User talk:Ludwigs2: Difference between revisions

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I've invited a number of people to join at this thread, so thank you for looking. I'd like to develop something similar to wp:AWB, except PHP based (frankly, I'm starting this because I'm annoyed that there's no version of AWB that works on Macs). My idea is to create a separate user (much like a bot-account): people can navigate to that user's page, where they will find an assortment of HTML forms where they can perform AWB-like functions straight through wikipedia's servers. My problem is the learning curve - the PHP coding is not beyond me technically, but the project is too large for me to handle on my own, given my current informational deficit. I've contacted you (as a group) because you have worked on or developed PHP bot code, and will probably be much more 'up' on this problem than I am. what I need to know is the following:

• Which of the various available bot frameworks is best suited to this task?
• How difficult do you think this project will actually be?
• What's the best approach (In your view) to achieving this?
• What considerations am I missing? I'm already concerned about keeping this from turning into a vandalism tool, for instance, and about server resources (it would probably be best to have a system of queueing requests, which would help with both problems).

I'd also like to know if any of you are interested in collaborating on this project - that would make things a hell of a lot easier for me, and make development much faster. Please let me know. --Ludwigs2 06:09, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Ludwig, I’m not sure whether you’re intending to still participate here, but if you are I thought you might want to know that there’s a new AN/I thread about Mathsci’s personal attacks against other editors. This one was posted by user:Rvcx, who’s been experiencing Mathsci’s behavior for the first time within the past week, so as someone who has a lot more experience with Mathsci I thought you might want to offer your input there. Are you interested? --Captain Occam (talk) 08:51, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm hoping this can get things moving in the right direction:

You are involved in a recently-filed request for arbitration. Please review the request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests#Race and Intelligence and, if you wish to do so, enter your statement and any other material you wish to submit to the Arbitration Committee. Additionally, the following resources may be of use—

• Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests#Requests for Arbitration;
• Wikipedia:Arbitration guide.

Thanks, —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rvcx (talk • contribs) 13:23, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi,
User talk:Ludwigs2/Archive 9#Twinkle bug was archived before you saw it, I think. Might be that those bugs are resolved.
Cheers, Amalthea 15:40, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Bug 353 seems to be resolved. with respect to bug 349, however, I need to find some vandalism to test it on. If you want to set up a test page and make a couple of edits that I can revert (don't worry, I won't actually report you as a vandal!) we can test it out that way. otherwise, when I run across something that's revert worthy I'll report back. --Ludwigs2 17:12, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can use this or that. Amalthea 17:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This bug does not seem to be resolved yet. on the second page, when I reverted using rollback vandal it took me right back to the page itself. there were no errors in the javascript console, but that may be because of the page reload (i.e., the errors were on the original page, and not retained when the new page loaded). The first page, for some reason, I can't revert at all using twinkle. don't know what's up with that. it seems to do the revert just like the other page, but no changes are made and nothing shows up in the history. --Ludwigs2 17:54, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

And you verified that you aren't just blocking popups in your browser? Amalthea 17:57, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

lol - no, I didn't, because I always leave that setting off. but yes, in fact that was the problem. Now I have to figure out how the heck the popup blocker got turned on. sorry for the confusion. . --Ludwigs2 18:00, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No worries. :) Amalthea 18:06, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Ludwigs. I was curious if you were aware of a "statute of limitation" on WP:OUTING. Say, if someone posted what they assumed was the name, place of residence, academic credentials, alma mater and current place of occupation of an individual on Wikipedia without the permission of that individual, but this went unnoticed for several years (due to the editor no longer being active on Wikipedia), and the individual in question never objected (due, again, to inactivity), would it still be considered an offence? This isn't hypothetical, mind you, and it involves someone we both know. Besides the question of offence and possible reprimand, however, shouldn't this information be deleted immediately by oversight? Thanks, --Aryaman (talk) 15:23, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure why you'd ask me, unless it involves me in some way. Does it? So far as I know there is no statute of limitations, and speaking from an ethical perspective, oversight should probably be used regardless of how old the outing is. Whether or not there should be further administrative action would be a matter for debate. Would the information have been considered outing at the time it was posted? Was the intention at that time malicious? Does the editor outed object now? does the outing editor even remember having done it? If it were me, I'd drop a private line to an admin and ask them to do the oversight first, quietly (since that probably needs to be done regardless), and then go on to debate whether any further action is needed. --Ludwigs2 15:54, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not entirely sure why I chose to ask you, either. I guess partly because we both know the person involved, and you seem pretty knowledgeable regarding policy (at least much more so than me). Sorry for pestering you with it, but I really didn't know who else would respond to the query - which in itself is a bit weird, I admit.

