User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 2

Better to not leave messages for me here, because I don't always look at meta. Put them on en:User_talk:Jimbo_Wales

Timetable

Talk to me?

People (en:User:Mindspillage ([1] and en:User:Uncle G ([2]) have kept saying that I should talk to you. I'm not convinved that you should get involved, but they know better than me. About [User talk:Expurgator This], this, but mainly This. Yeah, well that was all a rather bad idea. I guess lots of editting takes it toll after a while. So I make things lite-hearted, with little jokes to fool my fellow editors, testing the system and all that. Yeah it's immature, sure. I obviously don't take Wiki as serious as others, but that was all I editted for anyway, was to curb boredom. To be honest, I wasn't treating it like you were, as the future of encyclopedias or anything. Just as a bit of (intellectual) fun. Maybe I should take another wikibreak for a few weeks again? That did the trick for a while last time, and when I came back I had new projects to do (This one mainly). So I guess I'll be back in the new year. And will try to resist the temptation of making new sockpuppets (which, to be honest, I could do quite easily, I got a "roaming" (at least i think that's what it's called) IP adress AND a university owned one which has other learned users sharing it, which they've been unwilling to keep blocked.

NOTE TO OTHERS: COULD YOU MOVE THIS TO JIMBO'S PEDIA PAGE? THANKYOU!

Question here about Wikinews

I've posted same message on wikipedia, but I want to be sure you to find my message. Dear Wimbo, I ask you because of, we are making a vote about the french name of wikinews. You know that the others information web-site of wikimedia association having their name in proper language (Wikinoticias, wikinews,...) so some persons in french wikinews have propose to vote for an over name of the project, a name in french language. My question is if in your opinion, we are in our right? One user (Divol) say that "wikinews" is a copyrighted mark and we can't change it. The web-adress is posession of wikimedia foundation so we can not also change it. Even if the vote is oppose to change, what can you say us about it? And if the people vote for change, what can we do?--Jonathaneo 09:00, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Using Checkuser Privileges for "Dragnet" purposes

This seems to be happening now at Wikinews[3].

• About 4 of the requested user names were found to be in a different country; the other 10 or so were anons in Toronto. The person with Checkuser privilege, CSpurrier, reported information to the community about an alltogether different user "Factchecker" (for which there was no request at all for the use of checkuser) which he came upon during his check of the anons. There seems to be little if any actual vandalism involved and the checkuser requester, Amgine, has had an ongoing feud with the supposed sockpuppeteer,Neutralizer, who he recently blocked for 3 weeks. Can this apparently blatant abuse of the checkuser privilege be stopped? 70.50.76.209 23:43, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Upon further research it seems that the "infraction" committed by the majority of the anons who were subjected to Checkuser was this edit which they placed on Amgine's talk page in an attempt to disclose what they felt was an unbecoming edit by an Admin which had been erased from Wikinews' history;

What Amgine said about Australians [4] "Simeon edits from Australia, a continent populated entirely by criminals! And, as a criminal he would expect that we would not trust him, so obviously we cannot drink from the glass in front of us.."- Amgine/talk 03:54, 11 May 2005 (UTC). 70.50.76.209 00:05, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Message From Academia Sinica of Taiwan

Hi Jimbo, This is Frances. Hope you still remeber me. I have try my best to reach you since middle July. It is an urgent event needed your attention. Would you please reply my email asap? Thanks.--140.109.21.238 04:22, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Voting in the Community Elections

Mr. Wales, do you have any objections to my voting in the Elections on behalf of the Cherokee Community. Jmerkey 05:37, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Mr. Wales, Please disregard. I will send you an offline email with my concerns and occupy myself for the time being. Jmerkey 07:32, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

CheckUser information

Dear Jimbo Wales,

I am one of sysops of Vietnamese Wikipedia under the user name "Apple". Now, we have some votes of article deletion as well as undeletion. We have doubts about that some person can use more accounts for voting, that is a cheat! Could you please check user information for us.

