User talk:Alsee

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Socks[edit]

Hi Alsee

I hope you remember me, we had some interaction both on enwiki, a very long time ago, and on Meta earlier this year, so I was intrigued to see you have been contributing to WQ.

I see that in 2015 you initiated an edit on WQ similar to one that I did just a couple of days ago. Since I am fairly new here, I'll have to remember to try and find the old Talk:Donald Trump discussion from that time.

Anyway, I came to your talk-page for another reason: User: Vilho-Veli. I have been observing this user for quite some time, since I often saw their contributions on pages that I contributed to. In hind sight I believe that the reason has to do more with the volume of their contributions to many areas of WQ than with a common interest. They did a lot of gnome work such as adding categories and images to pages. I have never observed them doing any edits that I thought were vandal or spam related. I also did not see them use talk-pages very often, which to me is the only place (other than repeated reverts of others edits) where socks can have a negative effect on projects.

Anyway to make a long story short, it is not clear to me why so many enwiki users believe that Vilho-Veli is a sock-puppet. I would appreciate a clarification. Thanks in advance, ~~ —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ottawahitech (talkcontribs) 22:37, 2 December 2020‎ (UTC)

Hi. Let's start with what's in EnWiki Sock Investigation page for Risto_hot_sir
  • Risto_hot_sir is Sipe-Mika. Not only was Sipe-Mika making the same types of edits, Risto_hot_sir would update their edit counts on their various wiki userpages. On Wikis where Risto is locally blocked, Sipe-Mika would carry on updating the editcount list on Risto's userpage.
  • Savonhelmi is the same user. Not only were they making the same edits, there were "some interesting quirks in the CU data", and Savonhelmi shows on Meta ranting that Sipe-Mika shouldn't have been block and acknowledging Risto_hot_sir = Sipe-Mika.[1]
  • Vilho-Veli: The report doesn't give much evidence, but reports that Vilho-Veli is continuing with the same edits on Enwiki and reports the old&new accounts both self-identify as from Finland.
Now let's look at page history for Wikiquote Finnish proverbs:
  • Risto_hot_sir from 1 June 2018 through 29 Aug 2019. 600 edits in 1301 days, 0.46 edits per day, 45.91% of all edits to the page.
  • IP 80.223.95.147 and...
    IP 80.223.95.177 from 2 December 2019‎ through 24 December 2019 . 83 edits in 22 days, 3.8 edits per day, 6.35% of all edits to the page. The IPs Geolocate to Finland, not surprising considering the page, but noteworthy in confirming the named-accounts self identification as from Finland. Oh, I just found this IP explicitly identify as Risto_hot_sir.[2]
    • On the Talk page edit history,[3] these blatantly IPs resume Risto_hot_sir's work-stream, with identical edit summaries "Removing to the article" and "Exists already".
  • Savonhelmi from 28 December 2019‎ through 10 January 2020. 35 edits in 13 days, 2.7 edits per day, 2.68% of the total edits made to the page.
  • 80.223.94.19 from 10 February 2020‎ through 08 March 2020. 83 edits in 26 days, 3.2 edits per day, 6.35% of the total edits made to the page. Geolocates to the same city in Finland as the other IPs.
  • Roope poor from 8 March 2020‎ through 10 March 2020. 5 edits in 2 days, 2.5 edits per day, 0.38% of edits to the page. Note that this account was created 72 minutes after the IP's last edit. Looking at general contrib history not only matches, I find these edits[4][5] editwarring an admin's "(Global lock evasion)" edits, in particular they are trying to reinstate 80.223.95.147's edits.
  • Veli-Turo from 13 March 2020‎ through 29 March 2020‎. 41 in 16 days, 2.5 edits per day, 3.14% of the total edits made to the page. Oh what a coincidence, two Veli-hyphen names!
  • Vilho-Veli 30 March 2020‎ through 28 November 2020. 249 edits in 244 days, 1.0 edits per day, 19.05% of the total edits made to the page. Oh what a coincidence, two Veli-hyphen names!
  • Minä muka 29 November 2020 through 2 December 2020. 6 edits in 3 days. 2 edit per day, 0.46% of the total edits made to the page. (I see there is already a pending Global-lock request, identifying Minä muka as Risto_hot_sir.)
This is a single person using serial accounts and IPs, who made 84.32% of all edits to Finnish proverbs. If you discount the six years of page-edits before this person began editing, they made 94.6% of all edits to this page. There are gaps in the timeline of edits to that single page, but I believe there are basically no time-gaps between edits by these accounts if look at all edits by the accounts (I don't feel like rebuilding this list to verify it.) Checking global-contribs for these accounts reveals extremely distinctive identifier for this user - they run across huge number of language-wikis, generally adding links to wikiquote or adding images.
Re-ping Ottawahitech. I botched my previous ping attempt. Alsee (talk) 06:49, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Alsee Thank you so much for addressing my concern with so much detail. I also thank you for applying the unsigned template, and pinging me.It will take me awhile to follow all the links, just wanted to post my initial reaction.
The first thing I did was check the page view at Finnish proverbs and was surprised to see so many views, especially in previous years and before this latest sockpuppet scandal. I have not even looked at the contents of the page yet to see why Finnish proverbs are so popular.
Regardless, I still see no problem with Vilho-Veli contributing as long as their edits were performed in the best interests of the involved wmf-projects. For example if they add images that are not copyrighted and are appropriate for the page, I don't reall care if the contributor is a sockpuppet or not. I am however open to hearing others' views on this topic.
Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 22:33, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Ottawahitech I have not dug into the circumstances of the original block and lock. You may do so if you wish, and you could theoretically present a case that it was wrongly decided or that the user is no longer a problem and should now be unblocked/unlocked. However setting that aside, blocks and especially locks are generally only imposed when behavior behavior is so abusive or so disruptive or literally physically-dangerous-to-other-editors that any positive edits they make do not justify allowing them continue. I am not familiar with Wikiquote policies, but on EnWikipedia any page-creations by such a user can be mass-nuked and any edits may be mass reverted. In the case of persistent evaders such as this, I would suggest it would be appropriate and beneficial to do an automated mass-revert all edits that can be reverted in an automated fashion. That is in part to cheaply and effectively cleanup any and all problem-edits, and it is in part it is to eliminate the "successful edits" that encourage them to persist. The time wasted investigating such situations, compiling evidence, and dealing with each new account is itself a major disruptive problem. This user Risto/Vilho-Veli has been a major waste of *MY* time, as well as other people. I could have been been doing more productive work, as could other editors. I would like to add that along the way an innocent user appeared to be part of this sock swarm. That was sorted out and corrected, but the innocent user was understandably distressed at the misidentification. Those kinds of secondary effects pile on to the harm caused by this kind of Long Term Abuse evasion. Given that this user has been globally locked, it is the position of the community that any innocuous edits this user makes do not justify the harm and waste of time that they cause.
I hope that didn't come across as too strong, but you did invite my views on it. Grin. Alsee (talk) 07:47, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Socks continued[edit]

