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Someone was blocked. Their case was on WP:ANI. They provided an explanation. The polite thing would be to transfer their explanation to WP:ANI. As a result of this doing this (and offering no excuses for the person or any commentary), people are attacking me and calling for me to be blocked. People have invaded my privacy and looked up IP data (and they found I am "unrelated" to the blocked person).

You need to stop this childish and savage behavior. If not, nobody with any brains is going to want to write for your encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ANI#User:DBZfan29_unblock_request

Is anybody going to block Acme Plumbing? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 06:31, 3 September 2009 (UTC) Acme Plumbing is  Unrelated, just someone trying to be helpful by cross-posting DBZF's talk page comments. However, someone should ask DBZF about edit warring while logged out and the other two accounts operating from his home. Thatcher 20:42, 3 September 2009 (UTC) ..."Curiouser and curiouser." Durova310 02:47, 4 September 2009 (UTC) (A renewed attack)

Acme Plumbing (talk) 03:53, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Acme Plumbing is already blocked from editing. Indefinetly too. Should keep him out of trouble cause nobodys gonna unblock this bad boy. RascalthePeaceful (t) 18:01, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Jimbo, I first heard about the project from some friends of yours at the CBOE, I was clearing First Options at the Board. I remember the first time I came to the site - it was barren beyond belief, articles half written - major topics like States and continents unlisted.

I signed on and have been adding content since before 9/11. I've always prided myself on the quality of my edits, interesting content addition has always been a forte of mine. I travel extensively and have edited from small dark rooms in Tibet to overly bright cafe's in the Galapagos - I estimate I've easily made over 10,000 edits from dozens of nations over the last 9 years, and that's a very conservative estimate. (I've even created articles as an IP since after that was blocked off through requests to account holders. :) )

I've done all of this as a Public Editor, anonymously.

Around 2006 or so there was a cultural shift, anonymous editors began to become suspect - this was actually not the worst thing, the scrutiny made for strong editing as every ref or edit was considered fully, but fairly.

Lately though, certainly for the last year, IP editors have become the peons and plebes of many here. IP's routinely have the most basic and solid edits reverted and rejected - discussing or resisting is met with easy bans, page locks and wholesale reversions. It's a common and painfully true complaint of editors with an account that Administrators give little time or effort into considering a dispute before applying their not inconsiderable powers. The situation is far more pronounced when an IP is involved.

Much of this is institutional, the politics of social networking may have begun to pervade and poison neutral interaction and traditional consensus building. Those of us who historically have contributed evenly across topics of all kinds are giving way to the Gatekeepers and committed ideologues that seem to have entrenched themselves and built unspoken alliances. Pattern editing, in which one works from a specific identifiable angle across multiple related topics in order to paint an ideological picture throughout related articles is increasing rapidly. The historic individual edit-warriors, adept at skirting the rules while manipulating the levers of Wiki for their own ends are slowly being replaced by a growing body of a much more sophisticated animal - individuals that now have an objective and goals. Far short of the legendary "Cabals", but the pattern of evolution is not promising.

I've been inside most every nook and cranny, and grown with this project since its inception but now it seems nearly impossible to edit as a member of the public.

What are your thoughts on the role of the Public Editor? 99.144.240.242 (talk) 14:00, 4 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure why you are referring to an unregistered editor as a "Public Editor". We are all public editors. From what I see, unregistered editors are usually less experienced (although there are exceptions) and are less aware of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, which make their edits less likely to conform to Wikipedia's standards. If you consider only IP edits that are sourced and that have reasonable edit summaries (which many IP editors leave blank, contrary to guidelines), good edits stick and bad ones don't. There is one IP who has very substantially, and very effectively, rewritten articles relating to Euclid and Euclidean geometry. He or she had no problem with good edits being reverted and has become a very respected editor in math articles. I see a lot of good edits by anons that are not reverted. —Finell (Talk) 08:30, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK, "unregistered editor". It's a critical part of the success of the project and the source of much content, for many it's also their first and most important interaction with the encyclopedia. 99.144.240.242 (talk) 04:30, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