I am looking forward a reply from you. You can answer me on my talk page in Vietnamese Wikipedia. Thanks. An Apple of Newton ^talk 07:43, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikinews admins are blocking 500,000 people

This appears when anyone using the biggest ISP in Canada tries to edit wikinews;

"Your user name or IP address has been blocked by Deprifry.

The reason given is this: This IP range (Toronto area, Bell Canada) has recently been used by an individual currently banned from Wikinews. We apologize for this inconvenience. You may be able to contact Deprifry or one of the other administrators [5] to discuss the block, or e-mail the admin who blocked you using the "e-mail user" link on their user page. They will need to have registered an e-mail address to do this. Your IP address is 67.71.123.107. Please include this address in any queries you make."

When I go to the link it's a chatroom where nobody responds to a request. 67.71.123.107 03:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Cspurrier; Wikinews Bureaucrat; misusing Bureaucrat and Checkuser authority

It's impossible to RfDA him because he has hijacked the RfDA process on Wikinews with unilateral striking of RfDA's and striking of votes.

Cspurrier has systematically been pushing anglo-american pov on wikinews and systematically pushing away editors who do not share that pov.

Infractions;

1; Reinstating an RfDA against User:PVJ59 unilaterally (no consensus) after the nominator of the RfDA withdrew the RfDA.[6]

2; Misused Checkuser against Blueliner who was accused of no misbehavior and then PERMANENTLY banned her and struck out her vote based upon circumstantial checkuser evidence(same IP range).[7]

3; Falsely accused Tohstsalstuen of being a sockpuppet and struck out his vote.[8]

65.95.151.127 16:31, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

FYI steward-status

[Stewards] - a new steward election will be held soon. The most likely date for the election to start is 25th of November. This date can still change. Like it is now all existing stewards will need to reapply if they wish to remain steward. The rules of this procedure are still under discussion. All existing stewards and interested users for the function of steward can best apply as soon as possible.

• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11654/focus=11654
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2006-2

--Walter Do you have news? Report it to Wikizine 18:20, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Esperanza

Mr.Wales, I need your help ASAP. I created Esperanza on wikiquote and the sysop's there are trying to delete it because the Esperanza on wikipedia is under deletion review, they are saying the Esperanza on wikiquote is the exact same and that it will have the same problems and the editors believe that even though it is false. Another reason is that they think that I do not have it planned out. They think that it will be used as a social network. The mission of wikiquote Esperanza is to revert vandalism, make wikiquote more friendly, and to promote hard work. We have a few way's of doing this, the first way is to have a code of conduct, the code of conduct says that members can't be rude, have to edit at least 21 articles every week, and must not vandalize. If a member breaks the code of conduct then he is kicked out of Esperanza. We will have a list of people kicked out of Esperanza. We will also give out monthly awards for reverting vandalism, being friendly, and working hard, we will also award a article once a month. The people/article that were awarded will be shown on Esperanza's page. Esperanza's leadership is a president and vice president, and until we have a election we have a interim president and vice president. Esperanza already has its own charter. I am wondering, since your word is law, if you can let Esperanza stay on wikiquote. Voting closes on november 27. Have a nice week and god bless.--Sir James Paul 18:41, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Moldovan wikipedia

How much time should we wait to see Moldovan Wikipedia closed? Shall my children see this wikipedia closed as people voted on Moldovan Wikipedia, Meta, Wikipedia-l. We wait for more than 1 year now. Thank you. --Nicolae 14:04, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays, Jimbo! I've really enjoyed working with Wikimedia this year, and I hope that Wikimedia will continue to expand! Happy Holidays to you and yours, Thunderhead

Dmcdevit

I have been blocked by Dmcdevit the user account is Irate. I would like it reanabled straight away and User:Dmcdevit blocked and his admin removed.--84.9.194.47 11:03, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

So Jimbo it seems that Angela thinks I'm banned on here as well as WikiPedia. Why is that then? Iarte

