMF either.)

That, by itself, ought to tell you how fundamentally unimportant Wikipedia really is to the rest of the world.
Both Facebook and Twitter had major hacker-caused outages yesterday, and it was front page in many
newspapers and mentioned on TV news. When Wikipedia goes offline, the only people complaining are its
obsessive editors and admins......

In my opinion, this is because Wikipedia itself is essentially invisible. People end up at the articles because of Google, and if WP happens to be down, it's just another dead link in the world. Your average person doesn't know and doesn't care about all the drama that happens on Wikipedia, they just care about what Google points them to. This is to say, that your average person never types en.wikipedia.org into a browser. On the other hand, people type facebook.com or twitter.com or google.com all the time, thus they actually care about those sites as such.

That digression aside, I think that the BLP task force (if done right, and who knows if it will be) can be a tremendous step in the right direction. Wikipedia needs to move in the direction of having qualified people with more formalized authority. Of course, the BLP task force may just end up being a collection of OTRS types who do nothing but occasionally bully some poor sap, but I'm willing to believe it might be more than that.

It won't be.

I'm redundantly repeating myself here for the umpteenth time again, but any internal effort to deal with WP's BLP problem will fail, because:


1. Established Wikipedia users don't like outsiders and refuse to cede any degree of control to them

2. Wikipedia users consistently reject any new-feature initiative that would prevent defamatory content from being posted, and have a totally unrealistic conception of their supposed ability to deal with it appropriately after-the-fact

3. WMF management understands implicitly that cheap 'n' easy defamation is a valuable tool for recruiting new users (and that the media continues to measure their "success" quantitatively, not qualitatively)

4. Most WP'ers see BLP subjects as "celebrities" and "fat cats" who all "deserve what they get," i.e., to be defamed, or at least taken down a peg or two

5. Even if people among the WP user base who have consciences actually outnumbered people who don't, the people who don't have more time, energy, and determination to ensure that WP remains an effective free revenge platform

6. An opt-out policy, even if only for people of "marginal notability," would reduce drama


...So you see, as long as they're trying to solve this problem themselves, they have no chance of solving it whatsoever.

Well, as Wikipedia is an aggregation of other web sites (given that the average Wikipedian has a fit within coughing distance of a sheet of paper) if Wikipedia disappeared, the chances are that the information is there to a good enough level anyway.

Facebook actually provides a useful service to the teenage world who seem to arrange their social diaries through it, as well as use it to keep in contact (my youngest still is in contact, in French, with her exchange partner from 2 years ago because of it, so it does seem to have a positive benefit).

If there wasn't problems with BLPs then demonstrably Jimbo wouldn't get laid as often. Its a simple calculus of

Problem with BLP of available female aged 18-75 + Jimbo's libido = Jimbo gets laid + female sells Jimbo's old sweater on eBay

If only I could have thought of that...

ETA: Actually that's a great idea! A web resource of biographies of women, written by willing slaves the community, where any and all problems with said biographies are sorted out for a month of passionate horizontal jogging and they can sell my old clothes for extra cash afterwards.

It's a brilliant scheme! Every body is a winner!

This is an interesting observation, which could perhaps be taken one step further. How many people that found a WP page by googling, actually notice that WP is a whole project rather than some random website with some random info on their topic, or even remember the name 'Wikipedia' as the site where they got their info from?


Heh. I recently asked for a BLP violation to be oversighted, and the full extent of the response I got was an email back reading 'Thank you for your mail', unsigned.

I hate to be the resident optimist, but I think you're off a little on this. The characteristics you describe apply to a vocal minority of Wikipedatypes, but I think the majority (and certainly the majority who pay attention to BLP issues) are very open to taking at least the most basic measures to alleviate the problem. The trouble is, of course, that on Wikipedia a vocal minority is enough to prevent change. The problem is at least as structural as it is cultural.

The structure shapes the culture, and the culture perpetuates the structure. You're talking about the two faces of the same coin.

Yeah, the "structure" is that any time a BLP embarasses WMF (like Jimbo's well-publicized antics, and the whole of the Carolyn Doran bio), WMF has an easy time deleting it. Culture is steamrollered. It's done. End.

We are talking about the powers-that-be having a total double standard. They use the problems of "wiki-culture" as an excuse, of course, but the reality is that when it comes down to BLPs embarassing WMF, or any important person on it, the culture really presents no problems to them. They simply say: "It's our fucking website" and do what they want to remove the embarassing or damaging material.

Clear enough? Cary Bass has no BLP. If he did, and it wasn't protected, he might live to "get it." But he won't.

...and requests for... oh wait! Such pages don't count and cannot create a BLP problem because Google can't see them </pan-american smile>, or at least I get my ass chewed every time I suggest otherwise usually by an arbcom member in fact.

You've sparked an interesting idea; Once the "Biographies of Living Persons task force" is selected there should be a Bio created that outs each member. The Bios that get deleted from Wikipedia can then be hosted elsewhere. Of course it'd have to be a place with wide open editing, so any kook on the internet can 'improve' it, on a site run by juvenile pricks, with some google bombing thrown in for good measure ...

How do you think that'd fly?

To a point that's true. But a majority of Wikipedians are not Randians, free culture zealots, hard-core libertarians or anarchists, or anything else of the kind (those groups are all overrepresented in Wikipedia, certainly, but even collectively they don't make up anything approaching a majority). But Wikipedia's structures, such as they are, all bear the marks of those groups. Why? Because Wikipedia was set up by such people, and the structures in place don't allow for change.

LIke a LEDE balloon. Too POINT-y for the POINTY heads down there, who would just feel personally attacked by it.