While blatant vandals tend to be IP users, I'm seeing more and more spam coming from registered users. So I try to not judge a situation based on registration status. One frustration I have with IP users is that it can be impossible to ask them a question about their edits. WP:BRD rarely works because they don't have a watchlist. In the case of something that is questionably sourced, reverting is often the only option. Of course I leave an edit summary when doing so. But new users often don't check the summaries, which can leave them frustrated that their changes were taken out. I think this situation is getting worse as articles mature and new edits stand out for being poorly sourced. UncleDouggie (talk) 12:04, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Articles maturing..." This may be one of the more important variables at work here, defensive editing is definitely on the rise as people feel they have a controlling interest in a topic they've invested time in. 99.144.240.242 (talk) 01:51, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree this can be an issue, although it's not really what I was referring to here. In patrolling recent changes to articles on which I've had no contributions, especially BLPs, people will throw stuff in with no sources, or sources to a blog, while the article already has lots of well sourced material. I'm not talking about obvious vandalism. The only choice is to take it out with an edit summary and let someone with more experience in the subject put it back in later with a source if appropriate. Cases like this tend to get resolved more easily for registered accounts with talk pages, etc. It is more of an issue with editor experience than user type. However, it's harder to help people build experience when they're an IP user. UncleDouggie (talk) 04:07, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

One of the more interesting things I've noticed with intelligent IP edits I've witnessed recently is an immediate suspicion of puppetry (which itself is quite obviously soaring). I honestly wonder if its not time to abolish IP editing entirely, a half measure like delayed edits requiring approval by registered editors may cause more harm as Gatekeepers reject based upon their opinions rather than a vandal/no vandal consideration. 99.144.240.242 (talk) 12:58, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No, doing so would have no benefit, at least as long as creation of an account has no cost [with its broadest meaning] to the kind of people who now make edits that are uninformed or malicious. -- Hoary (talk) 03:13, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting article.[1] A serious study came out just last month finding:

"We consider this as evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content, especially when the edits come from occasional editors." ... ("Note that edits related to vandalism and edits performed by robots are excluded.")

An article that discusses the study can be found here:http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/aug/13/wikipedia-edits. Also interesting to note is a comment left by a reader at the study page: "I just did a few random edits as an anon IP. A day later, about 1/3 of them were reverted, despite being accurate. 2 or 3 years ago this wasn't the case. Hypothesis confirmed." Nothing more than anecdotal, but interesting nonetheless. 99.144.240.242 (talk) 03:00, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's an interesting study but this inference seems odd. This "growing resistance" looks to me like an epiphenomenon. Anyway, if you want to increase the chances that your edits will be taken seriously, you're free to get a username and stick to it (and to advise your chums to do the same). -- Hoary (talk) 03:13, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Here's another article on the study: [2]

Chi's team discovered that the way the site operated had changed significantly ...Today, they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away. Wikipedia – often touted as the bastion of open knowledge online – has become, in Chi's words, "a more exclusive place".

I really am open to the idea of dropping IP edits entirely - the potential damage caused to the project through what could be exaggeratively called almost a fraternity level of hazing to those wishing to contribute to the project as an IP is not a net positive. Not even close in my opinion. The level of frustration endured should not be overlooked, and its importance should not be discounted.99.144.240.242 (talk) 03:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The quote from an unspecified reader -- it proves very little. I can easily add a dozen accurate facts to that many articles, but perhaps most would deserve removal. Accuracy isn't enough: the additions need to cite reliable sources. Now, it could very well be that people are a lot more suspicious of unsourced additions by IPs than they are of the same by logged in users. I'd say they're right to be suspicious of the former and wrong not to be suspicious of the latter. In view of the large percentage of new content that's unsourced, if there is indeed a growing resistance to new content, this doesn't trouble me in the slightest. What's your own experience of the reaction to your addition of reliably sourced, non-trivial new content to articles? -- Hoary (talk) 03:58, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I note the quote above, and I can relate to it on a personal level. For a period earlier this year, I was using insecure computers so didn't want to log in particularly, and decided to do some nice relaxing wikignoming (spelling corrections, noun/verb agreement, formatting refs, stuff like that). I was flabbergasted to realise that at least a third of my completely uncontroversial edits were being reverted. To a large extent, I blame tools that permit easy reversion; we made them for clueful editors to revert vandalism, and instead they're being used by unclueful editors to build up their numbers and revert without thinking. It's only my own experience again, and it's anecdotal, but it certainly hit home. And yes, once I realised I was being reverted for *good* edits, I stopped editing. Risker (talk) 04:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Somebody should give it a go and log the results. Clueless reverters shouldn't have tools that encourage the exercise of cluelessness. -- Hoary (talk) 05:22, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I did it. Ten good copyedits to random articles as an IP user. Not a single revert after one hour. I'll check again tomorrow. On one article I deliberately made a good edit, but not the best edit, because it would have taken more time. Within a few minutes another user showed up and took the time to make the best edit. He or she was a rollbacker who had been fixing vandalism all night, and they still took the time to stop and fix this not so popular article the right way. I was so impressed I gave them a barnstar. It was their first award despite hundreds of incidents of fighting vandalism and making copyedits. Somewhere there's a very confused user wondering how in the world they got a barnstar from an IP user with only 10 edits! I think the lesson here is that the system can work very well. However, there are those who act too fast or abuse the tools. I'm reminded of the mantra for those on dab repair: it is more important to disambiguate correctly than to disambiguate quickly. The same can be said for reverts. Perhaps we need to look at some random samples of reverts to IP edits and see just how many good edits were reverted. Perhaps we can even identify a few bad apples that are hurting more than helping.

