Is there anyone here who is an admin (or higher) who will userfy a deleted page for me?

I do not wish to interact with the deleting admin, as that would not be productive for anyone. I'm fairly certain that they would refuse.

So you are a rogue admin, anonymous or not, willing to courtesy userfy this page

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...=edit&redlink=1


Thanks

This looks innocuous enough. I have no problem userfying it.

The page is now available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wjhonson...r_local_history

On the contrary, that page isn't "innocuous" at all - it's part of Mr. Wjhonson's general (and quite sinister) effort to drop Wikipedia's BLP notability standards to little more than passing mentions in obscure news articles and blog postings, and return it to the days of easy, cheap revenge-grabbing (which, admittedly, some of us don't believe have actually passed).

Undeleting that page is far, far worse than what Everyking was desysopped for, and will have a far more negative impact on Wikipedia as well.

Wjhonson is one of Wikipedia's worst offenders when it comes to supporting anonymous libel and revenge against living, identifiable people.

Of course, I wouldn't expect an under-18 person such as yourself to realize that, now would I?

This isn't the place to make this kind of request. You should have made this request "on wiki." This is a criticism site unaffiliated with Wikipedia. Isn't there a "Request to Userfy" noticeboard somewhere on WP?

On the subject of your page, I don't understand how you can have a "local history" project on a global project like Wikipedia. I could understand a "History of Boston" or "History of the Chicago-Metro Area" or something like that. Just "local history" does not make sense.

"The Cayman Islands" ? I wonder who that could be.

Anyone can see my list of contributions and make up their own mind about my worth to the project.

As far as making the request in-world, I did that as well before I came here.

The Joy, "Local History" doesn't refer necessary to a particular place, it refers to a type of history. The history of people who did not necessarily have a national impact. Such as for example a state senator, or the mayor of a large town who didn't make national news for anything.

These people may be famous locally, to some area smaller than a nation, and that's why it's called "Local" history.

[I modified my comments to remove one sentence that was a tad... direct.]

As far as I can tell, you're everything we don't like here on WR, trying to write BLPs of ordinary people on the web. Why don't you go first?

You mean where you failed to tell Peter what you wanted undeleting, or where you were told of an appropriate place to make a request?

I'm referring primarily to your efforts on WikiEN-L, actually, where anytime someone makes a positive suggestion regarding greater care, caution, or respect for BLP article subjects, you're always there to argue vehemently against it. You were doing it just a couple of weeks ago. I could go back and find dozens of additional examples...

Moreover, you manage to come up with things that make me actually agree with Dave Gerard, which may be even worse, in some respects.

On the plus side, I've stopped reading WikiEN-L because everything you post there depresses me, making me think that there's not only no hope for Wikipedia, there's no hope for the Internet in general. So that's one less person paying attention to your fascinating internal discussions!

What are you talking about ?
I have no idea. Can you be more clear please?

What does anything I said have to do with writing BLPs, or with ordinary people on the web?



I did not "fail" to tell him, I deliberately did *not* tell him. There's a difference.

I was not told of an "appropriate" place to make this request, I was told to request it of him. I did not find that suggestion appropriate. Just as if I hire a person to do a job, and they screw it up, I don't find it appropriate to be told, that I must give them a chance to fix it.

I'd rather hire someone else to fix a screw-up, as would every other rational being in the entire cosmos (and some irrational ones as well).



The amount of "care, caution and respect" we currently have for BLP article subjects, is already too much. That's my opinion. Evidently some others in the community agree with me. And that's where the policy situation stands. That I alone (praise God) have so much impact that I can swing the entire community on my pinkie is amazing to me. I never knew that, so thank you.

The hope for Wikipedia is to not hide it's head in the sand. If reliable sources state that Britney Spears is the product of an alien and a zebra than we should report it. If reliable sources state that President Obama slipped on a banana peel, fell down forty nine steps and then jumped up just fine because he is actually a robot then we should report it.

