John@88: It used to be that if an edit was deleted, you'd still see the actual edit and summary in the page history, just be unable to access the content. (Or so I hazily recall - it was a good while ago) This worked fine... and then people started putting the crap [defamatory claims, abuse, telephone numbers... sometimes all three] in the edit summary, or even in the username, so the whole line had to go. Annoying as anything - the system was never really designed to handle selective deletion, and it shows.
I believe someone's knocking together a patch to allow for the edit summary to be deleted along with the edit, but leave the record that there had been an edit at that point; I haven't heard anything on that for a while, though.
Arwel@85: The Stanek story is, uh, interesting. I originally found all his crap and deleted it; one of the half-dozen accounts who were Not Stanek Or Working Together At All, Honest Guv suddenly decided the page on him ought to go too, because it suddenly wasn't praising him any more. It got kept, mostly - I think - as a "fuck you" to Stanek, which I can sympathise with entirely. I do see where Jimbo's view - that we kept it solely because we thought he was a bad person who needed punishing - is coming from, and it's arguably fair to say with detatchment that we shouldn't have been doing that. I'm not happy arguing the details of the case with him, which is why I never touched it at the time - we were factually right to produce it as was but he has the moral upper hand, I think.
(I'm tempted to mark it for deletion again, in fact - the guy is subnotable at best, and it seems the simplest solution. One less thing for us to worry about maintaining.)
I feel guilty commenting here, because I haven't posted on ML in some years and it'll make me seem like I'm here to make kneejerk defences of Wikipedia, which is really the last thing I want to do - it'd be rude to return that way, given WP is itself one of the things that seduced me away from commenting on blogs &c. I love you people dearly and am not a wild-eyed crazy evangelist, I promise you. Herewith follows the perception from years on the coalface; I hope it serves as a useful backdrop to many of these complaints.
On wikipedia as a project:
For the past fifteen months, I've been handling the complaints email address that Lizzy mentions in #50. This is basically a giant parading cavalcade of problems, packaged up and emailed for us to deal with, fifty to a hundred a day. Any illusions as to wonderfulness go pretty fast. The interesting thing is, as Cory alludes to in #75, once one or two people with experience (and common sense, a somewhat rarer property among our administrators...) comes down on a problematic article, it tends to stabilise fast. I'm reasonably confident that the community as it exists can deal competently with any problem article individual; the problem is rolling that out further, because the people to do that don't scale - and there's always burnout.
Basically, to the extent that "Wikipedia" as a whole can be said to know anything, the core of people in the middle are bitterly aware of the vast amount of crappy behaviour going on, and quite worried about the general direction it's all going. We just don't know what to do about it. At some point, the project dropped the ball on enculturating newcomers. A failure to present good role models in the community? Communications failures? Just a spectacular explosion of success in 2005/6 that meant an influx of people we couldn't handle? We dunno. But over time, the capacity to deal with new community members diminished, and a lot of them ended up with very strange ideas of what the project was; a couple of waves down the line, there were all sorts of people, apparently members of the working community, who just had completely disconnected from the original ideas. Vast amounts of willing person-hours, wasted on some grotesque parody of a system when it could be writing an encyclopedia; somewhere the fundamental values slipped a notch between generations. ("Wikipedia is a grand experiment in online democracy and free speech" is particularly popular this week...) Online community enculturation fails to work as planned, film at 11; we've all been there, somewhere or another.
The joke floating around at the moment is that they got seduced into playing some kind of weird game, the Wikipedia MMORPG - bash a vandal! do this, do that! run a bot! level up to admin! There's a good kernel of truth to it - one of the cultural problems is "them and us", a growing tendency to percieve any external editor as more and more suspicious, and I don't need to say how utterly self-defeatingly stupid that is.
Regarding editing your own article - most of the community, if asked, doesn't care. As with so many of the proliferation of rules, it got put in place to deal with puffery by cranks and self-promoters, slowly crept in scope (it used to be "you probably shouldn't create an article, and some of us think editing it might be excessive too"...), and eventually became part of the endless game of nomic.
The problem is, most of the time, someone editing material related to them is fine and dandy, because 95% of people aren't malicious or crazy or timewasting self-promoters [re the last, we got hit by Stanek this time last year!]. It's the ones who are the latter that cause problems, and are the reason that position appeared; first it was a vague guideline, and the idiots ignored it, so it was made stronger... because people don't really realise that making rules stronger just makes life harder for those who follow them and doesn't even remotely bother those who ignore them anyway.
