Over on the TI-83 series we link to the WikiLeaks page with the keys on it (in fact I just fixed the link, as WikiLeaks website has drastically changed in the past few months). Should we also remove the link from there? it seems kinda odd that we have OFFICE action prohibiting the linking on the actual article but then have a link on the parent one. hbdragon88 (talk) 04:26, 10 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
After consulting with our counsel, I think we're okay there. The DMCA notice that we received was very specific as to what and where; this was not included therein. I don't want to get into a game where we're chasing the thing all around the site. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 23:59, 10 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I saw your recent WP:OFFICE block on the Choose Your Own Adventure article. As you may have gleaned from the talk page, I was aparty to some of the back and forth editing on the page. I also have some additional information that may be relevant to the discussion. Feel free to email me at seanmercy at yahoo dot com.
I'm feeling pretty in the dark as to what particular facts are in dispute on the page, although obviously I can see which things you deleted from the page first. Is there any way for me to be privy to exactly what you're (or FloNight) is trying to source in putting together the new page? If the disputed information isn't public, what's to prevent someone from unknowingly adding in the verboten information after the dispute has been resolved from the Wikipedia side? Seanmercy (talk) 05:15, 11 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
At this point, I'm not totally comfortable disclosing anything, because my involvement with that article is simply to watch and keep the WP:OFFICE protections in place. FloNight has been more recently involved with the complainant. - Philippe14:34, 12 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's been two weeks since Flonight took over, and the only action has been to blank the rest of the page, including deleting the talk page where editors had been chiming in with sources and asking questions. Any word on when this rebuild/rewrite is going to happen? I've had no luck contacting Flonight so far. Seanmercy (talk) 16:58, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This will not be a simple process, but there's no time limit on the encyclopedia. What's most important is that the article that emerges is well sourced, appropriate, useful, and legal. I'm sorry this is proceeding slowly, but this isn't the sort of thing we're going to rush. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 01:12, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We all fully understand there's no time limit involved, but there has to be some kind middle ground between "there's an office action involving this page, so everyone please back off for a bit while we talk to external parties" and having the article fully open to normal editing again. The issue isn't the speed, it's the complete and total obtuseness of the process. A slow-moving process is understandable, but from the outside, absolutely nothing has happened since you protected the article and there's no sign that anything will happen in the future. Normally, office actions involve DMCA takedown notices or blatant BLP violations or similar situations where reasonable editors can determine what is involved in the scope of the issue (e.g. don't add links to this material or include this secret key) and make edits to areas that avoid the disputed portion. These are perfectly reasonable steps taken to protect the project. Here, we just have a vague statement about "concerned parties" with no further guidance except that a single administrator is somehow supposed to rewrite the page. Even if Flonight were responsive, how could anyone collaborate with her when we have no idea what could possibly have been at issue, seeing as you went so far so as to remove such controversial content as the "See also" section? In short, we're not looking to rush, we're looking to start the process, but the more we hear from "the authorities" on this matter, the more confused we become. Zachlipton (talk) 01:31, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
In many cases, we're simply not free to disclose everything. This is one of them. FloNight is a volunteer who agreed to take on a particularly thorny issue on our behalf, and she has my full support. I understand your frustrations, really I do. And we're not trying to be obtuse, but the reality is, I've disclosed everything I'm comfortable disclosing right now. FloNight is in the midst of a series of extremely complicated negotiations about this article, and until that's done, I'm simply going to have to ask you to be patient. In the grand scheme of things... come on, it's two weeks. That's really not an incredibly long time period. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 02:06, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Philippe for your response. First of all, let me say that I certainly understand that you're stuck in a frustrating situation here too, and my intent isn't to badger you or even to complain about the WP:OFFICE policy, but rather to try to clarify why this particular implementation feels so different from other office actions. I'm not trying to be impatient, and the two weeks isn't what prompted me to join this discussion.
Rather, my point is that the procedure for resolving this seems to be for FloNight to privately engage in a private "series of extremely complicated negotiations" in order to somehow resolve this issue. That is very far from how we resolve content disputes on Wikipedia. Certainly, negative unsourced material should be removed, and if needed, the page protected while consensus is developed, but having an administrator "negotiate" the content of an article off-wiki is so far outside the bounds of what WP:OFFICE seems to state. Furthermore, such a private negotiation cannot be the basis for a future article, as other editors cannot possibly abide by a "consensus" we are unaware of.