Hi Alsee the discussion about risto and their socks is still simmering at Wikiquote:Administrators'_noticeboard#User:Babe_kebab. I have been wondering why you have not jumped in, since you have very strong views on the matter. My views on the matter are different than yours, but I would like to learn more about why people feel so strongly one way or the other. I have had experience with socks who pursued me for years, but I still believe things would have been different if the community did not block so many.

This may be an opportunity to hammer out some of these controversial issues, don't you think? Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 03:06, 5 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Removing comments made by others in a discussion[edit]

You have removed comments made by others in the discussion on WQAN:

Do you believe this is the way to solve community issues? Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 18:05, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ottawahitech Yes.
WP:BLOCKEVASION | Evasion and enforcement | Anyone is free to revert any edits made in violation of a block. That especially applies to global lock evasion. Alsee (talk) 05:59, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I am glad to see you back at WQ, Alsee. We need to hear your POV!
In regard to the link you provided to the pertinent section of enwiki's long&convoluted (IMIO) Blocking policy, I found this:

Anyone is free to revert any edits made in violation of a block, without giving any further reason and without regard to the three-revert rule. However, this does not mean that edits must be reverted just because they were made by a blocked editor

So I guesss it was ok for me to revert your reverts? Keep in mind I have to be super-special-careful not to break any community norms since I am already blocked on 3 wmf-sites. Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 17:11, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

flowlike movement[edit]

I know wikiquote is probably not the place to discuss Flow, but because of the politics, I wonder if we can move our ongoing discussion out of mediawiki? I don't know about you, but I feel much safer using talk pages on WQ (at least with the current administration :-). I know you feel you have met a chilly reception here, but this is nothing compared to being permanently silenced by being blocked. I hope you agree?