Unfortunately, I alluded above to Wikipedia: The MMORPG, where what you have to do is slay "vandals" and "trolls" and "sockpuppets" and so on. And, of course, what better way to gain points than to remove edits that are Against The RulesTM and Clearly Bad FaithTM?
So we have Strict Rules to deal with crazies, and a community that applies them without any actual clue, and, aaaaargh, sometimes I just want to deny it all ever existed.
I think that summarises a lot of the existing problems; a semi-dysfunctional community, without a clear goal or cultural ethos any more, trying to apply rules that objectively aren't in the best interests of an encyclopedia, for fear of anything more lax than those rules being worse.
I remain, on the whole, optomistic about the project - if I wasn't, if I didn't believe it can still achieve some good, I'd have thrown in the towel and found something else to work on. But there's just so much glaring stupidity around, masquerading as community behaviour, and we're just doing so badly at handling it...
James Macdonald: For what it's worth, the OED's first citation for WWI being used is in 1931:
"The salvage of what a dear dead and let us piously hope well-damned colonel preferred to call the First World War" (S. Jameson, Richer Dust)
Richard: I've often heard talk of Australia (or NZ, but Australia has closer historic links) taking the entire population in; I hadn't offhand heard of "reservations".
On the other hand, it's a relatively manageable number - twelve thousand people is about a tenth of Australia's annual immigration - and it might make sense to try reand settle them all in, basically, one mid-sized town somewhere, which could be construed as reservations. I have no idea what the actual "plans", such as they are, might be.
(I did read one article by an Australian economist arguing that a private foundation should resettle them in .au, in return for basically signing over the government. Imagine the fun the Enrons of this world could have with that...)
But never fear! The Pentagon is on the case of the important things to prohibit. Like selling copies of Playboy to the troops.
Richard: Nauru. It's... a terrifying story.
Basically, it's a small island, 2x3mi, that was almost entirely covered with guano; it has one freshwater lagoon, and supported a pre-colonial population of a thousand. 1900s, phosphate mining started, shipping fertiliser to Australia at cost; with independence in 1968, the money actually went to the Nauruan population, part directly and part into a trust fund. Very high standard of living for both landowners and non-landowners resulted, with heavy government subsidies - lots of modern consumer goods, cars, imported food...
In the 1980s, a trust fund of ~A$1bn was balanced by a A$600m national debt, A$60m annual income, and A$100m expenditure. You can guess what the economy looked like when the phosphate began to run out in the 1990s, and the government dipped into the trust fund to keep things afloat. Now, there's pretty much nothing left (a 1998 estimate said at most a decade), and almost all governmental assets have been sold to pay off the debt, or impounded. An attempt to diversify into profitable offshore "financial services" was slapped down heavily by the US. Corruption didn't help, either; a lot of money vanished here and there over the years, with little checks on where it was going - auditing that trust fund would be an interesting program, I understand.
And now, it's a rock. A rock with some trees, and a lagoon, and the money going fast. There's periodic droughts, and limited fresh water; most comes from a desalination plant, and it's breaking down. There's no agriculture worth speaking of; almost all food is imported (at significant cost). There's essentially no private industry that isn't dependent on the mines, barring some coconut products. Almost all population is on the coastal strip, not the plateau - which is a moonscape - and, well, sea-level won't help anything there in the long term.
Moving the entire nation lock, stock and barrel to Australia is a very, very tempting thought in these circumstances, as you might imagine.
TNH, upthread:
Liberia
Declared war with Germany on 4 August 1914
Okay, now I'm intrigued. Why Liberia? It was a pretty quick declaration, yet Liberia was essentially a US satellite at the time, and they didn't share a border with any combatants (so no chance of grabbing colonial territory). I really can't see why they declared war; anyone know?
Dori:
As chance would have it, I unsubscribed from that mailing list just two days ago. Probably for the best, since I can't quite imagine making a tactful reply to this attempt at a legal threat (Do other people publishing "PA sucks" get the innocent-victim spiel and vague comments about libellous monetary harm? Am curious now.)
Incidentally, the same person was trying to whitewash the article back in July; this version manages to make the wonderful claim that no new author ever got picked up by a traditional publisher ever before PA was founded. Even their ad copy is nonsensical...
Lisa: It wasn't just that his son died, though that would have been tragedy enough.
