Alsee

Welcome to Meta!

Hello, Alsee. Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum if you need help with something (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

--Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 10:54, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Charter of Wikimedia Movement

Hi Alsee. Please support the developement of a Charter of Wikimedia Movement (WMM). I think WMF could be offered some support by the international Community of Individual Volunteers (iCIV) to stay On the Scale of Billions and a couple of tenthousand engaged contributers. I am refering to Answers from Alsee. --84.62.180.179 21:01, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

VE

Hi Alsee, seasons greetings to you. I saw your comment about VE's impact. Was this answer provided in a public place you can link to? If in an email, was it an email with an expectation of privacy -- and if not, could you forward to me? -Pete F (talk) 18:57, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Pete F Holiday magic links appear!

• Main page for 2015 study results: m:Research:VisualEditor's_effect_on_newly_registered_editors/May_2015_study#Results
• Researcher's talk page where I asked for more: m:User_talk:Halfak_(WMF)#VisualEditor_May_2015_study_-_medium_term_results
• Initially it was only 1 week of results. Here's the 3 month results I requested: m:Research_talk:VisualEditor's_effect_on_newly_registered_editors/May_2015_study/Work_log/2015-09-30

Note: Some places he gives statistics values with no text. Anywhere you see a p-value greater than 0.050 that means "no detectable difference, within expected random variation". Alsee (talk) 21:16, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Cross-wiki watchlist

Hi! You voted for the cross-wiki watchlist as an important suggestions in the community wishlist survey last year. I'm pinging editors who showed interest in that task to tell them we have some suggestions for how things could look, if you'd like to glance at them and give us some feedback. You can find them on the project page on Meta. If you'd like to share any comments, you're very welcome to do so on the talk page. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 01:07, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Wrap up Related Pages RFC on enwiki

Hey Alsee, given the feedback and the conclusion here, can we wrap up the RFC on English Wikipedia as well. I didn't volunteer to wrap it up there, since you started it. :-), thanks! --Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

Melamrawy (WMF), thanx. Done Alsee (talk) 17:40, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

IRC office hour for Wikimedia Foundation copyright strategy

Hi there - thank you for your participation in the copyright strategy discussion so far! In addition to contributing on-wiki, you may be interested in an upcoming IRC office hour the Wikimedia Foundation legal team is holding to discuss the copyright strategy. It will be on September 15 at 14:00 UTC. More information is available on Meta-Wiki. Thanks! Joe Sutherland (WMF) 00:48, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Improved diffs

Hi, Alsee -- I have an update on the improved diffs project, and an apology.

The good news: A WMF developer fixed the diff problem that was identified in the the original proposal.

The problem with that diff was that a small change was made to a very long paragraph, and the diff engine had a limit of 10,000 bytes before it would give up and mark the whole paragraph as changed. This was set as a performance limit, to keep the process of generating the diff from overloading the system. In the new version, the diff engine is estimating the complexity of the diff based on the number of words changed, not on the overall size of the paragraph.

The bad news: We're not going to be able to make any other improvements to the diff view this year. Changing diffs is a high-stress venture -- Max's fix took six months of discussion and testing before it could be released.

Unfortunately, that means that the other examples on the Improved diffs page won't get worked on this year. One thing that I've learned from this first year of Community Wishlist work is that I need to be more careful about determining the scope of a proposal before people vote on it. This wish started with one discrete example that could be fixed, but the concept of "improve the diff compare screen" is much larger, and could include a complete re-imagining of how diffs are displayed.

So I should not have started that Community Tech/Improved diffs page, and I shouldn't have encouraged people to spend time adding to it. You've put time into that, and while I think there's a way to use that work, I misled you into thinking that your examples would get fixed this year. I'm sorry about that; I shouldn't have done it.

We're doing another Wishlist Survey starting in November; it's going to be an annual event. In the next one, we're going to use the proposal period to have people discuss and improve their proposals, before they go to a vote. Part of that is making sure that we don't have any more of these vague "Improve diffs" proposals that means a million different things. So -- I think we could use some of the examples that you've come up with to make a proposal for the next survey, if you're interested in doing that. Let me know what you think, okay? -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 01:28, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF), thanx. I have been following Community Tech work and I had pretty much came to that conclusion already. A little disappointing, but not troublingly so. I was planning to use the Community Tech/Improved diffs examples to write up a good concrete proposal for next Community Tech process. Alsee (talk) 03:15, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

Okay, good. Thanks, I'm glad you understand. I just put a notice on that Improved diffs page. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 16:40, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

2016 Community Wishlist Survey

Hi,

You’re getting this message because you participated in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey and we want to make sure you don't miss it this year – or at least can make the conscious choice to ignore if it you want to. The 2015 survey decided what the Community Tech team should work on during 2016. It was also the focus of Wikimedia hackathons and work by other developers. You can see the status of wishes from the 2015 wishlist at 2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Results.