Our function is not to hide statements reported by reliable source simply because they make us squeemish.

But specific wikiprojects already deal with local history. If I lived in Cook County, Illinois, I would likely be involved in the "Cook County, Illinois" wikiproject, or the Chicago wikiproject. I see no reason to belong to a "Local History" wikiproject. I studied history and I have done research in local history for my hometown. On Wikipedia, I would go to the wikiproject that deals with my geographic area and its history, not to the "Local History" wikiproject. It's superfluous. For a wikiproject to work, you have to have support. Do you have enough people willing to work on this?

Even if your project does get off the ground, you'll have to contend with WP's Notability and Reliable Sources policies (which can be a pain to find on local subjects, especially if the local papers don't keep archives and many don't keep their papers after X time has past), and be able to address and assuage BLP concerns (as Somey mentions). Even if someone in my hometown got on some of the news networks for doing something stupid like marrying a deer, I don't believe it would be right to have a Wikipedia article about him. You can't have a legalistic ethic on Wikipedia. Even if policy allows you to do it, you really need to ask yourself "should I do it?" Once you get a BLP article on someone, it is difficult to remove it or protect it from malicious intent. If you start it, the responsibility of keeping it clean and libel-free is in your hands. And if you can't do that, the BLP subject is going to be pissed.

And guess who he's going to be mad at?

That post made me laugh. David Gerard is right on the money sometimes. On the BLP issue, he's usually with the forces of truth and justice.

On Wikipolitics, I don't care about inclusionism or date formatting, or anything else--I'm essentially a one-issue voter, and I notice that some of the figures demonized on this site (SlimVirgin, David Gerard, Jimbo, and whoever else) are mostly in agreement on the BLP issue. As far as I'm concerned, these people are all allies of a more responsible Wikipedia.

The BLP extremists are an obnoxious minority (but of course, they couldn't have done it without the help of WP:CONSENSUS, a policy that seems specifically tailored for dysfunction).

(says it all, really)

This project was to co-ordinate all other local history projects, under one umbrella. By the way, I have no idea what you mean by all these other local history project teams, I don't see them. Perhaps there are a dozen or so here and there, but that's not what this project was for. I haven't encountered them. But that's all beside the point. I ask for the page to be *userfied*. Anyone's assumption that that means I'm going to try to reactivate the project is misguided and irrelevant.

I do recall Daniel Brandt praising Slim Virgin for her BLP stance and trying hard to remove Daniel's bio. Many here do try to give people credit when they do the right thing.

Still, one good deed is not enough to redeem a man of a lifetime of wickedness.

"Daniel Brandt" gets 42000 Googs.
Seems notable.
I only get ...oops... 110000 ...

I'd better shut up.

Alas, I have a similar fear.


Alison, could you coach Emesee on the appropriate use of emoticons?

WP:REFUND

I guess we'd better get that article started:



Knol: http://knol.google.com/k/will-johnson/will...4hmquk6fx4gu/1# (In future, please wear a shirt when posing for photos - think of the children!)

You should be banned from the project.


Freelance biographer. $25 per hour. Pushing Wikipedia to allow biographies on the "faintly notable". OH MY! Do we have a paid editor here pushing us to change Wikipedia policy in such a way as to further open up living people to libel so that he, a morally bankrupt "biographer", can make a few bucks?

Hmm... the powers that be on the big W.P. might be interested to see this.

Nawh, just another soldier in Web 2.0's reserve army of labour.

In a community so evidentially dysfunctional ignorant and corrupt, that's hardly a surprise, is it? And besides, your supportive "community" may only be half a dozen people going by various names like Kirsten Erikson or those created by JoshuaZ anyway, so your claims of support are meaningless.

I've maintained that "faintly notable" people who WANT a biography on Wikipedia ought to get one. And, when they eventually change their minds, they should be able to remove it. It's just a MMORPG, after all. It's like Facebook, just with different mark-up.

Earlier.

Before you suggested people googled you.

