User talk:Jimbo Wales

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Wikia

Hi! I blanked the discussion here because Wikia is my "day job" and wikipedia is my hobby and charity work... Please talk to me about Wikia by email at jwales@Wikia.com or on any talk page there... I will respond there. (But not until tomorrow, as I am traveling today.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 06:03, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Editing

Is there a way I can convert my edits from my IP, 173.49.140.141 to my account, Perseus, Son of Zeus? 173.49.140.141 (talk) 15:19, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

That would give me a total of 324 edits. 173.49.140.141 (talk) 15:58, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) You're better off asking that sort of question at WP:VPT, but I'm almost certain the answer is no. —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 16:20, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

No, at least not on Wikipedia. And anyway, this is more situable for the help desk or VPT than the founder's talk page. —  Waterfox  21:45, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

You can normally change your name, but since you don't have a name on the original account, just an IP address, I don't think that'd work. Dream Focus 22:04, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

It used to be possible, but it isn't done anymore. Graham87 03:09, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

No right of reply?

[I am open to people "contributing" their own story about me. I did things in the past that are well documented in tv documentaries, numerous media reports and a number of online submissions. But some of the information being added is very selective and is false. Sources that are being cited are not credible but accepted by Wikipedia due to simply having a web address. I have offered to those that are editing this page to be open to an interview by them on the subject matter. Still awaiting their reply. Chris Porter]

This makes me sad Christopher Porter. He's effectively saying "hey, you are writing about me, well I'd like to set the record straight". Not unreasonable, but it will almost certainly end badly. We research articles on people, but we don't take evidence from the subject, we don't interview them, not even if they offer, (that's OR) and we don't give a right of reply (a reasonable journalist would say "do you want to comment on this?" before running a story.) Maybe he'll be able to point us to third party sources that record his point of view, but unless he can we don't really have any way of helping him. It's just sad - a saw him trying to put his view into the article and I feel just helpless - another BLP train-wreck about to happen. Sigh.--Scott Mac 15:18, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

The pointing in the direction of solid independent reliable sources woul be a big step in the right direction. Like many things in life, it is also contingent on the ability of involved parties to negotiate with others whose opinions and goals differ and may be at odds with their own. A ubiquitous problem really, by no means restricted to BLPs. Interesting to see how it turns out. Casliber (talk · contribs) 15:25, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

One problem is he's not a regular wikipedian, so he don't know how to interact. I tried to communicate through his account User talk:NoteMyVote, but he may or may not have seen the message as he's generally not logging in. We'll only be able to work with him if he learn our rules (and why should he?).--Scott Mac 15:28, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

No he doesn't need to learn the rules if he lets us know what he feels to be broad introductory sources and other editors get on with it. If he wants to edit actively that is a different story but if the discussion is open should be okay, especially if a few more of the diplomatic editors keep an eye out. Casliber (talk · contribs) 15:42, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to thank Casliber and others for jumping in to help here, and I echo Scott Mac's concerns.

In the course of my usual BLP work, as well as upon meeting lots of people who have Wikipedia entries that they are unhappy about, it has come up many times that the subject is very likely the unintentional victim of bad/incomplete reporting, and doesn't really have a platform to correct the record in any useful way.

I think we often have an excessive concern that BLP subjects are interested in a "whitewash". This has not generally been my experience, even with controversial figures. What people seem more interested in, rather, is accuracy and truth - even in cases where the media has not embraced those values. This can be tricky. I have given this a lot of thought, but do not yet have a great answer to what can be done when reliable sources say one thing, and the BLP subject says another thing, particularly when the facts in question are not particularly exciting or controversial.

There are also sometimes problems of cherry-picking of sources in order to prove a point. I have personally said to the press hundreds of times over the years that I was always very optimistic at the founding of Wikipedia, citing the anecdote that I had looked at a list of the top 100 websites on the net and seen an encyclopedia site at around #50, and thinking that if we did our job well, we could be in the top 100 or even top 50. Dozens of publications have commented on my self-described "pathological optimism". Nevertheless, citing a single source (which was, as is well known at least partly debunked, the infamous "Essjay" piece which took him at his word) we claim "Neither Sanger nor Wales expected very much from the Wikipedia initiative." (Perhaps someone thought it might make this thin referencing better to cite the same article twice for the same false claim.)