Wikimedia Foundation / ComCom / Corruption and transparency

I would like to notify you of

Communications_committee/Notifications&oldid=533987#Corruption_and_transparency_in_Wikimedia_projects

Tobias Conradi 11:22, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Serbian wikipedia

Today I was blocked on 24 hours on serbian wiki sr:Корисник:Шолевић because I started to do same thing as others are doing, but I was little bit workaholic. They have thousands of articles with years BC. (before Christ), many years in future and centuries in future. They were reluctant to delete these articles since as I understood numbers of articles will fall down. Even administrators were doing same thing as I had done on hundred of articles, I have done ReDirection of 45. century to 4. milenium like other administrators, but they have first told me that I should not do that since number of articles will fall down. I ignore that and they blocked me. (SasAstefanovic, but DungoDung and Kale are also behind that action). Today I started to ask what policy they followed. They say obstruction of project.

Please do something. I think serbian wikipedia is really needed some rearangement. Out of 42.000 articles they have more than 10.000 articles with french small villages with usually less than 100o inhabitants. They have maybe 5.000 articles about years, but with nothing in it. They plan to do entering of 100.000 articles with minerals automatically. I could say they had crazy ideas and they need outside control.

--Solevic 12:26, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Legal internships/externships?

Jimbo, does the foundation have any legal intern/externships? If I understand correctly, Brad left, and I'm not sure who to ask in the legal department: I emailed juriwiki-l. I'm a 1st year law student at American University, Washington College of Law (a top 50 school). I've worked in law firms for years from a file clerk to a research assistant, and I'd love to help you guys out. Also, conveniently I'm located in Florida (for the time being until I go back to D.C, though I spend my summers in Palm Beach Gardens), and I'm somewhat familiar with florida statute. Most importantly, I have quite a few contacts in Tallahassee from prior internships, lobbying work, and extensive family relationships in the legislature. I recently testified in front of the house commission on veterans affairs, and I've worked in the capitol as well. I hold a B.S. in political science from F.S.U. and a minor in communications. Let me know if this sounds like something you'd be interested in. I don't need to be paid, my family has plenty of ability to support me, and I'm financially stable. I just love Wikipedia and want to help it beyond my ability as just another en administrator. Credentials and information at en:User:Swatjester Swatjester 20:29, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

hello, allow me please to answer. I did not notice any email from you on the juriwiki list. Normally, it is a not moderated list, so I am unsure of why. Are you certain you posted to the right email address ? Second, we do not really have any legal intern as of today, as we miss an in-house lawyer to help follow their activity. However, we rely on several lawyers worldwide, some entirely working pro-bono, others sometime paid on a task-basis. We are also currently looking for a legal coordinator to help us, and we might have one very soon (cross fingers behind my back). As of today, I largely help do the legal coordination on some tasks (in particular trademarks), a few people give a very serious help on the OTRS legal queue (answering numerous various topics, from lawsuit threats to logo use permission). Carolyn, our COO, largely rely on a local lawyer for business agreements. In short, we patch :-) I would dare saying that help would be welcome. I will look at the information on your user page and I invite you to contact me privately at anthere AT wikimedia.org. Thanks Anthere 21:14, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Arbcom and checkuser abuse

Hi there, I want to report that User:Mackensen appears to either be abusing checkuser privileges or handing out bans without doing checks. Either way it is abusive behaviour and he is abusing his arbcom relationships to cover this up. I am not going to rehash all the details here, more of what is really going on can be read at http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=11181. They are now also attempting to silence this issue on wikipedia by reverting you talk page. Biophase 19:34, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Final approval for bcl

I am excited for it. --Filipinayzd @ incubator

Please help me stop this Abuse of Power

I am hoping you can help me, I contributed sporadically to WIkipedia for about 2 years and never hadany problems. I recently "Came under the radar" of someone who began to agressivly "cyber-stalk" me, a new trend unfortunatley these day. Anyway a day did not go by where he was not editing any entries I made, trying to delete articles I did in the past , or leaving rude and abusive messages on my page. Messages to the effect :" I can't believe you made such and such editing mistake, have'nt you been editing Wikipedia for 2 years!" ( I have literally went months and months without a single edit)