Anyway, today I felt I had to re-indent a comment made by one of the candidates in the 2021-Steward-elections at META, and it made me think of Flow. Are you still around? Have not seen you lately. Ottawahitech (talk) 18:16, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ottawahitech I haven't been very active recently, a combination of general life and dealing with a browser problem and a bit of burnout from the Foundation's inability to constructively engage the community. The Rebranding project is a mess, they want to rename the Foundation something like "Wikipedia Foundation" despite 92% community consensus against it. Also the Foundation Global Strategy project is spewing a series of messes. For example they basically want to scrap all of Wikipedia's content-quality policies such as Notability, Verifiability, and Reliable Sources. Why would they want to do that? Because some cultures have few or zero Reliable written sources, and they are unhappy that such content gets deleted as non-Notable or unsourced. Their "fix" is that any random idiot on the internet should be allowed to claim they took an "oral history" from a random idiot off-the-internet, and then use that as a ref to write anything-they-want in Wikipedia. The community is obviously not going to allow that. The worst part is that they think their entire Global Strategy stuff is somehow valid and appropriately enforceable on everyone, despite the fact that there has been literally 100% opposition on some parts and strong opposition on other parts, and an almost complete lack of response on most of the rest because it's uselessly vague.
Regarding Flow, development and deployment have been halted but they still provide maintenance for existing deployments. I'm hoping Flow gets fully removed everywhere, once the mw:Talk pages project progresses further. The main part of the project is to add a Reply Link to each comment on Talk pages, making Talk pages easier to comment on without breaking the nature or functionality of existing Talk pages. You click reply, type your comment in a reply box, then it automatically finds the right spot in the wikisource to insert the comment and it automatically applies the indentation markup. It's mostly working, available as opt-in beta on some wikis and as default on Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia. You can see it and test it here on a TestWiki. (Note that as a test wiki, you'll either post as an IP or you need to create a test-account there. It's suggested not to create an account with your usual password there, as test wikis are assumed not secure.) Alsee (talk) 04:40, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Great to hear from you. re

they basically want to scrap all of Wikipedia's content-quality policies such as Notability, Verifiability, and Reliable Sources