Just a tip for next time...

Good luck.

That goes without saying. Who'd want to pay for their highly-ranked payback machine when they can get it for free?


I wouldn't call it "impact," but why is it so amazing? The squeaky wheel gets the grease. If you keep harping on something long enough, reasonable and rational people get tired of it and give up. You're not swinging the community, you're outlasting the community. What's more, I believe you're perfectly aware of this, and that this is a deliberate strategy on your part - it's the only thing (aside from financial remuneration, see below) that logically explains your persistence.


...Aaaaaaaaand it's right in with the strawman arguments.

For the roughly 800-zillionth time, we're not talking about Britney Spears and Barack Obama here, we're talking about Sam Kapinsky of Hackensack, NJ, who unintentionally thwarted a bank robbery one day and had his right arm shot off in the process, and was thereafter the subject of an article in the Hackensack Daily News. Does that person really need a Wikipedia article with his name on it? I say no, but you, quite clearly, say yes. Why is that? You've never come up with a satisfactory answer to that question; you only produce these strawmen about Britney and Barack, and go on about "what the sources say." There's no qualitative bar in your universe, below which people should be allowed to have privacy and freedom from having to monitor a publicly-editable website in case of revenge-attacks for the rest of their lives.


Whose "function" is it, then? And why do you deign to speak for everyone?

More to the point, it has nothing to do with whether or not it "makes you squeamish." Nobody cares about your squeamishness, in fact - people do care about privacy and other people's respect for it, however.


Doesn't sound like much of a business model, but I suppose if you've already got enough money to live on for a while, it might at least keep you from becoming completely indolent.

In the old days, there were actually a large number of "professional genealogists" who would do things like get a list of everyone in a particular region with the same last name, design a bogus "family crest," and then send them all a mailing, offering them a "certified" framed print of the crest for $100 or so (if enough people ordered them). Please wait 8-10 weeks for delivery, etc. Another one was the "family book," though that was less bogus - it actually required some research, going to libraries and looking up whatever it was that people with that last name had done throughout history. I always suspected that they worked in some sort of secret consortium, dividing up lists of last names among them so as to not compete with each other... Wikipedia, presumably, has hurt these people just as much as it's hurt reference publishers and journalists, since now anyone who wants to know the exploits of someone with the same last name can simply type it into a search engine, and voila. I felt sorry for them because of this, but if the new technique is to wear down the rest of the WP "community" until they drop "notability" standards to near-zero, and then make money off the resulting BLP's, well then... maybe not so much.

There's truth in what you say.

I especially like "It's like Facebook, just with different mark-up."

But they'd need to admit that first, and while it is what it is, it is what it is.

The problem, as I know you know, with allowing "people who WANT a biography on Wikipedia ought to get one. " is how you assert their right to wanting one against a "community" want to them not having one without much dramah.

The games don't mesh.

It works ok on your site - I just set up a couple of articles in your Directory space for one of my customers.

Different game, different rulez...

Unacceptable. Because if we make it so that "faintly notable" people get a biography because they want one, then we open it up for people to create biographies on "faintly notable" people that don't want them.

We don't need biographies on the faintly notable. That's not encyclopedic. We don't serve as ad space for nobodies.

Exactly right - see the WP rules are you can't have a bio unless WP (as determined by its community and admins) determines you may.

They will make and apply the rules which govern this.

These rules of notability will be different from all other rules of notability because, well, someone could get sued, or hurt.

So pokemon good, notable - pokemon player bad, unnotable...


Don't please get me wrong - I understand both sides of this - and I understand why the notability for BLP has been set higher than that for articles.

It's a silly situation created by some bizarre concept that really I don't understand.

As I see it, if your encyclopedia has poor articles about:

1 Things
2 People
3 Concepts

Guess who'll complain the most, at the highest level. (clue: things and concepts rarely complain)

And thus will policy be framed and enforced.