"What should people do when they see a WP:OFFICE action? Treat it as a call for attention from the absolute best within ourselves, the absolute best within our community. Here we have an article which has gone horribly wrong in some way, and sometimes it can be a mystery as to what exactly the problem is. Why is someone upset? Which claim in the article is false or overstated or biased or hostile? I think dozens of people should swoop in and start working really hard on a temp version (usualy protected or semi-protected, depending on the exact nature of the situation), with extreme hardcore attention paid to sourcing, to neutral phrasing, etc."
This makes sense and is that path several editors have wanted to take with this article. The problem here is that this process has been blocked from happening. We do not know why someone is upset nor what claims are problematic. When well-meaning editors did jump in and start collecting links to reliable sources to use in constructing a new article, FloNight proceeded to blank them (though I'm certainly inclined to WP:AGF on this and presume that she thought they were an old discussion). When other editors have come here and to Talk:Choose Your Own Adventure with the hope of swooping in and fixing this, the response
I'm fully willing to AGF and I do believe that everyone has the best intentions in mind here. Obviously, this article has apparently upset someone greatly, and I believe we should do our best to recreate it with a new focus towards accuracy and neutrality. That process is inherently going to have to involve some degree of semi-public (e.g. talk pages) discussion because that is the only way Wikipedia editors can collaborate on an article. If the parties involved cannot accept even minimal disclosure, the article ought to be deleted and salted so we can just accept that Wikipedia simply shall not have an article on the subject. Zachlipton (talk) 02:59, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just FYI, two weeks ago I replaced the links to the specs (I wish WMF legal would explain their interpretation; to my reading, it seems quite unambiguous that the notice only demanded removing "the specifications", not links thereto) with links to google searches for the specs. I assumed you were patrolling changes, so I didn't need to bring it to your attention explicitly. User:Ruud Koot recently saw fit to "remove infringing links", an edit that I objected to. If you're able to, an Office interpretation on this subject would be a useful addition to the talk page discussion. Thank you! 71.41.210.146 (talk) 20:21, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
A proposal to add topical links to all of the contents pages has been made. As part of that proposal, the navigation bar at the top of these contents pages would look like this.
I would like to appeal the office action regarding Choose your own Adventure series. Will the office consider filing counter DMCA? Phearson (talk) 15:32, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, but there's no reason to believe a DMCA notification was ever filed in this matter to begin with. Only the Foundation and the party involved know for sure, but it seems highly unlikely to me that this is a DMCA situation as none of the content removed appears to be copyrighted material or at all related to any possible copyright claim. In any case, I can't see how you would complete a good-faith counter-notification without having seen the original notification (if there was one), as you wouldn't know what material is under dispute or even who to address your letter to. In any case, Philippe seems to be on a wikibreak now, so I suppose the only real option is to try to contact FloNight or someone else at the Foundation. Zachlipton (talk) 05:36, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Counter-notifications are filed by the copyright holder, not by the WMF. Philippe is on a temporary wiki-break and will be returning shortly -- you'll have to talk to him or someone else listed on WP:OFFICE as being authorized to modify office actions. (FloNight is not involved with office actions). ⇒SWATJesterSon of the Defender12:18, 3 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Section on the mainproject page WikiGuides
Hi
I worded the section header that way to differentiate that it was designed to be for existing established users.
Is it the case that you are expecting all users, including the new users to comment on that particular page?
I was anticipating a page in another place for the new users to comment on their experiences but, if your intent is in fact for them to all be jumbled up together, then so be it. Chaosdruid (talk) 03:45, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Revert or undo? Certainly not, lol. I am not privy to the reasoning behind what the objectives of the project were and are. I was only concerned with making sure that the objectives would still be allowed to be as flexible as possible while constructing the sub-page framework for the tabs. If the intent is to get them onto the same page, that is fine! To be honest I am 50;50 on it, it might be good to get them all together, I just thought from the point of view of tracking effectiveness of the project it would be better to keep them separated. As I said, I would not know what the intentions were, we were just concerned that they were taking up a large amount of space on the discussion page and we agreed they needed to be moved to a sub-page.
I had to do something I do not like doing, ass-u-me what the intention might be and go ahead and create the sub-pages. I just wanted to make sure that if there was an intent to look at similar experiences, once the new users had been around for some time, they would not be jumbled up with the others and so not easily identifiable.
If the intent was to make them feel like "one of the gang" after a certain amount of time, then separating them would be a mistake.
