User:Wikid77 is currently in wiki-jail, for 1 month (til 01Feb10) for charges of sockpuppetry. I filed 2 unblock requests to review my punishment, but both were harshly denied, so I think they would increase my ban to 3 months if I said anything else. Tie a yellow ribbon for me. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:12, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Questionable punishment of D

The January 2010 block against User:Darryl98 was extremely harsh, IMHO, as being a 1-month block for a WP:3RR violation that was escalated by a more-experienced user who was well aware of goading people into a revert-war. Perhaps an 8-day block would have been more fair, with an attempt to discuss the situation during those 8 days, and possibly remove the block sooner than 8 days, after true consensus (that means a mutual agreement). Please understand that Wikipedia policies are actually much more fair, in writing, than the way some users (and admin users) misapply those policies: the typical block for WP:3RR is only a 24-hour block, not 1 month. In fact, per WP:Blocking_policy, use of excessive blocking is a violation due to the reasoning that new users will become highly irritated by excessive punishment. The idea of fair punishment isn't just a matter of human decency, or common sense when trying to actually "collaborate" with other users, no, much more than those reasons, fair punishment is a stated policy issue. I think what needs to be added, to avoid excessive punishment, is to develop a type of "Code of Hammurabi" as a list of wiki-punishments for each situation, based on length of tenure, total edit-count, and repeat-offenses, so that the punishment does NOT just become a matter of "lengthen the block so a user won't come back soon to cause more trouble". Meanwhile, rather than reducing future conflicts, excessive punishment poisons the Internet community with unhappy users who spread the word of how they were mistreated. Typically, users will not see unfairness as a few admins crossing the line and violating policies in a harsh manner, instead, a user victim is likely to "blame Wikipedia" for being a "bad system" that harrasses and abuses people. What needs to be emphasized, in discussions during a shorter block, is that some (many?) users (admins) violate policies, but this is not condoned, it's just hard to enforce because a banned user can return using a social-networking site that has thousands of IP addresses and Wikipedia cannot easily stop them. Also, Wikipedia has very limited appeal processes, and so there is nothing, yet, as sophisticated as even the "American notion of justice" in Wikipedia: there are no trials by jury of informed peers (chosen at random). Instead, many issues are decided by "dog pile" groups, who collect around a common bias or mindset, as a sort of "feeding frenzy" or hive mind that sees a negative remark as a veiled attack against the hive, and many members of the hive must sink into "sting mode" to counter-attack a person who states angry remarks. Currently, Wikipedia likes people who are ultra-mild and don't claim any Bill of Rights but simply beg to belong with the others. Hence, people from democratic republics come to Wikipedia and might demand their rights under the law, without realizing it is the Law of the Old West: be as nice as possible to avoid getting shot by other users/admins who are toting wiki-guns. Only some people think users have any rights to fair treatment, despite current WP policies that even require actions to be fair within those regulations. Perhaps WP needs to teach "fairness classes" to users who come from fascist countries or domineering parents: being fair and courteous is not a strong force of nature, but rather must be taught to users. -Wikid77 (talk) 02:33, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikid, I'm sure that you are well aware of why WP cannot tolerate the improper use of WP:Sockpuppets. Just as your socking as Wz777 had to be stopped, so did PilgrimRose's socking as Darryl98. But blocks are not regarded as punishment, they are regarded as protection of WP from those who, like yourself, are having difficulty working within the rules. The indef block of a sockpuppet is applied equally to all such. LeadSongDog come howl 04:43, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

