Change of pace

I find myself losing faith in the ability of the Wikipedia community to recover from the tailspin it's pushed itself into lately, and I'm not getting much enjoyment out of trolling it, in any case.

The other night, someone (I haven't a clue who) messaged me via ICQ (wow, people still use ICQ) and asked me if I was still working on my Java port. As it happens, I haven't worked on it since late last year, and I regret that. So I'm putting down my sockpuppet army for now and am going back to working on the Java port. I'm actually starting over, with a whole new SVN repository and a new name, too.

Best of luck to the few sane people left in Wikipedia. Hopefully you'll be able to find someone to pick up the pieces after Wikimedia runs out of money....

Today's seething idiocy

Well, the WikiDrama is in high swing today. (Apologies, but I am not going to litter this post with links. If you want to find the originals on Wikipedia, do it yourself.)

It all started with an article about some fat Chinese kid who has apparently been made the subject of Internet ridicule (certainly not a new story; happens all time). Some Internet "meme" addict obviously created the article. A deletion discussion ensued, which was eventually closed precipitously on the grounds that the article violated the "biography of living persons" policy (which it quite clearly did). However, badlydrawnjeff (hereinafter, BDJ) objected to this and initiated a series of procedural maneuvers all intended to bring the article back. Several aborted deletion reviews and deletion discussions later, the issue ended up in front of the Arbitration Committee -- but the ArbCom refused to hear the case. So the whole matter went from there to a Request for Comments, which BDJ basically refused to participate in in any meaningful way, leading to a second Arbitration case against him, also rejected.

All of this is pretty much par for the course for BDJ, who has long viewed himself as a crusader against administrative tyranny on Wikipedia, with a ready willingness to use or abuse process to support his excessive fondness of Internet memes and his extreme inclusionist tendencies. While I really don't agree with BDJ, at least he's consistent.

No, the real problem came after all of the above. After the second ArbCom case was rejected (or at least appeared to be headed for rejection), apparently there was a discussion on the infamous Wikipedia English admins channel, leading to (apparently) a decision by administrator Zsinj to ban/block BDJ. Zsinj was even stupid enough to cite IRC as the reason for the block -- despite there being endless warnings about doing that. Doing so basically guarantees endless screaming and furthermore makes a martyr of BDJ with the "we hate IRC" crowd.

So, we are faced with two possibilities with respect to Zsinj: either he is deliberately attempting to further harm the reputation of the admin's channel, or he is just abjectly stupid. In either case, it's in the interest of the IRC channel that he be removed, at least temporarily. I'm really inclined to do so, although I haven't actually decided yet -- I've elected to defer that decision until morning.

The sad thing is, I really think BDJ should be banned from deletion discussions; he is disruptive there and rarely, if ever, benefit the encyclopedia in his actions. But Zsinj's actions will make it very much harder to impose any form of community sanctions against BDJ. I don't know at this point what Zsinj's intentions were, but it's quite clear that his results were quite harmful.

At the moment, I am strongly inclined to revoke Zsinj's access to the admin's channel for one month. I won't decide on whether to actually do this until morning. And, of course, any of the other channel administrators could override me, after all.

Today's Worst Wikipedian in the World

In his novel Friday, Robert Heinlein presents, through the character of the protagonist's "boss", the thesis that incivility is the hallmark sign of a sick and moribund society (for more on this, see a somewhat interesting article by The Death of Civility, part 2 by Don Webb). Sadly, I see this being the case on Wikipedia.



Of course, I'm sure many of my regular readers are now cleaning the Coke off their monitors, as I am certainly generally known as one of Wikipedia's least civil participants, second perhaps only to Grand Master Giano himself; surely for me to criticize Wikipedians for their lack of civility is the pot calling the kettle black, no? And, yes, I have had certainly had my moments where I have failed to remain civil, although admittedly most of those were for political effect. But I reject any claim that I am in any way responsible for Wikipedia's current crisis of civility, or even that I'm one of the worst offenders.



For example, today's particularly obnoxious offender is recently-promoted Wikipedia administrator Anthony. Despite a very clearly worded statement on my user talk page that I consider such "thank you notes" unwelcome, and despite a general admonishment not to post such notices in the Guide to Request for Adminships, Anthony spewed out a mass-delivered thank you. In the message left on my page, Anthony not only ignored both the general and my specific requests, but even invoked "civility" as an excuse to do so. Apparently, he believes that, because my request is "incivil and rude", he is entitled to ignore it. I have promised to scorn and vilify any editor who ignores my request, and so I hereby do scorn and vilify Anthony for being the rudest Wikipedian I have had the displeasure to deal with in at least the past week or so.



Anybody else feel like submitting him for consideration on Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World? Perhaps I should have a "Worst Wikipedian in the World" periodic segment.... Although I am certainly not going to put a MIDI of Bach on autoplay.... You can always email me suggestions.

Some things were not meant to be

This is one of them.



This post is entirely her fault.

Are we perhaps a weensie bit reductionist?

Today's rant is about Sudan at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Why Wikipedia needs an entire article to say "Yup, they were there" is beyond me.



I suppose the idea is that someone will come along and add endless details about each member of the Sudanese team and how they placed in each event they were in and so on and so forth. Yeah, right. That's going to happen.



I'm sure there are thousands more articles just like this one, too.



I've been copyediting for the past few days, just hitting "random article" and correcting whatever is wrong with the article I find. About one in four articles requires at least some changes, and about one in ten gets substantially rewritten. Most commonly, this occurs because the original is obviously either PR spam or blatant hagiography. It's obvious to me that we underestimate the number of PR agencies and the like that are editing Wikipedia. It's also obvious to me that there are not nearly enough people doing copyediting.