The wording is not really important. We were using terminology like "Established User", but that seemed a little old fashioned as well as perhaps leading the New User to think "does that mean I will not be established until I have been here for a year or more?" I chose "Wikipedian" to imply that we were going to help them join in and feel like "one of the gang", specifically wikipedians. It is more a question of somehow retaining those three things: becoming part of "us" (the wiki community), showing that we were all once like them, and choosing the name for "us" that conveyed the idea of "group/family of wikipedia editors"
P.S. - Sorry, forgot, yes it should have been a possessive plural but I was also thinking how to re-word it to avoid all those zzzzs. Chaosdruid (talk) 04:40, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
P.P.S. - Please weigh in on the point on my talk page just above your post - all input there is important as it may impact on confidentiality - I am not sure ... Chaosdruid (talk) 04:44, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Users own records
I felt that we could adopt it like we do on the GOCE drives. This text code can be put anywhere, there is one in my use space, and it autoupdates too all of them. That way individual guides could all keep their own in their user space and a copy of all of them could be put one secret WMF page that only those that need to, would have access to them all.
Feel free to take this one wherever you wish! Only limitation is I think it might only work on en-wikisapce, so would be nice if you can put it onto a WMF space page and see if it does work... Chaosdruid (talk) 05:12, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Chaosdruid
AW = already welcomed
W TP = welcomed using my template
m = email
m2 = email2
corr = correspondence started
nr = no reply
c = corporate/coi
v = vandal
i1 = one issue editor
nr = states not returning
P/C/D= Page created was deleted
This is the Barnstar of Diligence, which I bestow upon you, Philippe, in honour of your reluctance to take a proper vacation. It is also a test of Kaldari's new WikiLove widget :-) Sue Gardner (talk) 02:18, 8 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I view this edit as paradoxical to what it says a bit further down on your userpage:
You can find me on en:Wikipedia as Philippe as a volunteer, or as Philippe (WMF) in my staff role.
It's a bit confusing, specifically because you have a volunteer account that you can use in a "capacity as a volunteer" and because this account only has administrative privileges because you are a staff member. Essentially, it seems you are conflating roles between accounts. Could you clarify what you meant? Maybe I'm missing something. Killiondude (talk) 22:09, 19 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hey Philippe, I saw you tried to clarify here. I don't mean to be a pest, but it didn't really clarify things for me. If you have two separate accounts, one volunteer one and one that has "(WMF)" in the title, I don't see why you should use the staff account for volunteer purposes. Due to the fact that it has WMF in the title, it makes it look official regardless of what you post on your userpage. As I posted above, your userpage still says one account is a volunteer account and this one is used for your "staff role". And again, like I posted above, your edit where you said,
"Unless otherwise stated, any edit to this wiki by me is an act of a regular member of the community and administrator, not a legal or official action of the Wikimedia Foundation."
doesn't make much sense to me because this account isn't a "regular" account and only has adminship because you're a staff member (this account also carries the global "staff" right-- see m:Special:GlobalUsers/Staff). These things aren't properly documented on-wiki, and my confusion with the conflicting reports on your userpage is what prompted me to ask. Thanks for taking the time to read. Killiondude (talk) 20:48, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hey Killiondude, thanks for the comment. The language for those disclaimers is being discussed by legal fairly soon, and I hope that will clear things up. We've had some confusion about the role of those accounts, as you rightly point out, and it needs to be clarified. So, I'm sorry but I can't give you a great answer yet. I'll tell you that I view the role this way: unless I clearly spell out that it's an OFFICE action and shouldn't be reverted, I figure it should be treated like an action of any other community member. In some cases, because it's an action that would happen with administrative rights, that should be read as "an action of any community member with administrative rights". I know that's hazy, but trust me, please, when I say we're trying to come up with good clear language. New General Counsel. :) Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:37, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Can you think of a few good candidates to round up for input into this one? Seems as though this, or something very simialr, could be such a good idea, but it's stalling for lack of TLC and attention. Thought you might be able to resuscitate it a bit - I don't know enough people yet to help this idea along. Pesky (talk) 07:12, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, Philippe. What is the Head of Reader Relations? What does the Head of Reader Relations do exactly? I would be very grateful if you were to explain to me. Thanks! Jempcorp {My User Page | My Talk Page} 21:39, 3 April 2011 (UTC).[reply]
License @ MW wiki
I'm pretty sure this is wrong, That wiki isn't under a single license, some is under the CCBYSA and some of it is under the public domain, see mw:Project:Copyright for more info, So that altered text is now wrong. Peachey88(T·C)01:17, 4 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