He'd fought to get his son a commission - pulled strings to get him through the medicals (he had terrible eyesight), arranged matters to get him into a front-line regiment, because it was what Kipling himself wanted. The fact that John was there to be killed was, in many ways, Kipling's doing alone. And then he died; he died wastefully, pointlessly (as did everyone in 1915, I suppose), and in the worst possible way from the point of view of his parents - there was no body, no closure that he was known to be dead, but there were reports of people who had seen him, grievously injured and in great pain, so even the comforting lie of "at least he died quickly" wasn't available. The self-loathing that came after that is entirely unsurprising. But the writing is powerful - Epitaphs of the War (which you quote one part of); My Boy Jack; The Children (the latter sums it all)
There's a comment above that he was for the war until John's death, which is a bit iffy. He still supported the war - I'm not sure he could do otherwise - but in a much more complex manner, and it shows in his writing. You still had cheerful things like The Irish Guards (I sing this in the shower sometimes), but it was tempered with work like Children, above, or Beginnings, or Death-Bed...
Kristjan: You may be thinking of Wilfred Owen, who is often associated with Sassoon; he died a week before the Armstice, on November 4th 1918. Sassoon lived until 1967, in his eighties.
(I worked briefly at Napier University, which occupies the old neurasthenia hospital where the two lived and worked; the small collection of War Poets material there is quite remarkable.)
Never such innocence again
Just to confuse matters, one of the regiments is nominally a brigade, and several battalions are nominally regiments...
Dave: USMC operate aircraft... (And then the Coast Guard has fixed-wing aircraft, if you want to count them too.)
Paula: After the War, the Russians pressed a set of rebuilt V-2s into service as ballistic missiles. After a short period, during which the ethanol fuel kept disappearing, they replaced them with an upgraded model designed to run on methanol. I assume the problem didn't recur after the first month or so...
Kate: Corzine, Democrat, New Jersey. He was off campaigning for the gubernatorial election that day, and didn't vote on anything.
ajay: If you poke around on the quoted site, incidentally, you find the Mitford quote alongside one talking about voters being "neatly labelled blue, or green, or red" - green seems to have been not uncommon for Liberals in the past.
[pokes] Hmm. The usenet post on the matter I was vaguely remembering was here.
Serge: It's MacDonald Fraser, no hyphen, so it's hard to tell at a glance if he's George M. Fraser or G. MacDonald Fraser. (the latter, I believe - so should be under F, but a not unreasonable error)
For what it's worth - I just assume for granted that five-ten percent of any charity's intake goes to administrative overhead. If they feel they need to hire very well-paid administrators, it's fine by me - the Red Cross is not exactly run on a shoestring. If they want to cut overheads down, good on them, but it's not like it's going into drug-running or something - just a trivial amount of wastage. For context, the International Red Cross gets its own footnotes in international law, is bordering on being a sovereign entity, and has an operating budget of about $700m. The American Red Cross, who I assume are the ones the reimbursement fuss is over, employ thirty thousand people and handle half the blood products in the US. In comparison to that, the salary of the board members is a drop in the bucket - yes, it would be nice if it were lower, but it's not worth making a fuss over.
(There is a bit of a double standard here - if the head of a small charity were making that much, yes, it would be a Major Problem. It's a scale thing)
Incidentally, it seems they announced that they expect about 9% of the donations for Katrina to go to adminstrative costs; they seem to have a handle on most of the more remarkable fuckups that happened after 9/11, so management should be better this time.
I don't have knowledge of the charging issues, but Snopes says plainly: "The [American] Red Cross does not solicit payment for services rendered from the folks it is called upon to assist during times of emergency"; they note that a lot of the "charging for items" stories seem to originate from Red Cross run canteens in WWII, which charged by Army request. I don't know how this gels with stories of having to pay for services recently - I'd not encountered them before.
I wonder if it's confusion with Red Cross (or similar agencies) operating mobile canteens and the like, which often aren't targeted directly at the affected population but are there to feed the support services? If one branch of the agency is handing out food and blankets and another charging for cups of coffee, on the same site, I can see where confusion would arise - and why people would be angry at being charged for something they expected was free.
It used to be, as I understand it, Red-Blue on elections - Red the challenger, Blue the incumbent. Then, in 2000, the maps stayed in the public view constantly, for days or weeks - previously they'd been in the next day's papers and not much else - and "red" and "blue" became solid definitions as, well, Red States and Blue States. Simply chance that it happened to be R. challenging D. when it happened rather than the other way around.
(Randomly, in the UK, party colours - so I am told - got fixed in the mid-seventies, after colour television came out. Previously local parties chose their own colours, but this confused viewers when the television news interviewed Conservatives wearing red or Labour wearing green - their local colours, sure, but the rest of the country was baffled)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 4 |
| 2006 | 1 |
| 2005 | 75 |
| 2004 | 9 |
Total: 89 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Andrew Gray:
Show all comments by Andrew Gray.