The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey is now open for wishes. You can create proposals until November 20. You will be able to vote on which wishes you think are best or most important between November 28 and December 12. /Johan (WMF) (talk) via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:17, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Who protects 5 pillars

Alsee, I'm writing about the evidences of systemic bias in Farsi language, but I don't have access to some statistics or it is difficult to find them on Wikipedia. If possible please provide me the following information or let me know where should I look for them.

1- Number of reverts and deletions in Farsi Wikipedia in past 6 months in comparison with other countries (like an European, an Asian and an American country). 2- Number of blocked IPs or users in last 6 months in comparison with other countries (like an European, an Asian and an American country). 3- How can I find frequency of an specific reference in the whole articles? ThanksErfan2017 (talk) 02:08, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Erfan2017, to find all pages with a specific reference you can type something like insource:rasanews.ir into the search box. insource: searches the raw wikitext of the page, including inside references.

Regarding "systemic bias", I can't read Farsi so I have no knowledge and no opinion on the articles there. No matter what the articles say, some people aren't going to like it. There is no possibility that the global community will interfere in a local wiki just because you disagree with most other editors. The only way anyone would get involved is if admins are making widespread and blatantly abusive blocks, and comparable other adminitrative abuses, repressing the general editing community.

It takes a while to learn how Wikipedia and the community works, and you've only been editing for two months. You're not blocked, and you haven't indicated any evidence of administrative abuse. It doesn't look like this is going anywhere. In an encyclopedia where anyone can edit, dealing with disagreements is routine.

P.S. I saw your latest edit.[1] The page has a "Remove timed" template on it, and the article may be deleted on March 10. If you believe the article complies with policies and should be kept, you are allowed to simply remove the "Remove timed" template. I see you added some references to the article. I can't judge the quality of those references. They may be good enough for the article to be kept. However if you remove the "Remove timed" template, someone may still start the normal process to discuss whether it should be deleted. Alsee (talk) 03:56, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Invitation to Requests for comment/Fair Use on Commons

In response to your comment at NonFreeWiki, I invite you to this: Requests for comment/Fair Use on Commons. (Well... I oppose it for my own reasons.) --George Ho (talk) 10:45, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

George Ho, I had already come across that RFC. Grin. I've only edited a little at commons, and I'm not really sure how much of a difference that proposal would make, so I passed on it. But thanks for the relevant ping. Alsee (talk) 11:09, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

You're welcome. For an update, I revisited the RFC subpage and found it closed, so I struck out the invitation. --George Ho (talk) 16:38, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Help Wikipedia improve Recent Changes!

Hi Alsee,

The Editing Design team at the Wikimedia Foundation is currently seeking Wikipedians for user studies. If you've been using the new Recent Changes filters for edit review beta, we would love to talk with you! The study session will take approximately an hour.

Participants will need access to a stable internet connection, a quiet place to go for a research session, and a desktop/laptop with a microphone and optionally, a camera (it'd be nice to be able to see you during the session, but NOT required!).

If you are interested, please email me (see my userpage) to let me know your availability the next 2 weeks for a research session in Pacific Time (or specify your time zone).

Please let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for helping us improve Recent Changes and Edit Review!

Dchen (WMF) (talk) 21:18, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Interaction Timeline alpha demo is ready for testing

Hello all,

The Interaction Timeline alpha version is ready for testing. The Anti-Harassment Tools team appreciates you spending a few minutes to try out the tool and let us know if there is value in displaying the interactions in a vertical timeline instead of the approach used with the existing interaction analysis tools.

Also we interested in learning about which additional functionality or information we should prioritize developing.

Comments can be left on the discussion page on meta. or you can share your ideas by email.

Thank you,

For the Anti-Harassment Tools Team, SPoore (WMF) (talk) , Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 20:54, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey

Hi,

You get this message because you’ve previously participated in the Community Wishlist Survey. I just wanted to let you know that this year’s survey is now open for proposals. You can suggest technical changes until 11 November: Community Wishlist Survey 2019.

You can vote from November 16 to November 30. To keep the number of messages at a reasonable level, I won’t send out a separate reminder to you about that. /Johan (WMF) 11:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Watchlist Expiry project page

Hello,

During the Community Whishlist survey 2019, you have voted for the Watchlist item Expiration wish.