• If you read that user's larger prior talk-page revisions, you will see that the stated preference was to become named as "Darryl98" so I am respecting that request. In changing names, that user was not aware of how people can be goaded into a WP:3RR excess of revisions, and that escalation seemed to be the most serious of the policy violations. It is not a violation to have multiple usernames on Wikipedia. Plus, as an occasional user, it seemed that Darryl98 had spent extensive time to read the policies about WP:Sockpuppetry and properly explained each issue as it applied in the situation: no clear violation of puppets, but rather just being accused of "nefarious" intentions, which was noted as a violation of WP:AGF. Again, the largest disturbance was engaging in a WP:3RR violation, typically risking a 24-hour block, which I am not sure that user fully understood. The stated intent was a renaming as "Darryl98" and I think that should have been accepted, on good faith, then impose the WP:3RR (and possibly indef the older username). Anyway, as far as the concept of "difficulty working within the rules", we at Wikipedia have WP:IAR as a safety valve. By using WP:IAR, someone in a WP:BLP emergency could remove a whole section named "Lies often told by <living person>" that contained numerous unsourced negative remarks, using WP:IAR to defend a unilateral section-blanking hopefully later explained on a talk-page. You probably know by now that Bing.com creates long-term SEO subpages based on "==subheaders==" and hence, slurs in a subheader can go viral for weeks. It is always a judgment call as to when to invoke WP:IAR, but the main goal is to write the encyclopedia and guide users into consensus. We don't want angry users returning 2 months later, as a whole new identity, with the idea that WP is a ruthless group that must be fought because they don't follow many of their own "bad" policies. We need to discuss that the policies are very good but, sometimes, misapplied. Hence, there must be a balance, if the policy seems to indicate ban for 1 month, consider the extenuating circumstances and, perhaps, consider an 8-day ban with the understanding that the issues could be discussed from the usertalk-page during that period (perhaps with a Checkuser). We are trying to avoid 2 major problems: people returning with a negative attitude (perhaps a new id), and people leaving "forever" with plans to tell the world, with all the writing skills they have evidenced on WP. That's why we sometimes "ignore all rules" to see if we can restore relations with an insulted user, who wishes to change the username they have used among many people in their everyday community. With a name like "Pilgrim~" you should beware a powerful spirit: Plymouth Colony was the oldest, continuous colony in the U.S. mainland (they continued there after the First Thanksgiving from Jamestown, Virginia, which was later massacred by natives and eventually abandoned for a day). There's the old adage, "Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword" but consider offering an olive branch instead. It is not a good idea to anger powerful people, we must seek consensus with them. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:21, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
  • Correct, usernames do not belong in section headers, as I've previously advised. However, if you or PR wish to change username there is a legitimate way to do so without creating a sock puppet. The above-board uses of sock puppets are deliberately very limited and in no case do they involve deception of other users. Once your brief block expires, you will of course be able to discuss proposed improvements to any policy on its associated talkpage. LeadSongDog come howl 16:16, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

[edit] 2010 delay to improvements in Template:Convert

02-Jan-10: I know I had "promised" many users that I would be reducing Template:Convert by nearly 2,400(?) fewer subtemplates, of the current 3,050 pages; however, I'm forbidden to work outside my talk-page during January 2010. Feel free to start reducing those highly complex templates without me, but remember they are a minefield of difficult issues (at least 13 sub-groups of conversion types). Also, many of the converted measurements displayed by Template:Convert are actually incorrect by 2-5% (another big embarrassment for Wikipedia), so please try to fix those while I am locked out during January. Also, don't worry about the embarrassment, we can always say the problems were known but it took the admins a while to help fix those measurement errors. And remember, Wikipedia is already a "joke website" to many people, so we will be making Wikipedia's bad reputation somewhat better just by correcting the misleading measurements this year. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:12, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Work on Kercher-Murder article

02-Jan-10: All of us who were banned wanted to keep improving that article "Murder of Meredith Kercher", so everyone else please keep adding the missing evidence about the murder case. At this point, since Wikipedia wants to avoid lawsuits or libelous phrases, I am thinking the article should state that there was no major evidence of a bisexual orgy involving Kercher or any of the living people (per WP:BLP), but rather, the notion of a sex game was primarily a prosecution theory. I don't think the article should imply that those people had a bizarre, wild sex event that might slur their names, since the evidence doesn't seem to indicate more than just typical boy-girl couples: I have not found any prior events of so-called Italian orgies. Nota bene: While Knox/Sollecito were convicted in Italy, the evidence would be denied in the U.S., and so I think the Italian slurs would be considered libel in the U.S. -Wikid77 22:12, 2 January 2010

[edit] Admins are not dense but no speaka da english

03-Jan-10: People might get frustrated when trying to discuss issues with the admins on the English Wikipedia. A major source of the trouble, rather than the perception that admins are too dim to follow logic, is the fact that many admins do not really speak English ("I can english, I can english don't you"). Hints of this problem can be seen in many user pages, where they claim "native speaker of English" but also show "level 19" fluency in Mondavian-jabberish or such. Hence, please do not blame those admins for not discussing issues with you, they mean no disrespect, as they can't fully understand anyone who is speaking English idioms in your culture. It is not their fault: there is no adequate wiki-test to ensure admins know the common English idioms. This situation is a form of systemic problem that permeates the entire Wikipedia environment, when trying to find long-term volunteers to perform the (boring) admin functions. The cause of the problem is the overall system about English literacy, not the individual people. -Wikid77 06:11, 3 January 2010