In response to your questions: Seeing as the post contains the full name of the individual and his (then?) current location - neither or which were even hinted at in any of the editors comments - I think it would definitely be considered as outing. Also, the "outing" party was involved in a nasty dispute with the individual, which resulted in that individual leaving Wikipedia after being treated in a very rude manner. Thus, I think it qualifies as malicious. I don't know if the outed individual cares, but he did note that he wished to preserve as much of his identity was possible, in order to protect his real-life career. I doubt that the outing editor remembers having done it.

Oh, hell. I'm terrible with the beating-around-the-bush thing. Take a look at this. I ran across it by chance today, and thought that at a bare minimum, that the post needs to be deleted. I almost deleted it myself, but I just knew that would open up a nasty can of worms.

Again, sorry to post this here if it puts you in a bad situation. Delete it immediately if I've done something wrong and/or direct me to whomever needs to be alerted to this. Thanks, --Aryaman (talk) 16:07, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, really. I don't see any reason to delete it immediately after four years, and I've left a message with an oversight admin who I trust will handle it properly. Much as I'd like to, I'm not going to dredge up a 4-year-old mistake as a weapon (even though he would - and has - done that to me). it sucks being ethical - --Ludwigs2 16:35, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, good. Thanks for alerting an oversight administrator; I wouldn't know where to begin with that. Cheers, --Aryaman (talk) 16:50, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate the collegial tone of your response to my comments. I hope it was clear that I was addressing MathSci's interactions with other parties to the mediation, and not with you. I am however disappointed that you really think my edits and proposals regarding the R&I article were motivated by my politics and not by my commitment to WP policies, and my understanding that WP = encyclopedia means we must represent scholarly views accurately. Ramdrake gives a very different portrait of the mediation and the general situation than you do, so I imagine you will not agree with him. For what it is worth, I agree with his account. Lest you think that this is just another case of "everyone thinks that they are right and the other side is wrong," I really do not lump all other people I disagree with in the same category. Some it is true I think are trolls, but some I think were acting in good faith but did not fully understand WP policy; others I think were acting in good faith but have a skewed experience/view of academia (a failing which by the way I find in academics across disciplines). Slrubenstein | Talk 16:17, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I probably over-spoke. This debacle gets on my nerves, and I will admit that (as Mathsci puts it) I get a bit intemperate dealing with it. is there something you want me to revise that you think is clearly overstated? I'm happy to do so if I've stepped over the line.

But don't take offense - everyone has a political stance on a topic like this, it's unavoidable. Basically the topic raises the question "are certain racial groups cognitively inferior to other racial groups?" Not having a political stance is a political stance in its own right; there is no neutral ground. I completely believe you when you say that your commitment is to WP content policies, and I suspect that you are better than most of the people on the article at segregating (pun intended) your personal feelings from content issues, but when it comes right down to it - with tricky balance issues around primary and secondary sources, say - you are always going to lean a bit in favor of the sociological model and away from the genetic model. As will I, though I've had a tremendous amount of practice at assessing research of this sort neutrally.