That Wiki-ism is as priceless as WP:TEMPLAR

Here's his web job-seeking application, from 4 years ago:



There's an old CV with street address given in Santa Cruz, also, different from the mailing address. Still have that house? Sell it in bad economy? Divorce, and wife still has it? Any children? There's so much more available on you in public records, and so much more the world wants to know about this man, without digging through so much old google stuff. He deserves to be better known. In so many ways.

That:

"I have been a multi-value programmer since 1983 when my first multi-value job in Chicago was at the Academy for General Dentistry."

is SO going on my wall

I know - I'm cheap, tell me about it...



It seems so long ago you said that, now...

What was your point, exactly ?...

I've got confused with all the crosstalk.

At first I thought you guys were being hard on the johnson. But after reading his various bios and CV I'm not so sure.

I used to be a male prostitute. You can do better than just find my registrant info!
There's smut on me all over the net already!
I have nothing to hide... um... almost.



You're the funniest monkey in the zoo Lara. I mean it sincerely!
Take your best shot dear.




I want people to google me. I want to hit "top google search" at least once in my meaningless empty and pathetic life




I missed something. What's funny or interesting about that?

Yeah - in the cold light of day it's not as funny as it seemed at the time - I've taken it off the wall.

Still, in a conversation about notability, it's a handy illustration of the type of article you'd get with free for all BLPs.

I think it's pretty notable that my 6 year old has started to write her first work of fiction, about imaginary monsters who live on the moon - she's done a whole page so far, and even spelled a few words right. It's notable to me, and to her mum, and the other people who love her - but at this point, if I'm honest, a WP biography for her wouldn't be particularly appropriate, or useful, for the rest of the knowledge-seeking world. I made her a website, instead - that works.

By the way, you didn't answer my question.

You're probably thinking that because the wingnuts (and I use that term with a caseload of endearment not unlike a case of moldy brie covered in whiskey) have lambasted me in a particularly odd spew of bile, that I advocate biographies for each living person.

I don't. I never have.

If we have a reliable source, that states X, Y and Z. We should be *allowed* to report that source. That is not the same thing as saying we should do it. The issue here is force.

You have a newspaper article reporting that the mayor of Peekskill just signed an ordinance outlawing dog poop. *If* we already have an article on that person, or on that city, than we should be *allowed* to cite that newspaper article, within the existing article. Every sentient being in the cosmos agrees.

Next.
You have twelve different newspaper articles on whether Spam can be used as a deadly projectile. You should be *allowed* to cite those in the article on Spam. And if we have no article on Spam, then twelve newspaper articles is certainly notable enough to create an article on Spam. Every sentient being in the cosmos agrees.

The people who scream and jump up and down about BLPs should be banned. Then they should all be rounded up, put in camps, and indoctrinated. But hey that's just my opinion. I would never try to force someone to agree with me by threatening them with repercussion if they don't.

At one time Jimmy agreed with me that the use of force to silence opposition is abhorrent. Perhaps he still does agree with me. But that doesn't mean that the club-wielding minority doesn't score some victories here and there.

[quote name='Somey' date='Wed 23rd September 2009, 9:07am' post='195596']
[quote]
For the roughly 800-zillionth time, we're not talking about Britney Spears and Barack Obama here, we're talking about Sam Kapinsky of Hackensack, NJ, who unintentionally thwarted a bank robbery one day and had his right arm shot off in the process, and was thereafter the subject of an article in the Hackensack Daily News. Does that person really need a Wikipedia article with his name on it? I say no, but you, quite clearly, say yes. Why is that? You've never come up with a satisfactory answer to that question; you only produce these strawmen about Britney and Barack, and go on about "what the sources say." There's no qualitative bar in your universe, below which people should be allowed to have privacy and freedom from having to monitor a publicly-editable website in case of revenge-attacks for the rest of their lives.
[/quote]

First I cut this down to just the point I wanted to address.
So, sorry but you're wrong.
It's only the 211 zillionth time you've said it.