Mr. Wales it felt weird to me to have a nameless faceless entity constantly trying to make connections with me! I hope this is not the intent of Wikipedia, anyway when I threatened a "wiki-alert" to stop this problem, I had my account frozen and it was claimed "legal threat", I don't understand how a wiki-alert can be a "legal threat"? this was an excuse to get my account locked up and then he proceeded to get me banned (with false information and allegations) to stop me from complaining about the abuse and harassment. Alot of the info posted on my talk page and user pages is false and libelous! I want help with this please! My health is suffering from the stalking behavior of this stalker/abuser. Alphagirl20 20:35, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

A nubmer of Editors have tried to help me by deleting the private information but he just goes and brings it back, he is obsessed with me!! I can prove this by showing you my contributions (which I did from scratch, that he had to get the last word on all of them!! to exert his power and control!! all five articles-so this is not in my imagination-how can this be a coincidence? this is a guy who is power-obsessed and so I don't know how this will escalate, he checks up on me on a daily and hourly basis! I no sooner do an edit and he is right there ( I don't think he has a job!) I am pretty sure this is not the intent of the Wikipedia Foundation! An administrator deleted the personal info off yesterday, and when the abuser found out (hes not an admin) he got a admin to undelete and then put on the admins' talk page words to the effect of "I will certainly give you a barn-star for this!!" I find his behavior quite childish and bizarre, why does this guy care if my private info is up or not? I have sought help from a womens abuse agency and they told me to try this, before any other action, thanks ! this is the page I wish to get deleted, it has been deleted twice by two different administrators, but one (and abuser) keeps bringing it up to humilate! http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ACommunity_sanction_noticeboard&diff=163824065&oldid=163819424 Please have this page deleted, it mentions being physically abused and it is humiliating! Alphagirl20 20:40, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Account blocked

I blocked some minutes ago the account s:cs:User:Jimbo Wales for a pornographic edit here, which is simply similar to many others (see s:cs:User:-jkb-/Vandal). I will change the block to indef. If you are like to have an account on the cs.source so let me know and we shall arrange it. Good luck, Thx, -jkb- 11:40, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Account renamed to s:cs:User:Renamed 1 (Jimbo Wales) so that the account s:cs:User:Jimbo Wales is according to SUL free. -jkb- 17:30, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

This is not appropriate words

This　scatter a wrong article for a search in the Internet. good intellectual helps with an article to see it ... There is the volunteer activity by the people of the good will to straighten it. But, editing by the user of the wrong knowledge is only a vicious circle . And rude remark and action of the invisible manager of the resume. There many intellectuals with social status participate inside. They makes a fool of the people of the participant. There is do not have the role of the encyclopedia precisely. should be active for the cause of another name...... The free editing that participation is possible with anyone. It reaches even a basic rule. And there is not today's rule tomorrow.

It is equal to infinite irresponsibility. And the foundation does not take responsibility about mechanism it. Do not should leave that you introduce yourself as an encyclopedia. Because makes invite misunderstanding and trouble and confusion as people of the world. It is wrong as volunteer activity!!! They(Wikimedia Foundation, Inc) should not use a name called the encyclopedia at least. In addition, the idea of the American liberalism is not always a thing suitable for the other countries. It gives the society and a country big problem. and did the representative learn such a thing? and they become the cause to cause a problem. But, existing; what is the profit that wants to let exist?

Please right quit use by a name called the encyclopedia. Because,this is only mere Community site.

Do not using the image of the word of the encyclopedia!! --125.51.206.87 16:49, 14 December 2007 (UTC)From Japan

Comments on your thoughts on Volapük

Thank you very much for your comments, Jimbo Wales. You raise important questions and concerns; other participants had raised them before, and I believe there are important answers that you probably need to be aware of, in order to think further about the issue and decide for yourself. I will try to quickly sketch them here (and then I'll copy and paste this on the cleanup discussion page for those who are there).