In cases like this latter case, there is a serious need for NPOV editorial judgment. Someone has to do the difficult job of weighing up the sources and realizing that, on balance, a particular source (even if from a generally well-regarded publication) which is an outlier in some respects must be ignored or anyway dealt with as problematic. If we get it wrong even when I have said the same thing hundreds of times to dozens or hundreds of publications, imagine how much harder it is for people who are not interviewed very often, whose only press is 5-10 articles across a span of a dozen years.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:57, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

• There is also, in my experience of over-viewing BLPs, that "a serious need for NPOV editorial judgment" is not being enforced as much as it should be. I see unsourced and poorly-sourced nonsense being added on a daily basis, largely because some of our editors do not understand the difference between "encyclopedia", "fansite" and "tabloid blog". It's an uphill struggle fighting this kind of input, and as a result, I feel I have to watchlist articles concerning topics in which I have zero interest, if only to keep those articles within policy. To be honest, I am not a junior school teacher, and don't see why my analytical expertise should be wasted on dealing with such issues. I should have better things to be doing here. Rodhullandemu 00:09, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with you completely. I am hopeful that Pending Changes, applied liberally to biographies which have had any problems at all, will be majorly helpful. But I also think that the ongoing tightening of BLP policy is something that should be accelerated.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 00:14, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Pending changes may solve the problem of readers seeing the unsourced, speculative info, but it doesn't solve Rodhullandemu's problem of having to patrol the edits--someone still has to eventually go in, revert the pending change, and explain why (and then explain why on the article/user talk page, if the problem persists). I'm not saying that PC is bad, just that it doesn't solve the inevitable problems that occur from our being a fundamentally different type of interactive site than nearly everything else on the internet. Qwyrxian (talk) 00:46, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, in cases where there is POV pushing, as opposed to random vandalism, there should be a very strong change in behavior of the would-be POV pushers in light of knowing that their edits won't be seen by the public. The more we take away the rewards for bad editing, the less bad editing we will see (on average). There is no perfect security, but there should be things we can do which alter the cost/benefit ratio in useful ways. :)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 00:51, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Alas, in political silly season, "experienced editors" who would be unaffected by pending changes are among the offenders. Collect (talk) 11:46, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, not everything is helped by Pending Changes. :) There are no magic bullets.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:18, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

I was just recommended to this discussion. I started one regarding BLP at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), under the heading "6 To propose Autobiographical as a sub-category" Here's the link:- [1]. You'll notice I didn't get very far, and now I'm exhausted. I shall follow this discussion here, with a great deal of interest. Please read what I had to say, because that's my contribution. JohnClarknew (talk) 22:44, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion/idea

Jimbo sayeth, What people seem more interested in, rather, is accuracy and truth - 'even in cases where the media has not embraced those values'. This can be tricky. I have given this a lot of thought, but do not yet have a great answer to what can be done when reliable sources say one thing,

What if the subject of the BLP uploaded documentation/evidence/information from their own personal archives to Wikisource. I'm talking about transcripts or other forms of primary sources. Or maybe just their side of the story.--*Kat* ^(meow?) 01:57, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's helpful in many cases. OTRS is the current best solution, which has the advantage of respecting privacy. I'm pretty sure asking people whose birthdate is in some regard confusing to upload their birth certificate is not a very user-friendly or privacy-respecting solution.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 02:10, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Birth certificates aren't the only things with the DOB on them. But I get your point. --*Kat* ^(meow?) 04:32, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

And, to be fair, I get yours as well. More user-friendly ways for people who aren't Wikipedia editors to point us towards useful sources and evidence would be a net good thing, without a doubt.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 04:57, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