That is total news to me and I bet to many at WQ. The common wisdom around here is that enwiki is the bible: we do not question anything said on enwiki, we just copy&paste it here. If you ever get beyond the burnout stage, a note to this effect to WQ's village pump is going to get some of the few active wikiqutiens to sit up and listen, I bet. Ottawahitech (talk) 16:57, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Also, if you ever find yourself looking for a wiki-challenge I would greatly appreciate your take on what happened here. This is an old edit of mine, which I posted in response to the previous poster. I never intended my post to replace part of the the previous poster's signature, but it appears to have happened anyway. Can you help me figure out what caused what appears to be a glitch?
No hurry, this has waited since December 2020, so a few more months would not make any difference. Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (talk) 18:00, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding the diff, that is indeed odd. My first thought was maybe VisualEditor was to blame (chuckle), but I see it was a standard wikitext edit. If I were to speculate I'd guess you had "COVID-19 pandemic in the United States" stored in copy-paste, and maybe you doubleclicked the username and accidentally pasted over it. Other than that, I have no clue.
Regarding news of current Foundation activities, I can't currently handle the idea of informing a community. I'd want to write it up properly, dig up and supply all relevant links, and follow through with subsequent discussions. What I can do is give you crude braindump and invite you to dig in and follow through if you're up for it. It will be a "brief" version, but there are so many items that it's an ugly wall of text. I can provide more info on request. I'll include some links I have handy, and at some spots I'll put an empty []. An empty [] indicates a link that exists, you might be able to find it or I could dig up if needed.
  • The elected term of Board members has EXPIRED. They decided to suspend elections and keep themselves in power until further notice, on the grounds of COVID.[] It is not quite clear how or why COVID precludes an online election.
  • They are currently discussing changing the Foundation bylaws, and in particular discussing changing the process for future Board elections.[6] They are talking about encouraging diversity in new Board members (mandatory quotas), desired qualifications for future Board candidates, discussing various schemes to implement it, but fundamentally they want to set up a process to decide who we are and are-not allowed to vote for in elections. Kind of like Iran, where a Council of Clerics decides who is and is not allowed to run for president. Then we are permitted to vote for one of the Approved candidates for the Board, and only an Approved candidates.
  • The Foundation ran a Global Strategy process.[] There were repeated requests for it to be a Consensus Process,[] but as always, they have no interest in consensus. It was run by staff with some parts involving volunteers, but given the results it is clear that many of the volunteers were fringe and were pushing their own personal agenda. The process was broken, criticism was not only ignored it was systematically vanished. The Board thinks it was a successful and most-open and most-inclusive process ever, and disagrees that it was fundamentally broken.[] Staff invited massive comments from various communities, then dug through the responses cherry-picking any random scraps that fit the Foundation's own agendas. They now believe they have some sort of Global Mandate to forcibly impose everything and anything they cooked up. Not all strategy initiatives appear in the formal Strategy List,[7] and the final published items tend to be far more vague and unclear than earlier versions. Strategy initiatives include:
    • Increase the Sustainability of Our_Movement:[8] I note this mainly for the symbolism, but the #1 strategy item is that the Foundation NEEDS MOAR MONEY!!!1! Yes, their objective and impartial management of the Global Strategy Consultation found that this was the #1 item of strategy feedback from the community.
    • Innovate in Free Knowledge:[9][10] I would cite this as the most flagrant proof that the Strategy Process was completely illegitimate and completely dysfunctional. They want to trash core content policies, explicitly targeting Notability, explicitly targeting Reliable Sources, and implicitly targeting Verifiability. As far as I have seen, feedback on this item as been unanimous opposition. Earlier versions more directly stated the intent, but I will quote key parts that lay out the intent:
      • What: ...improve our policies to include more diverse domains of knowledge
      • Changes and Actions: ...identify policies in Wikimedia projects that act as barriers of access to content related to underrepresented communities (e.g. Notability)... allow the inclusion and preservation of all forms of human knowledge in all socio-cultural contexts (e.g. encourage refining reliability criteria to ...[allow]... oral or non-Western knowledge resources
      • Rationale: ...because of an inability to comply with notability and sourcing policies, some topics regarding under- and unrepresented communities, like indigenous people who have not historically held positions of power and could not build the infrastructure to document it by the same methods, are left out.
    • Rebranding process:[] This is not listed on the main Strategy pages, this is claimed to be part of the Strategy. Rebranding includes logos and stuff, the key item is wanting to rename the Wikimedia Foundation to "Wikipedia Foundation" or "Wikipedia Network" or "Wikipedia Trust" or something similar. An RFC[] with over 500 votes reached 92% consensus against the Foundation identifying itself as "Wikipedia". Staff tried to steamroll forwards anyway, and a 1000+ signature Community Open Letter On Renaming (COLOR)[] asked the board to pause or halt the broken process. The board did order a pause. Their "fix" was to announce a committee to advise on a better process, which would then restart. The rules[] they announced for the committee effectively mandated it be composed of six affiliate seats, a current Board member, and a former Board member who was responsible for the Superprotect crisis.[] The rules effectively prohibit the community from any vote or representation whatsoever on the committee. The irony is thick, ordering a broken process that ignores the community as a solution to a broken process that ignores the community.
    • Masking project:[] This is not on the main list of Global Strategy initiatives, but it is asserted to a Strategy project. The board considers IP addresses to be a privacy issue, and they say there's some secret legal reason they MUST stop displaying any IPs on new edits. There's no timeline for this to change, no indication that this "legal requirement" is in any way urgent, but apparently it is mandatory. They intend to terminate IP edits and deploy "Masked editing". A Masked edit is an IP edit, except you see a crypto-code or something instead of the actual IP. Two edits by the same IP would (probably) show the same crypto code. While there is little dispute that the Foundation can terminate IP edits if there are legal requirement to do so, there appears to be strong opposition to Masked edits. I suspect at minimum several large wikis would prohibit Masked edits, there might even be an effective global consensus against Masked edits. Staff have been directed to built it, so they just ignore any feedback that it may be unwanted or even community-banned.