The issue is not whether Sam *needs* an article. The issue is whether we should be *allowed* to create an article. I have never said that Sam needs an article.

So yes there is a qualitative bar in my universe (which you share with me if you didn't know) below which people should be allowed to have privacy. That qualitative bar is this. Stay... out... of... the... public... eye.

If you don't want an article on yourself, then stop beating your wife, shooting at your neighbor, getting arrested for prostitution, running your car through a shop window, and blogging all over the net about your wonderful graphic design company.

It's pretty hypocritical for a person to declare that the only details they want made public in their ever-so-public life, are those they choose. If you are newsworthy, then you are project worthy. Stop being newsworthy. That's the bar.

Like the people who choose to be mentally ill in a manner that amuses you? Asshole.

We should be allowed to do it, even if we shouldn't do it? What is the point in that?



I call bullshit. I'm sentient, and disagree. We're writing biographies, not a collection of everything ever written about a person.



Isn't it great that we can all have opinions - mine is that you are an ass a complete ass, and should be banned. Not because you don't agree with me, but because your opinion on BLPs is so far from what is right and responsible that your presence on WP is a net negative.

Presumably I also need to ensure that I:

Am never the victim of beatings.
Am never shot at by my neighbour.
Never arrest anyone for prostitution.
Never have a shop window through which a car may run...

etc ?

Otherwise you'll be "allowed" to write an article about me, since I've now been propelled above your "bar" ?

By the way, you didn't answer my question.

Maybe I didn't understand your question, what was it again?
By the way, we do have notability guidelines as you know. So it's hardly likely that just because you have a single incident that puts you into the newspaper that you would warrant a biography. You need to be pretty often reported, I'm sure you agree. There is a bar. That bar is not "I don't wanna be", that's not how it works. Biographers do not need permission from their subjects, and we do not want a project where permission is a necessary step. If you are a public figure, you can be biographed. Habitual criminals are just as public as city councilmen.

As I see it, most people who complain about BLP are complaining about what our current policy states. I didn't write that policy. But I'll argue to keep it.

It is possible to change policy, so those who complain about my argument are just too lazy to make the effort. And that's fine. Anyone has the right to be lazy. If I were truly the sole person inworld to adhere to this argument, than policy would already have been changed.

Really people give me too much credit for the creation of policy if they want to rant and rave about my argument, every time it's brought up. Anyone who doesn't like the BLP policy can certainly make the effort to change it.

I didn't think I was ranting or raving - just pointing out what I saw as an inconsistency in the argument where you seemed to be saying that if someone didn't wish to be notable, they should just stop being notable.

I don't really sit firmly on either side of the BLP fence, as I said earlier.


Oh, and the question was:

[quote name='Jim' date='Wed 23rd September 2009, 7:11pm' post='195737']
[quote]
I didn't think I was ranting or raving - just pointing out what I saw as an inconsistency in the argument where you seemed to be saying that if someone didn't wish to be notable, they should just stop being notable.[/quote]

That part of my screed wasn't directed at you


[quote]
[quote]"Daniel Brandt" gets 42000 Googs.
Seems notable.
I only get ...oops... 110000 ...

I'd better shut up.

[/quote]
[/quote]

Daniel Brandt, if you were here during the long drawn-out monkey business, is or was a person who had a biography inworld, but didn't want it. He wanted it deleted, probably citing something like not being notable or something like that. (I wasn't really involved in it.)

That was alluded to earlier in this thread. My response was supposed to show that Daniel was indeed notable since he got over 40,000 hits.

Then when I google'd myself, I found that I got more. So by my own argument, somebody should be allowed to create a biography about me.

Then when I said "I'd better shut up", that was tongue-in-cheek humour of the "oops I stepped in it" variety.

We are not writing biographies. We are playing games with words. There is a huge difference -- the separation of a book report and a book.