We wrote into the sourcing policy here several years ago that self-published websites maintained by the subjects of articles are allowed as reliable sources in those articles, so long as they're not unduly self-serving, there's no doubt about the authorship, and the article isn't based on that source. We did that so that subjects had a way they could correct errors that the secondary sources (e.g. newspapers) had made about them. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 05:24, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, and that helps in many (but sadly not all) cases. In some cases, subjects quite rightly fear that bringing up some unpleasant thing or other on their personal website will lead to renewed media interest. And when there is POV-pushing involved, it's just never going to be that simple. Let's go back to the original example that started this thread: he used to be a dolphin trader, and now he's had "a change of heart" and his concern is that sources are being cherry picked and misrepresented, and he'd like to put his side of the story on the record. We do have ways of helping him, of course, and one of them is that he could start a blog, prove that it is his, and write his side of the story. I just wish that process could be easier, and I wish that he could have better ways of offering assistance to us that don't put him at risk of some bad press coverage claiming that he's "lashing out at volunteer driven Wikipedia" or whatever.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:38, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

A suggestion someone made a couple of years ago was that each BLP would have a little drop-down section, a pop-up window or similar, where the subject would have the right of reply. A limited number of words, not a long thing, and something only the subject would have access to. It would take a lot of working out in terms of what the rules would be, how we'd be sure we were dealing with the subject, and so on, but I always thought it was an idea that had potential. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 05:41, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with you completely. :) --Jimbo Wales (talk) 05:53, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

That would also have the advantage that with reasonable subjects, we might strive to get the article to such neutrality that a subject might be able to endorse it as "fair and reasonable". I just keep coming back to the fact that good journalists don't publish material on people without contacting them and inviting (at very least) their comment. I suppose the problem would be do we allow them 10 words, or 500 to put a complex counter-case? And what do we do if their response is profanities, or a libellous attack on a third-party? Do we censor? I'd certainly like us to make effort to contact subjects and print any response on the talk page for editors to consider. Although my settled view is that the only fix here is to lift our notability bar for BLPs by a mile: have fewer, on people with more solid sources, where enough editors will be interested in contributing to them, that we can actually maintain them properly. But like that's gonna happen?--Scott Mac 09:10, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

How many "good journalists" are left? Have you read some of the material about "opposition politicians" written in some sources? We need a lot more than raising notability standards (most marginal BLPs are not "hit pieces" to be sure) but much stronger rules concerning defamatory opinion being placed as "fact" in all BLPs. Collect (talk) 11:46, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

"rules" are not the problem, we have absolute rules on not placing opinion, or defamation, or interpretation, or unsound fact on ANY article, nevermind a BLP. The problem is that our policies focus on ideals and aspiration, and not on what is maintainable. What we need to establish is realistic quality control, and a related risk-assessment to our notability threshholds, and the degree of the openness of our editing. That's simply not a question that most of Wikipedia is willing to ask. There is too much eventualist optimism. People say "contentious stuff can be removed", well, yes it can be, but the problem isn't removal (which the BLP policy gives us the tools to do) the problem is identifying the less-obvious bad stuff in the first place. Until we adjust policy to reflect the real problem, nothing will change.--Scott Mac 12:04, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Unfotunately, that'd take about another 10 years or so I reckon, before the 'pedia is in enough of a 'maintenance' phase to be able to do this. Problem is, this (in how it is being done currently) broadly appears to be the only way to get from A to B. All other attempts thus far with expert editors or other procesing of content have failed. These issues with BLP can be broadly applied to many other articles - any article which discusses medical, nutritional or economic issues could be placed in the same basket. The numbers of articles with real-life impact are extremely broad, and slashing content will be catastrophic. Casliber (talk · contribs) 12:25, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