[edit] Why no anger about being banned

03-Jan-10: People might wonder why I am not upset about being sentenced to 1 month of wiki-jail for a crime I didn't commit. Well, there is an old song (in English) about unjust punishment: "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" (1973, 1981, 1992, 2002) with the lyric "that's the night that they hung an innocent man". The song contains at least 5 plot twists of people's mistaken ideas, leading to the final unjust conviction and revelation. The lyrics are written with many American gothic, Southern English idioms (the word "hung" is used for the proper term "hanged" or "supper's waitin' at home" etc.). Anyway, for 4 decades, that song has typified widespread feelings of unjust punishment in English-language cultures, as proven by the song having been re-recorded during those decades. So, being unjustly punished is a common occurrence in English-speaking cultures. Plus, considering that I've made over 2,000 major edits in the past 3 months, Wikipedia is actually suffering, vastly more than I am, while I am being thwarted from helping. It is just so pitiful, but there is an idiom for that as well: "shooting yourself in the foot". -Wikid77 06:11, 3 January 2010

[edit] Barnstar

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		For fixing a complex coding error in Template:Google Inc. when no one else could figure it out! - Ahunt (talk) 02:54, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Stubs

Hi Wikid77 - good to see you making a few new stubs for wildlife reserves in Texas. If you mke any more could I ask you to add {{Texas-geo-stub}} rather than just {{Geo-stub}}? It'll save a bit of sorting further down the line. Cheers, Grutness...wha? 21:57, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia extended growth

Your essay Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia extended growth looks very good. I would suggest to add an introduction and a link to Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth. As you might know I introduced the 3, 4 and 5M limit as the maximum number of articles on the english wikipedia (the logistic model). This as contrast to the belief that growth was exponential. My model was created in March 2006, THREE YEARS ago. Until this essay I have not seen new models. HenkvD (talk) 18:54, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Kudos for the work on image placement

Thanks for the effort you put into dealing with the issue of placing images when there is already a floating table. I fear that there were quite a few nights put into it. I'd given up worrying about a response after a week. I'll have to look more carefully at it when I can find the headspace. And thanks for the border + cellpadding tip. Cheers. -- spin^control 23:01, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

 ArcAngel (talk) 04:27, 3 September 2009 (UTC) 

[edit] DRV

If you disagree with the deletion of {{in}}, please take it to WP:DRV, rather than repeatedly recreating a template deleted after a WP:TFD discussion. Thank you. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 14:26, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

• There was no true consensus to delete the spacing template which had been in use all during 2009. Plus, as the author, I was not even notified that a TfD had been issued by User:Plastikspork, who forced the deletion of a universal template, then get this, changed several closed-AfD archives in a rabid obsession to rid Wikipedia of that universal template. I naturally restored the contents of that universal template, and on 3 occasions the template was quickly reverted to the math symbol "\in" thereby violating WP:3RR. At which point, User:Plastispork protected the reverted template as a high-use template, which is a total lie, and an illegal use of protection. In other words, the unbalanced, frantic actions of User:Plastikspork have violated so many policies and norms that the overall behavior is utterly bizarre, especially when deleting a universal template. I'm not implying User:Plastikspork is the only user issuing TfDs that omit the author, but the frantic other policy violations are just way over the edge. Here, I have been working, trying to advance the structure of both English Wikipedia & the Commons, and I am thwarted by such bizarre reactions. I'm just stating this for the record: it's all too petty for me, and I cannot waste any more time this week. -Wikid77 (talk) 02:55, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Recreation of redundant templates

You recently recreated Kmbot and Htbot after they had been deleted at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2009 August 9#More redundant conversion templates. Not only does this go against deletion rules, but as far as I can tell, they are completely redundant to {{Convert}}. For this reason, I've also deleted Volbot. If you want to contest the deletion process, you can take the issue to WP:DRV, but do not recreate these templates. Thank you. — Huntster (t @ c) 06:32, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Table of contents

A comment of yours has inspired me to write the following.