What is the purpose of the Volapük Wikipedia?

Excellent question. To me, this question should be broadened to: what is the purpose of any 'small' Wikipedia? There are other Wikipedias that don't have any real native speakers (Latin, Old English, Ancient Greek -- the latter in the Incubator), there are Wikipedias with very few active contributors (the last 100 in the List of Wikipedias probably fall in this category), there are Wikipedias in languages with very few speakers, sometimes as few as Volapük (cf. Hawaiian, Inupiaq). It is true that all Volapük speakers can speak and read other languages (in fact, Volapük is never their best language!). But this is true for many other cases. All dialectal Wikipedias (Nnapulitano, Zeeuws, Võro) have contributors who also speak their standard languages (Italian, Dutch, Estonian) and could use/contribute to the corresponding Wikipedias. All speakers of other constructed languages (Esperanto, Ido, Novial...) can also speak other languages at native level and could use/contribute to the corresponding Wikipedias. All speakers of Catalan also speak Spanish; all speakers of Dutch (where I can speak from personal experience) and, apparently, also of the Scandinavian languages, can speak excellent English, and could use/contribute to the English Wikipedia (many of them do, actually). As you said about Volapük, they don't need their specific projects to learn about the world. They can do that with other projects.

So: Do these projects have a point? What is their goal? As you see, it's not simply a Volapük question. It's actually a question for every Wikipedia in a language for which there is no significant population of monolingual speakers who only have that language as a means to explore the world of ideas. And there already are dozens of such Wikipedias, from Latin to Lombard to Zeeuws to Esperanto to Old English to Volapük to Võro to Hawaiian to Nnapulitano to Limburgish to... What is their purpose? To me: they should define it for themselves. Why? Because the stated purpose of Wikipedia as a project -- the creation of a great free Encyclopedia, a repository of all of human knowledges -- is not attainable to most of them. User communities would have to get to (I guess) at least a hundred dedicated active contributors before a full encyclopedia became a plausible goal. Even with the hundreds of thousands of contributors in en.wp, it took years! So: The goal of these small communities MUST BE DIFFERENT. It cannot be the same as the goal of larger projects like en.wp or de.wp. If this goal -- the creation of a comprehensive encyclopedia, an no other -- is the only acceptable one, then I'm afraid half, probably more than half of the projects in the List of Wikipedias should be closed as soon as possible. Is that so? Aren't there other reasons for Wikipedias to exist?

As you point out in your comments: there is the joy of those who want to create (and use) the resulting Wikipedias! I will use your own words: let the contributors of all those Wikipedias proudly and with joy create articles! For what purpose? For an all-encompassing encyclopedia? Well, no. Maybe for somethign else, for documentation of their cultures, or any other topics they thought interesting... what the goals could be is an interesting question, and I'd love to hear what other small communities (say, 20 active contributors or less) think about that.

In the old-fashioned human way?... Yes, of course. But what if they decide that they also want to do it in other ways? Should this be their decision, or should this be a general decision, to be taken at the inter-Wikipedia level? This is ultimately a question about general policy. It has thus far been the case that every project was awarded as much freedom as possible. That means deciding by themselves what could be good and bad -- even if it involves, say, creating huge amounts of bot-stubs. If these projects should however all have the same goal -- a comprehensive encyclopedia with preferably featured-article-quality contributions -- then perhaps there should be stronger guidelines that prevent other kinds of ideas from getting started. I suggest that this be made a discussion at a higher level. (Do you happen to know what I would have to do to start such a discussion?)

