Mailing List Archive

2009/2/3 Thomas Larsen <larsen.thomas.h@gmail.com>:
> We now have 25 contributors and 118 articles.

How many of those are copied from Wikipedia (I've checked and at least
some are)? What are your plans for using Wikipedia content, assuming
the licenses become compatible?

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Your initial announcement was fine. Continuing to spam is not.

Fred


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On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud@fairpoint.net> wrote:

> Your initial announcement was fine. Continuing to spam is not.
>
> Fred
>

Agreed, please don't spam here further.

--
Alex
(User:Majorly)
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Basically you've just said "we're going to be just like wikipdia except we
won't let incivlity, personal attacks and other bad stuff like that happen".
How will you stop it? Blocking? Then you're just like wikipedia.
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On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Patton 123 <pattonabc@gmail.com> wrote:

> Basically you've just said "we're going to be just like wikipdia except we
> won't let incivlity, personal attacks and other bad stuff like that
> happen".
> How will you stop it? Blocking? Then you're just like wikipedia.
>

No, removing uncivil editors will stop incivility.

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Alex
(User:Majorly)
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I would also like to say that a community run by a
http://meta.epistemia.org/wiki/Council is a community destined to fail...
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2009/2/3 Nathan <nawrich@gmail.com>:
> I don't think Thomas Larsen needs to remind us about Epistemia regularly,
> although I can't say it really bothers me. It isn't spam, though.

I don't think this email was spam - it was informing a larger audience
(foundation-l rather than just wikien-l) of the project now that it is
up and running. That seems reasonable to me. Any more after this
(unless it gets to the point where there are notable announcements
like "We've just created our nth article", what value of 'n' is
considered notable is somewhat subjective) would probably be spam.

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> Basically you've just said "we're going to be just like wikipdia except
> we
> won't let incivlity, personal attacks and other bad stuff like that
> happen".
> How will you stop it? Blocking? Then you're just like wikipedia.

Actually, no. Wikipedia no longer enforces civility. At least not against
aggressive well-established players like Giano. Actually, it never did
much. So, whoever is aggressive and persistent can determine the content
of the information on the 8th largest website.

Fred



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> I would also like to say that a community run by a
> http://meta.epistemia.org/wiki/Council is a community destined to fail...
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

That is just a knockoff of the arbitration committee and performs more or
less the same function.

Fred



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Hi,

On 2/4/09, Patton 123 <pattonabc@gmail.com> wrote:
> I would also like to say that a community run by a
> http://meta.epistemia.org/wiki/Council is a community destined to fail...

I beg to differ. A community run by a democratically-elected council
of active community members seems, to myself at least, a step forwards
from the largely-autocratic, detached management committees that are
so prevalent in this day and age among Internet community projects.

—Thomas Larsen

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Hi all,

On 2/4/09, Fred Bauder <fredbaud@fairpoint.net> wrote:
>> Basically you've just said "we're going to be just like wikipdia except
>> we
>> won't let incivlity, personal attacks and other bad stuff like that
>> happen".
>> How will you stop it? Blocking? Then you're just like wikipedia.
>
> Actually, no. Wikipedia no longer enforces civility. At least not against
> aggressive well-established players like Giano. Actually, it never did
> much. So, whoever is aggressive and persistent can determine the content
> of the information on the 8th largest website.

Fred Bauder has it exactly right. Wikipedians now accept incivility
and rudeness as part of their daily operations. Worse, some of them
seem to believe that it's actually a _good_ thing.

Epistemia's culture, from the very start, will be one where incivility
and rudeness are rejected without question. Indeed, our policy (found
at http://meta.epistemia.org/wiki/Policy, and it's all on one page, by
the way!) states that "[i]n order to maintain a positive community and
a productive environment in which to work, users who deliberately
engage in serious or repeated violations of these standards may be
banned indefinitely from participating, regardless of the quality or
extent of their work on the project". That's a far cry from
Wikipedia's civility policy, which states that "[a] pattern of
incivility is disruptive and unacceptable, and may result in blocks if
it rises to the level of harassment or egregious personal
attacks"—Wikipedia is so keen to attract contributors that it only
blocks people for incivility if that incivility rises to the level of
harassment or personal attacks.

I invite you to step up, create an account at Epistemia, and start
contributing—or, at least, offer your views and give constructive
criticism. We're open to improvement.

—Thomas Larsen

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Thomas Larsen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On 2/4/09, Fred Bauder <fredbaud@fairpoint.net> wrote:
>
>>> Basically you've just said "we're going to be just like wikipdia except
>>> we
>>> won't let incivlity, personal attacks and other bad stuff like that
>>> happen".
>>> How will you stop it? Blocking? Then you're just like wikipedia.
>>>
>> Actually, no. Wikipedia no longer enforces civility. At least not against
>> aggressive well-established players like Giano. Actually, it never did
>> much. So, whoever is aggressive and persistent can determine the content
>> of the information on the 8th largest website.
>>
>
> Fred Bauder has it exactly right. Wikipedians now accept incivility
> and rudeness as part of their daily operations. Worse, some of them
> seem to believe that it's actually a _good_ thing.
>
I must be editing in the wrong places, because I make thousands of edits
yet rarely encounter incivility. On the mailing lists, sure, but rarely
on the wiki. Where I do, it's extremely limited cases that are almost
entirely predictable.

One is deletion. I generally these days write in areas where it doesn't
come up. But when I tried covering pop culture it was pretty annoying to
deal with (despite meticulous sourcing), and made it pretty easy to get
into conflicts.

The other is controversial topics with clear partisans ---
Israel/Palestine, Hindu nationalism, Balkan nationalism, topical
political issues, religion-related articles, etc. But it'd tricky to
figure out how to avoid *that*. I personally would argue for expansive
conflict-of-interest rules: when writing about a Croatian-Serbian
conflict, for example, anyone who is connected with Croatia or Serbia or
their cultures should recuse themselves when discussion gets heated. But
generally Wikipedia's declined to consider this a conflict of interest
on par with editing your own business's article. If that isn't going to
be done, I think the only effect of civility rules will be to create
simmering passive-aggresive conflicts, which to some extent already
happens (the 3RR just means partisans revert 3x per day every day for
months on end).

But the vast majority of the encyclopedia isn't either of those, so I'm
not sure why people are seeing incivility everywhere?

-Mark


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Delirium wrote:
> conflict-of-interest rules: when writing about a Croatian-Serbian
> conflict, for example, anyone who is connected with Croatia or Serbia or
> their cultures should recuse themselves when discussion gets heated. But

The only thing you will achieve is that people will pretend to not be
connected with Croatia or Serbia when they want to edit these articles.
So you will have only the most stubborn people, willing to edit nothing
else but these articles, editing them.

> generally Wikipedia's declined to consider this a conflict of interest
> on par with editing your own business's article. If that isn't going to

In my dealing with humans I came to understanding that every action has
a reaction, and that this reaction can lead to the opposite of what you
want to achieve.

In this example:
* Desired outcome: prevent business articles from being filled with
propaganda.
* Action: forbid people to edit articles about their business.
* Reaction: people pretend that they are someone else when editing
articles about their business.
* Actual outcome: business articles are filled with propaganda, covertly.

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