BTW, if you are back from your Wikibreak, you might want to remove the notice at the top of this talkpage. Debresser (talk) 15:45, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Template:Convert deadlock - engineers versus others

See, my problem is that having more than one template, especially one that does the same thing but a little bit differently, is that editors are going to get even more confused. "What, are we supposed to use one in this situation and the other in that? Screw it, I won't use either!" which completely defeats the point of having Convert templates in the first place...we want people to use them, so there's less chance of completely fubar'd data. Outputs can always be modified later, but inputs are the key.

Secondly, I keep getting the feeling like you are blaming the template creators for perceived inaccuracies in articles. I'm not an engineer, and I though I love working with and building templates, this one is far too complex for my comprehension. Yet I actually took the time to understand how to use the damn thing, which the vast majority of people can't or won't do. If the output in an article is incorrect, blame the editor, not the template. It's their ultimate responsibility to get it right if they're going to use the template in the first place. As "intelligent" as I find it to be, it is ultimately just a dumb passive piece of code.

In other words, I completely disagree with the creation of a "GConvert" template, but of course I'm not going to delete it outright. The only reason I did that with the previous ones is because they were essentially recreations of TfD'd templates, with even the same names. You should have taken it to Deletion Review rather than simply making them all over again.

In any case, if you'd like to reply to any of this, please do so, and then I'll launch into how you should have conducted things at the Convert talk page. — Huntster (t @ c) 07:10, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Edel's Land in 1619 in science

I was checking page 1619 in science between WP:EN and WP:FR, and I noticed the sentence: "Edel's Land, in Western Australia, is discovered by Jans Van Edel, a Dutch seaman" that you added on 25 April 2007 (I hope I checked the history properly). I googled a bit, but it was difficult for me to find anything relevant. Could you add a reference or create an article for one or both red links? Thanks - --Anneyh (talk) 09:19, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Barnstar

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		For fixing the convert template's ft-in to cm conversion and eliminating significant conversion errors in thousands of articles, I award you this barnstar. And so should WikiProject Basketball! JN466 09:08, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Now, if you could do the same thing for {{convert|36|m|ft}} {{convert|37|m|ft}} {{convert|38|m|ft}}, which at the time of writing comes out as 36 metres (120 ft) 37 metres (120 ft) 38 metres (120 ft), ... JN466 09:08, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] File:Kercher Knox house Perugia Italy.gif listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, File:Kercher Knox house Perugia Italy.gif, has been listed at Wikipedia:Files for deletion. Please see the discussion to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. FormerIP (talk) 03:02, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Sockpuppetry at Murder of Meredith Kercher

You have been blocked from editing for a period of 1 month for Abuse of multiple accounts. Please stop. You are welcome to make useful contributions after the block expires. If you believe this block is unjustified you may contest this block by adding the text {{unblock|Your reason here}} below.

Your usage of multiple accounts at Murder of Meredith Kercher has been confirmed by checkuser. See WP:Sockpuppet investigations/Wikid77. Use of more than one account on a controversial article may be assumed to be avoiding scrutiny, which is a violation of WP:SOCK. EdJohnston (talk) 00:05, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Per consensus in the SPI report, your IPBE permission has also been removed. If you need it again, ask at WP:AN or ask any admin. EdJohnston (talk) 00:15, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

• The 2nd account was used to avoid slurs against the older account, slurs repeatedly logged into the edit-summary lines. An example of one slur against User:Wikid77 can be seen in edit-summary of diff:
        Murder_of_Meredith_Kercher-diff4949.
  The ease of embedding insults into edit-summaries is a loophole in WP's control of insulting behavior. Of course, many people just edit using IP addresses to avoid Wikipedia's insulted-username problems. However, I wanted to be able to discuss some issues between named-user talk-pages (not a floating IP address) without exposing the older username to repeated insults. Plus, ironically, I did not want to involve arbitration, but rather, just request people to stop the insults, by making talk-page requests with a new username they could continue to insult. I have been working on some massively important pages, such as re-designing Template:Convert to not need 2,700 subtemplates, and I didn't need the insults to "Wikid77" to taint progress on changing hundreds of templates used in over 200,000 (?) articles. I hope you understand that working on a controversial article exposes a username to harrassment that can affect work on templates used by thousands of articles: bold insults, can lead to wiki-stalking, then to IP-edit tampering of templates being updated. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:18, 1 January 2010 (UTC)