The decision of creating bot-articles was a hard one. I was responsible for it; nobody else on vo.wp should be blamed for this one decision. I maintain that there are good reasons for doing that (beginning with "completeness-of-coverage" and "it's-at-least-a-useful-something", but going further into other aspects of the question); but this is a different question maybe. (By itself, the question of the usefulness of bot-articles should probably be also discussed at a higher level, independent of the specifics of each project. Again, do you happen to know what I would have to do to bring this topic up for general discussion?). Here, since you mention the actual joy of creating articles, I will mention only one more: these languages have speakers who like them, who want to use them. (That's why they're not working mostly on the other wiki's whose language they know well, by the way.) They had never had much for themselves, because their communities are small. Even dead languages like Latin were loved by those who liked its past, not its present: Academics, students, lovers of history... Even a collection of simple stubs -- a "phone directory", as someone once described to me -- is more than the speakers of these languages ever had. (Of course not for Dutch of for the Scandaniavian languages, or for Esperanto, or arguably for Latin; the others, however, really never did.) It's a leap forward in terms of the amount of information available in the languages they love and prefer to use. Isn't that worth something?

But how about the other projects? Aren't they harmed by it? As far as I can see, they are not. There is no big waste of resources, there is no lack of storage space for them, there is no reduction in access time due to vo.wp, nothing I can see. The interwiki question, which is always mentioned, looks like a pretext, since it can be easily solved within each project. (Or perhaps by a general discussion about the uses of interwiki links. But anyway without forcing any project to close or delete articles...)

The only good arguments I've heard in this area are the ones about 'how fair it is' for Volapük to be so high on the table -- when projects with more contributors working hard have fewer pages? No, because I don't think the number of articles judges how good a project is. Is anybody judging a project by how many pictures they've uploaded? No, since Commons made this number immaterial: any project has now 2,000,000+ pictures and media files at their disposition at the moment of its creation. I think the parameter used at the List of Wikipedias -- number of articles -- is simply wrong. Jimbo, if you use it in presentations and talks without mentioning that it is a very, very poor parameter, then you're making an important mistake. It is not! Consider the List of Wikipedias by sample of articles: it has a better parameter (which has problems itself, some of which are pointed out on its talk page) and would probably be better. The Hebrew Wikipedia is, in my opinion, better than the Romanian Wikipedia, and at least as good as the Vietnamese Wikipedia; yet it is ranked lower only because it has fewer articles. This ranking is as misleading as it is for Volapük -- if you think that number of articles tells you much about the quality of a Wikipedia. Think of this: the English Wikipedia has now 2,100,000+ articles. A naive reader of the List of Wikipedias could think they are all excellent, FA-quality articles, or at least good articles; but if you still have less than 100,000 FA-quality articles, the number of good articles there is clearly much smaller. I'll guess (correct me if I'm wrong) that about half of these 2,100,000+ articles are of substandard quality (in that they wouldn't be accepted for a paper encyclopedia). So if this number -- 2,100,000+ -- is mentioned without qualifications (for PR reasons, etc.), it is, frankly, as misleading as the 100,000 Volapük articles -- since people want to deduce quality from it.

(The real argument in favor of en.wp is, of course, than even 100,000 FA-quality articles are more than there has ever been in an encyclopedia; the 2-million number is not really necessary for someone to say that en.wp has already achieved far more than any other similar endeavor.)

So my thought on this: please use other criteria, and advertise them as well. I'm sure it would be good for WMF, and for public presentations of Wikipedia, if a different ranking, based on different criteria, was presented. This would be more scientific and more appropriate, and the viewers would be happy to see that some obvious problems with the original criterion -- number of articles -- had been addressed and tentatively solved.

I hope my thoughts don't sound offensive -- that wasn't the intention. And I hope you may find them useful. Thanks in advance! --Smeira 13:07, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I disagree with Smeira on one point. The value of writing a Wikipedia is of genuine importance in its own right. When a under resourced language starts writing its Wikipedia, it may never have the same comprehensivess as the biggest Wikipedia. This does not negate the fact that such a project can become in and of itself a relevant resource for the people that prefer to have information in that language. As Wikipedia is a living project, the road to the shared goal is of importance in its own right. GerardM 13:08, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Good luck travelling

I noticed on your user page it said there's a travel schedule because you are travelling the world for Wikipedia or something. That's pretty cool, I hope you enjoy yourself. Tyciol 17:13, 21 June 2008 (UTC)