I'll also throw in that I've seen lots of good edits from IP users. I think it would be a mistake to ban them and it wouldn't slow down vandalism. OK, it would slow down gross, opportunistic vandalism, but ClueBot already catches this. The tougher cases won't be impeded by needing to create an account. My comments further up were aimed at encouraging frustrated IP users to create an account because it would be easier for us to help them. UncleDouggie (talk) 10:25, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As the nominator in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ashida Kim (2nd nomination), you may be interested to know that its sixth deletion discussion is now at Deletion Review. You can follow it at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2009 September 4#Ashida Kim. For what it's worth, your question of October 2005 remains unanswered almost four years later, despite my pressing for it to be answered here and again here. Ironically, the badly sourced biographical content that so incensed the subject back then is still being replaced into the article even now. You can read my thoughts on our perennial failure to apply policy here, in the face of a determined effort by the owners/members of a WWW discussion forum to out-vote it again and again, at User talk:Backslash Forwardslash#Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ashida Kim (6th nomination). Uncle G (talk) 07:35, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Huh. What a mess.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:40, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just a note: UncleG's comment can now be found at User talk:Backslash Forwardslash/Archive 7#Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ashida Kim (6th nomination). Graham87 15:11, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Jimbo! I noticed you have lots of people requesting for you to sign your guestbook here. Have you looked there lately to take the links they put there for you to sign theirs? RascalthePeaceful (t) 14:27, 7 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, no, I hadn't! Thanks for pointing me to it. If I get the time (not this week, sadly!) I would love to go and sign everyone's in return...--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:31, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Jimbo

I write concerning the arrangements for your appointment of arbitrators pursuant to the December "advisory" election. I wonder whether you will agree to a change in these arrangements, specifically, a declaration before the start of the electoral process of:

1. how many candidates you will appoint; and
2. whether you will extend the term of any sitting arbitrator or make any appointment beyond the scope of the election results.

There may be two key advantages in these changes: first, greater community confidence that its opinion will be directly reflected in the composition of ArbCom; and second, that the voters, candidates, and ArbCom itself will know in advance the size of the Committee next year, with important considerations for the planning of arbitrators' workload and leave, and the delegation of specific business.

Thanks in advance for your time. Tony (talk) 08:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. I intend to keep the size of the ArbCom the same, unless there are compelling arguments offered now and with majority support of the sitting ArbCom. And second, I intend to form a new review committee composed of former arbs and checkusers, tasked specifically with doing "background checks" on the winning candidates for sockpuppets, past bad behavior, etc. Their reports will be the only thing that I would consider legitimate as a reason to not appoint, that is to say, I want my "appoint" role to be purely ceremonial this time around. And third, I will insist that all ArbCom members identify to the Foundation before taking office. I have discussed some of the details of this with ArbCom but haven't yet gotten around to reaching a final conclusion about the details - and I welcome input.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:09, 8 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]