I just read Ramdrake's contribution, and I actually agree with a lot of what he says. He paints Mathsci in a brighter light where I tend to paint Mathsci in a darker light, and he displays a liberal/sociological bias (one that I share, but that I recognize as a bias), but on the whole his statement is sensible. I'll tell you frankly, the difference between me and most of the people in this discussion is that (a) I don't have any firm preconceptions about what the article should say, and (b) I think that the article needs to start someplace and work its way slowly in to proper balance. a lot of the conflicts we have with this article (and with similarly contentious articles elsewhere) because different 'sides' are trying to pre-cast the article whole-cloth, and get annoyed when the other 'side' creeps in little changes. It would work a lot better if people gave up on trying to do the whole thing and settled down to writing the article one little piece at a time. --Ludwigs2 17:00, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I will admit - in fact, I think I did in my own statement - that my bias is towards sociological rather than biological explanations. But I consider this a scientific stance (surely, everyone in the academy - chemists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists - not only claim where their disciplinary expertise begins, but where it ends. I think Ramdrake is quite right to call attention to the fact that most biologists do not claim that these group differences in cognitive ability are inherited, so I think my bias is supported not only by what sociologists say about social processes, but what biologists say about biological processes. Be that as it may, I first developed this bias when considering certain academic problems unconnected to the race & IQ debate. All I mean to say is, a bias towards a certain general research program informs my views on this particular question - rather than my views on this particular question biasing me towards a more general research program. Now, one might aruge that in a more general way preexisting political commitments biased me towards social science rather than life science. I am sure that this is true, but I still have to point out again that the people pushing the genetic explanation are actually not geneticists. The way I see it, and you can call me naive, my position is based on a strong commitment to biology (as an academic discipline and body of knowledge) and equally sociology. I admit i have a problem with Rushton and Lynn but it doesn't have to do with their claims about IQ tests, which I accept as an object ob psychological expertise, but their claims about matters which fall under the expertise of biology or sociology. If anything, I think this makes me rather conservative (small c) in my belief in academic authority. Or maybe just a snob.

I wish ArboCom would just designate those people who, in their collective opinion, wrote the most constructive statements (I would not expect myself to be included) and just ask them to redraft the article. Instead we will have a long tiring drawn-out process to equal the mediation, and if we are lucky a few people will be mandated a 1RR and one or two others topic banned and otherwise we will be back where we started, a lot of effort that instead should be used trying to write an article. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:14, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The thing everyone forgets is that (philosophically speaking) science is a political stance. The entire scientific enterprise is designed to imbue statements about the world with a form of authority that can overpower other forms of authority (so that statements by the Pope, or a king, or from simple common knowledge cannot assert themselves as 'true'). The pure social sciences have never forgotten that; the hard sciences largely have, which is why you get people making biological claims about human nature and acting as though they haven't said anything political (and also why Einstein took such a public stance against nuclear weapons - he realized that even physicists have a responsibility for the social ramifications of their physical discoveries). If I were to give people like Rushton the benefit of the doubt, I would say that they opened a question with the expectation they could get a scientific answer that would be useful sociological knowledge; the scientific answer has not yet arrived (or at least, the social scientific answers are not yet decisive and the bio-science answers are largely absent), and the question has been co-opted by people on all sides as a tool in a lot of non-scientific political discourse. Strictly speaking, the scientific opinion at the moment is something like "balance of evidence against, but not yet refuted". Believe me, when the question is answered scientifically, it will have profound political implications; imagine the fallout from a definitive scientific statement that races do/don't have have distinct differences in intelligence. There would surely be an Obama speech, not to mention a horde of new policy implementations (god help us if it's 'do', that would be ugly).

re: ArbCom: I think that's the reason why they are prohibited from dealing with content issues. It would be great if they could just appoint someone to write the damned article, but no matter who they chose some group of people would go through the roof. What I'd really like to see is ArbCom take the time to strengthen civility rules (give wp:CIV some serious teeth). it's high time that wikipedia stopped indulging the various forms of hysteria that currently govern articles like this. but that seems like a remote possibility... --Ludwigs2 17:47, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is such a bad faith assumption that I am rendered speechless. --Enric Naval (talk) 13:06, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh my heavens, that is hilarious. Look, Eric, let me point out what should be an obvious fact that you (and Mathsci, and Hipocrite, and several others I could name) seem not to get. People who run around insulting and criticizing others, who focus on punishment and sanctions rather than communication and cooperation, who indulge in name-calling and labeling in order to invoke prejudicial reactions from others - i.e. people who act like spoiled, pugnacious children - these people do not get to claim the moral high ground. Not ever.

This is not a matter of who's right and who's wrong (which is a far more interesting question which we will get to if we ever sift through all the crap); this is a mater of whether one acts like an adult, or whether one doesn't. If you don't like me trying to help David understand this silliness the way an adult would, tough shit.