Beyond the Wikipedia population (the word "community" doesn't apply) and the lazy people who tap into the web site for instant information, no one considers the stuff on the site to have any cred as a goldmine of professionally crafted and well-researched biographies. The delusion that many Wikipedians carry is that they are creating a work of academic value. The tragedy is that their work has no value -- not in a scholarly measure, not in a commercial measure, and rarely in a literary measure.

Well obviously I meant by intent, not by reality. Not yet anyway.

Reality? On Wikipedia? Cue Rod Serling.

The only posters who have ever annoyed me this much are the racists and possibly DL.

And only yesterday I thought Somey might have been unfair!

Were you banned from WikiEn-l or something, WJ?

That's quite a comprehensive biography of Matt Sanchez you have on your wiki, Will. You should probably add a link to it in the external links section of Matt's bio on Wikipedia because they've left a lot of stuff out.

I should shouldn't I?
Kinda stir the pot while it's hot and bothered...

Well at least the Columbia University wiki sees the virtue in accuracy

How scandalous! A pillar of learning citing all relevant sources!
I'm chagrined

Truthiness-ly I haven't updated my work on Matt for a coon's age. I fix a broken link now and then, but I don't add all the rest of the mischief he's been up to. For that you have to visit the site of journalist Charles Wilson fondly dedicated to Matt.

Everything's relative. For the record, my (real) full name in quotation marks gets... oh wow... zero.

Okay but as much as WP folks love complicated and irregular rules most of them wouldn't know a necessary condition from a sufficient one.


...am never conceived in a (medically) unusual way!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Louise_Brown

Chelsea Clinton has been mentioned in seventeen hundred and forty nine publications.

It's not her *fault* that she is the only child of an ex-President. She didn't ask to be a public figure, and yet there you go.

Should you nominate her article for deletion as well on the grounds of ... what... misadventure of birth?

That's the crucial point, actually. Most people actually don't mind being public figures, whether or not they "ask." It isn't really a question of how a person became a public figure, it's a question of how, and if, a person can stop being a public figure.

Because of the internet, with Wikipedia leading the way, society has reached a point where knowledge about your private life is now ludicrously easy to obtain, and as if that isn't bad enough, equally easy to mess with. In the past, there was at least some sort of barrier to people making massive-scale public attacks on other people - it wasn't cheap (it was quite expensive, in fact), it was hard to do anonymously, and there were many longstanding legal strictures against it. Those legal strictures will catch up to the technology, someday, but it will be too late for Wikipedia and its victims. WP and the WMF will lose, big-time, when that happens, and the roughly 97 percent of otherwise-innocuous content WP carries - the labor of tens of thousands of mostly well-meaning people - may be lost right along with it.

Those well-meaning people should be helping us restore the previous status quo by demanding that Wikipedia police itself properly, and give people a way out if they need and deserve one, assuming such a thing is practical. Chelsea Clinton probably would push the bounds of practicality - as you say, there's too much paper that's been published on her. That's not true of Daniel Brandt, Don Murphy, and tens of thousands of other people. (Though we all know that the number of people who would actually opt out is in the hundreds, not the thousands.)

And if anything, Mr. Johnson, you should be helping us too. By imposing an opt-out policy, Wikipedia could free itself of a great deal of BLP and "Notability-Guideline" baggage. If people could simply ask to have their BLP's deleted, and those requests are respected, there's no reason (other than ongoing maintenance, which is a problem all over the site) to not lower the notability requirements proportionately, just as you've wanted all along. Just don't have articles about people who don't want them, assuming they're otherwise not well-known, and do it.

So why doesn't that happen? Because they don't understand the concept? No, it's because the articles that would be deleted as a result are the most treasured, precious commodities the Wikipedia community has - articles that actually hurt people.

Personally, I don't believe you really want to hurt people, WJ - I have every reason to believe that you just want to write more biographical articles. But you're going about that the wrong way. Regardless of the "notability" requirements, you're only going to fully succeed in that regard if all BLP subjects want those articles to exist, and until they're all given some degree of control, too many of them aren't going to.