    • Provide for Safety and Inclusion[11] A.K.A. Universal Code of Conduct: This story starts with the Foundation getting a half-million dollar grant to focus on "harassment" and "incivility".[] They directed the Trust&Safety team to start getting involved in low level routine content and policy squabbles. Meanwhile, an editor was making crappy edits for profit and they persistently violating policies and guidelines. To make the story interesting, that problem-editor happened to be sleeping with top level Foundation staff. A serious conflict of interest there. The Foundation also happens to have a strong political agenda favoring of some of this problem-editor's topics. The problem-editor then files a Trust&Safety complaint claiming they are being "harrassed" by an administrator who is (correctly) enforcing content policies, and complaining that the repeated complains about their persistently-bad-edits is becoming increasingly "incivil". Trust&Safety issued a year ban against the admin, thus we got the FRAMBAN crisis. (I don't know if WQ heard about it, but it got ugly.) The Board resolved the crisis by (1) allowing EnWiki Arbitration Committee to review the Secret Evidence and evaluate the legitimacy of the ban, and (2) ordering a Global Consultation on the proper scope of Trust&Safety activity. The Arbitration Committee found the admin was correctly working to enforce policies&guidelines and overturned the ban as invalid,[] although they did find the admin's tone inappropriately harsh (given the persistent and abusive behavior the admin was dealing with, many considered the admin's frustration understandable). The Global Consultation resulted in Global Consensus AND Foundation agreement that Trust&Safety return to their traditional role of not getting involved in routine content-and-policy squabbles.[] The Board then directed the Foundation to VIOLATE that outcome, ordered the Foundation to return to policing routine squabbles. They then cooked up a Universal Code Of Conduct[] project, with a final version recently approved by the Board to be part of the Terms of Service.[] They refused any process for the community to approve the Code, it was supposedly requested by the community in the supposedly authoritative Global Strategy process. There is an upcoming process to determine how the Code will be enforced. One way or another it's ultimately enforceable by the Foundation as part of the Terms of Service. It effectively says the Foundation gets to rule on Neutrality and Truth, and it prohibits people from adding untrue content. (Note, if all scientists and Reliable science sources say the moon is made of cheese, Wikipedia Policy requires us to accurately report what they say: "The moon is made of cheese". In other words the Code is in direct contradiction to our core policies, the Foundation has no freaking clue how we work, and they have no clue what the frik they are doing.) There appears to be strong opposition to the Code, but staff don't care. There's going to be a consultation on how the Code shall be enforced.
    • Ensure Equity in Decision-making:[12] This is a MAJOR item but all of the important details are missing or murky. They are proposing some sort of Global Council in charge of deciding things. The composition of the Council is undefined, its authority is unclear, its scope of decisions is murky. If one is an optimist and has great faith and trust in the Foundation, one could interpret the page as a very positive thing. In a magical universe, the Council would tell the Foundation to stop fighting global consensus. If one is more cynical and/or one does not particularly trust the Foundation, one could note that the Foundation hates dealing with community consensus and has long been searching for some sort of mechanism or authority to overrule even a global community consensus. One might note the Foundation's recently discovered fetish for the word "equity", such as claiming core content policies need to be scrapped in the name of "equity". Their definition of equity appears to be "almost everyone says we're wrong, but it is unfair to disagree with us if we call it equity".
    • Improve User Experience:[13] The formal page sounds good, but background material indicates a big problem here. The authors want to fix the fact that the community sometimes concludes that the Foundation's "improvements" are actually harmful. Sometimes their own data provides concrete proof that the "improvements" are harmful. The goal here is is to more-loudly tell the community how good the "improvements" are until the community stops opposing them, or to find a way to ram through "improvements" even if there is global consensus that they are harmful.
  • This is not tied to the Strategy Process, but it is long term strategy slowly creeping forward. A decade ago the Visual Editor project was started with a strategy document declaring an intent to "deprecate wikitext".[] VisualEditor would replace wikitext on article pages, and Flow would replace wikitext on Talk pages. That's why Flow had partial/dysfunctional support for wikitext. VisualEditor was not designed for editing wikigages, it was designed to edit HTML pages. They built a temporary hack to allow VE to work on wikipages, which would only be used while they worked on eliminating wikitext. Almost all of the problems with VE are due to the fact that it was not built to work on wikipages, and because that "temporary hack" is the only thing that lets it work at all. While that plan obviously didn't happen, they still want to impose VE as the only editor (2017WikitextEditor was built inside VE,[] so they could eliminate the current wikitext editor[] and finally force everyone into VE). They are also on a slow roll still trying to kill off our wikitext engine that runs everything and replace it with VE's back-end engine that built as a temporary hack to simulate wikitext support on a non-wikitext platform. They call it the Parser Migration project.[] If you've noticed "lint" or "linter" work going on, that's part of the preparation work to kill off our wikitext engine. If you have run into pages with suddenly mangled rendering, despite the fact that the page used to display fine and no edit had been made to break the page, the reason the page broke is because they've been screwing with the wikitext engine as part of the preparation for killing it off. I'll cite a particularly ugly example of a change:
This is an example. I will use a small tag here, as you can see. The next line will be blank, needed for this example, then I'll put another line with text.
This is the next line of the example. It's still small, as expected. If you check the wikitext, you'll see I put a /small tag here end small mode. IT DID NOT WORK! The tag to end small mode is there, it used to work, but now it is mysteriously ignored. Small mode would now run down to the end of the page, even affecting sections below here (if there were sections below here). I could have used any tag and the same problem occurs. If I had made the text red, the tag turning off the red text style wouldn't have worked. Red sytle would spill down to the end of the page. The simplest way to trigger the problem is to open a tag on or before a line with zero indentation, then try to close that tag on a line indented four-or-more levels. The technical details are a little more complicated, it can also happen in other situations.