Now, you have two choices here. you can:

1. Sit back and consider what I have said for a while, choke back the rage that I'm sure it inspires in you, and respond with a thoughtful, measured discussion (which I will, of course, respond to in kind)
2. Get all up in arms about it and react in some unpleasant way, which I may or may not respond to as see fit.

Either way, thank you for lightening my morning a bit. --Ludwigs2 17:08, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's about improving the encyclopedia. Your incivility here, and other's incivility elsewhere, is secondary. aprock (talk) 18:04, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. However, I suggest that it is impossible to improve the encyclopedia when articles devolve in the manner of Lord of the Flies. Eric and Mathsci (and others) have decided to resort to playground warfare tactics to achieve their ends, and it has (unfortunately) worked well for them as a matter of practice. It doesn't fly with me, though, and I do know how to deal with it.

If you want my advice, AProck, you'd do wikipedia a wonderful service if you sat down with these people and instructed them in the proper way to interact with others on the project. They won't listen to me (they've decided I'm the enemy, even though I largely agree with their content perspective); they might listen to you. If you want me to be nice, that's easy - get them to be nice, and I'll follow suit automatically. --Ludwigs2 18:27, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I certainly think civility is an issue, and have explicitly mentioned Mathsci's issues. Civility is a problem to the extent that it harms the encyclopedia, and I think sanctions are warranted in the case of several of the participants. I expect that if ArbCom takes the case they will handle all the issues, civility included, in a reasonable manner. aprock (talk) 18:34, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

let's hope so. I know I can be crotchety when pushed, but it's not my preferred state of being. whatever willing, Arbcom will put a stop to the crapulence, and I can go back to being a pleasant person. What is the procedure, do you know? This stage determines whether ArbCom accepts the case, so it seems... is there another stage where they hear arguments, or do they just go straight to rendering a decision? --Ludwigs2 19:14, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

@Ludwig2. Come on, read your comment again: you label me a "pseudoscientist", you tell David that I'm doing "standard hazing" and that my actions are designed to "make [him] feel paranoid". Please retract those statements. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:14, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe I specifically pointed you out in what I said to DK, so there's no reason for you to personalize it. That being said, look at the facts:

1. You know as well as I do that the likelihood of a community ban happening here is almost zero (if DK were doing something worthy of a ban, he'd have been topic-banned long ago). That relegates this effort to an act of intimidation (i.e., paranoia inducing) rather than a meaningful effort at resolving a problem.
2. This is a standard hazing - I've been through it multiple times, and I've seen it inflicted on numerous other editors. A variable but identifiable coterie of editors (usually including people like you, Mathsci, Beyond my ken, hipocrite, Arthur rubin, etc...) rake some editor over the coals in ANI for some marginal offense - blowing everything out of proportion, speaking in uncompromizing and unflattering phrases, liberally using prejudicial terms, harping on obscure interpretations of policy, using sheer volume of noise to try to make the editor look as bad as possible. whether or not administrator action results (which it rarely does) seems to be irrelevant; the only sensible rationale for the behavior is that it's a hazing designed to shame or frighten hapless editors into conformity.
3. A pseudoscientist is anyone who claims the authoritative mantle of science while ignoring the rules, methods, and standards of science. it's been a while since I've edited a page with you, so I can't say whether the term applies to you in particular, but my experience is that the most vocal of the pro-science, pro-skeptic editors on Wikipedia (which covers many of the people in the above-mentioned coterie) have a very poor grasp of scientific principles. Mostly they seem to be offended by things that they have decided are non-scientific, and resist anything that resembles scientific logic if it in any way goes against their pre-given beliefs (while Popper rolls over in his grave and Feyerabend laughs raucously...). Now, if you are one of the few who actually does appreciate the nature of science, then explain why are you trying to win this battle politically on ANI rather than applying your scientific skills to the article? a good calm, clean, cold application of scientific reason is precisely what this article needs.

Or are you trying to tell me that this whole ANI thing is something more than mere showmanship (drama-trauma to enrage and befuddle the masses)? If so, what would that be? --Ludwigs2 22:42, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]