A few days ago Michael Hardy was indefinitely blocked from editing Wikipedia by SarekOfVulcan. Michael Hardy is an administrator who has made over 200,000 edits to Wikipedia, currently ranked as the 146th most prolific Wikipedian of all time. A mathematician and statistician, he has edited Wikipedia for over 16 years. In the end he was blocked…
#wikipedia-en-help
There is an IRC help channel for Wikipedia called #wikipedia-en-help. It is linked to in some new page creation templates on Wikipedia. It is an overall problem, antithetical to how Wikipedia is supposed to work. It should be replaced. Replacement options are limited, either another, better, communication method could be used, or it could be…
2018 CheckUser and Oversight appointments open for comments
The 2018 CheckUser and Oversight appointments page is now open for comments Checkuser is a tool which gives it’s operator detailed information about editors IP address, approximate location, computer and browser. Oversight is a tool which hides Wikipedia content from view so even administrators cannot see it. The people given access to these tools are…
Unbannable king of editing
Wikipedia has a policy on what constitutes an acceptable username. Most accounts with an unacceptable username are blocked immediately that an administrator notices them or they are reported on the usernames for administrator attention noticeboard. When the situation is less clear, they are listed on the requests for comment noticeboard. A recent example of this…
Profile of the Trump Cabal
There is a little club of editors that frequently edit controversy affected areas such as Donald Trump’s many Wikipedia pages, they are; EEng Atsme Lourdes Tryptofish MjolnirPants Ritchie333 Volunteer Marek PaleoNeonate L3X1 Shock Brigade Harvester Boris Martinevans123 nagualdesign Following are short introductions to the members of the cabal, this is not an exhaustive overview of…
Hurricane Florence
Hurricane Florence is a tropical cyclone that made landfall in North Carolina. The sixth named storm, third hurricane and the first major hurricane of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season. Read more on Wikipedia. Trump tweet Wikipedia administrator Cyclonebiskit decided to add the presidential verdict on the situation to the article, he added a quote from President Donald Trump’s twitter account. They haven’t seen anything like what’s coming…
Counting the perks
There are many ways to count your contribution to Wikipedia. By your edit count. By your article count. By your advanced actions count. By your recognised content count. By time spent on Wikipedia. By user-rights gained. By disputes settled. A high collective count across these metrics is important for many things such as: Becoming an…
New Wikimedia Wordpress
It’s been some time, almost a month since the Wikimedia Foundation switched from their free-open source website which was partly maintained by volunteers, to their new closed source website. Common complaints about the site are that it suffers from errors, which no-one can fix or suggest fixes for because it’s closed source. This has led…
European Parliament passes controversial new copyright directive
Normally this blog includes nice pictures and links, but it’s now illegal to simply reuse peoples images without a proper license, and hyperlinks are being restricted as well. In the name of open source content, things will continue much the same as before here on this site. So all is good in that respect. Observe…
Croatian language Wikipedia taken over by neo-nazi administrators
It starts back in 2013, when it was noted that the Croatian Wikipedia was basically a right wing troll blog, and that almost every article has been slightly doctored by hard right Ustasha supporters. But recently, someone has decided enough is enough, and has told Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to do something. Media…