I will now add another /small tag here, because I don't want to leave my page stuck in small mode. They deliberately changed wikitext to sometimes ignore /tags, and they did it as part of the preparation to kill off our wikitext engine and move to VE's engine. I tried to report it as a bug,[] and I was basically told they won't fix because no one should be using the wikitext editor.

There are probably other items I forgot. There's so much it's hard to keep track. Alsee (talk) 20:16, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

OHT's take[edit]

I usually avoid reading stuff that looks like wallsoftext, but I must admit your wallsoftext are fascinating to read. When I have the time (probably never) I'll have to try and analyse what the difference is between classic WOT compared to your WOT.

I wish I had your talent of flowing so well, but when it comes to writing I usually have writer's block even though I am not a writer, if that makes sense to you. I'll try to do my best to address your very informative WOT above:

First off a WARNING: I read your text without looking at any of the links you so generously shared, so I am only addressing your perceptions, and oh yes, thanks for looking into my personal "glitch".

Your comment about

criticism was not only ignored it was systematically vanished

piqued my interest. I believe I have witnessed what I thought were some vanishings of my own, I even asked someone about it years ago on enwiki, but I was given the impression that it is all my imagination, so I try to put it out of my mind when I think I see it (does not happen often thankfully).


Re:

The foundation wants more money

in my experience this is normal behaviour for any non-profit organization, especially one that succeeds after starting out as a strictly volunter organization, so no surprise for me.


Re:

identify policies in Wikimedia projects that act as barriers of access to content related to underrepresented communities (e.g. Notability)... allow the inclusion and preservation of all forms of human knowledge in all socio-cultural contexts (e.g. encourage refining reliability criteria to ...[allow]... oral or non-Western knowledge resources

as an inclusionist I agree with those sentiments. I suspect though that what they mean by underrepresented is far more restricted than my own views. As much as I like simplicity, I also don't believe that the solution is to remove all current Notability, Verifiability, and Reliable Sources policies: this is way too simplistic.


Re

Masking project

I can speculate why they think it is a good idea to mask IPs. Of course IPs from developing countries are scrutinized more harshly than "local" IPs, and privacy is becoming more&more important for pretty much everyone. I am not sure, though that masking of IPs will accomplish anything, except remove the community ability to control its own destiny, and put more power into the hands of fewer people. I'll have to think more about this, bt my initial reaction is that I don't like it.


Re the FRAMBAN crisis, (warning offopic) I was not active at WQ at the time, but rather at enSimple. I even tried to get the local community at simple to get involved because I believed this impacted Simple just as much as enwiki. Unfortunately I was overruled and all the work I did in that respect was deleted. Shortly thereafter I was blocked at simple and finally lucked out landing on WQ.

Which brings me to my closing for today: Anyone who ends up making a proper document of this WOT should separate criticism of the Board from criticism of staff. I hope at least some of what I wrote makes as much sense as your masterpiece above it. Just my $.02, and back to work. Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 23:08, 16 February 2021 (UTC) updated: Ottawahitech (talk) 04:10, 17 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

wikiproject breakfast[edit]

I just discovered this :-) Ottawahitech (talk) 16:42, 27 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]