That is unfortunately the type of response that's at the root of the problem. A risk assessment that essentially says "the cost to the project is too high" and thus lets third parties pay it instead. Another way of looking at it is to say that the level of collateral damage to innocent parties is too high - so we need to take some pain to reduce it. Frankly, if we can't reduce the risks to third-parties to a responsible level, then it is irresponsible to host any BLPs at all. I don't think we need to go anything like as far as that, but we no need to stop the ostrich approach. The argument that we shouldn't treat BLPs as special cases, because the problems are in all articles is spurious. Ten minutes on OTRS will show that BLPs are disproportionately the cause of legitimate subject complaint - so let's start there. There are a wide range of measures we could take that would reduce the risks to BLP subjects without trashing the project - none of them as cost-free, granted. But if we start by saying we need to be willing to sacrifice some of our ideals here (at least at the margins) we may get somewhere. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.--Scott Mac 13:44, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm not saying there is no problem - my idea (semi'ing the lot of them) is still more workable (I think) and less labour intensive than flagged revisions (though it is not a 'shiny new toy') - it means the onus is on the adder to explain how their information is good rather than the flagged revision reviewer sifting through the added info afterwards. You Scott have mentioned quitting WP several times, so I feel I need to be convinced that the creation of an encyclopedia is actually a goal of yours, and hence trying to marry the two is an aim, rather than just solely BLP protection. Casliber (talk · contribs) 23:18, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

My aims are beside the point - my arguments ought to stand or fall on their own merits. I've never seen FR as worth much - precisely because of the problem of the reviewer. If you deploy flagged widely (even on all BLPs) you'll end up with a low quality of review and reviewer. Such a net may catch obvious crap, but will do little to catch the plausible untruth - which is rarer, but most damaging to subjects. Semi'ing the lot is worth considering - although the determined libeller or POV pusher will only be delayed a bit. It is also quite a high price for the project to pay (no newbie gets to edit any BLP) for a questionable return. Worth exploring certainly. I'd also like us to explore a) targeted flagging and b) reviewing the lower notability threshold for BLPs. If the danger of harm is disproportionately on BLPs, it is more so on less notable subjects, who don't have other bios online to offset ours, and have far less knowledgeable eyes on then spotting crap. We are always more likely to hurt John Seigenthaler than Sarah Palin. Since there is project cost to whatever we do, pay the price where it does most good for limiting harm to real subjects. We need to get smart, not use scatter-guns.--Scott Mac 00:45, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Overall, I dislike the idea of a 'right of reply', and I believe it will generally be misunderstood by readers and the repository of unverifiable, self-serving claims by subjects (e.g., "I didn't do it", by a majority of convicted criminals). I prefer the current system, in which a person subjected to an article is welcome to set up a completely separate website, which we'll link. That avoids all the complications of word limits, updates as the article evolves, etc.

As for the (IMO serious) problem of unbalanced articles, one approach is simply to raise the standards for inclusion. It's hard to make a credible claim for bias if a dozen independent sources report the same things, over a period of at least several years, involving multiple events. Conversely, it's almost impossible to avoid bias if you're trying to build an article on a few sentences in two media reports that are mostly about something else, and all involve events happening over the space of a day or two. The equation that 2RS=N is not appropriate for BLPs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:46, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Meetup Miami

I'm planning to form a wikimeetup at my university or close by. But I don't want to form a date until if you could confirm if you want to go or not. I want the wikimeetup to attract as many people as possible including many new contributers. Let me know of a date and I'll work the venue situation. Maybe I could have it on campus, on one of the auditoriums. Thanks Secret ^account 16:49, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Best if we move this to email, because there will probably have to be some back and forth about the date. Miami might seem convenient to me, but it is a 4 hour drive or a flight from my part of Florida, so this is to some extent just like a request that I come to a meetup in England or India. I will come, but it might be nontrivial to find a date that works.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:52, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

First edit to Wikipedia

Who made the first edit to Wikipedia? Wayne Olajuwon chat 00:04, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Me. I installed Usemod Wiki, and then typed "Hello, World!" on the front page and hit save. --Jimbo Wales (talk) 01:26, 24 October 2010 (UTC)