Community Tech has created the Watchlist Expiry project page to work on this feature, and is looking for your feedback about the open questions they have.

Regards, IFried_(WMF), 15:51, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Hello, Alsee! The Community Tech team has posted an April update to the Watchlist Expiry project, and we would love your feedback. The update includes new mockups, which show how users can determine watch status when viewing/editing watched pages or the watchlist. In that case, we invite you to check out the update and share your feedback on the project talk page. Thank you! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 17:47, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Well-phrased

Thought I'd drop a thanks for you recent edit - very well put, and much more diplomatic than I! (Which I feel is well warranted - unlike several WMF staff, NKohli has shown good willingness to talk with the Community, but it's almost as if we're now talking past each other). I hadn't considered it before your comment, but it does have the feel that Niharika was told by her boss "right, we're introducing IP masking, go talk to the Community on how to adapt for that) - the discussion about the tools progresses with genuine discussion, but the masking discussion feels like it's taken as an assumed premise. Nosebagbear (talk) 15:52, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Nosebagbear thanks. I've pretty much taken up Foundation-relations as my primary task ever since Superprotect. With a few notable exceptions, they really do have good intentions and they're trying. But they are employees in a conventional top-down authority structure. They are hired to do a job, and they are generally isolated inside the Foundation walls. The wikis are a far away land where generic social-network-users show up and magically do stuff. Anything related to consensus is completely alien. Imagine how culturally-incomprehensible it would be for an employee in any other organisation on earth to go to their boss and say "Some random users on the internet decided you're wrong". Under the new Director they seem to be getting the message that they need to listen and "consult" a lot more, but there is a painfully narrow channel of communication and there is little shared culture and understanding between our two populations.

Masking is only one of a half dozen big issues at the moment. The community needs to hear them, and the Foundation needs to hear what the community has to say. I'm trying to gear up to make some big changes, starting with a new page at EnWiki village dedicated to Foundation-related matters. Alsee (talk) 08:19, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

That all seems reasonable. Perhaps we should suggest organising something between new joiners (at the San Fran office) and the local Chapter - if the first contact is going to random people from the internet screaming at you for trying to do your job and you can't see why they think they should be deciding, then that's never going to be wildly successful. Having it as part of onboarding/induction might help bed it in better. Nosebagbear (talk) 10:43, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Flow

At least Wikidata and Chinese Wikipedia do not reject it, and Flow is still actively used there. The result of consultation does not include explicitly uninstall Flow from all wikis without regard of local community consensus.--GZWDer (talk) 04:51, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021: Invitation

The 2021 Community Wishlist Survey is now open! This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on 30 November, or comment on other proposals to help make them better. The communities will vote on the proposals between 8 December and 21 December.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals!

SGrabarczuk (WMF)

18:25, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Time will tell

Cooking with the WMF

Regarding your edit summary I humbly suggest my comment might have a better change of success, and when my comments are not successful I have a history of *successful* action to ensure the Foundation respects consensus.

Well, I guess we'll see. So far I see the board being complete and utter tone-deaf, I would be somewhat surprised if they changed their tune now. And talking about "failing in a housefire", yeah.. I like dumpster fires. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 14:08, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Alexis Jazz I really wish we had better insight into how the board has been discussing this internally. Any decent board should have acknowledged the consensus directly. Viewing it most charitably, the board bureaucratically did exactly what COLOR said, and COLOR was written in a bureaucratic style to ensure there was basically nothing anyone could disagree with.

On the other hand it seems a lot of these conflicts are basically arising from staff's attempts to carry out instructions from the board. That structure inevitably fails when we deliver consensus to staff, and the board has no idea what's happening at those down at those levels. Alsee (talk) 15:00, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Alexis Jazz P.S. you probably don't recall my name, but I see you came across my work before. I got Flow uninstalled from EnWiki, then I ensured the Meta consensus was specifically that Flow be uninstalled, and when staff tried to revive development I opened the Commons RFC to uninstall. Staff fought tooth and nail but in the end I got to personally slap a banner at the top of the MediaWiki project page,[2] declaring development&deployment suspended. Alsee (talk) 15:50, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Well all this didn't exactly work out as planned. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 12:04, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Brand Project

I saw your most recent at Talk:COLOR, and I think you're correct about the Foundation engaging and disengaging at their convenience being a problem. I've been keeping the Movement Brand Project running without them, by integrating the results of the RfC as the new seventh quality of good movement branding, and in general updating the project page to remove sentences that were in conflict with its adoption. I put some thoughts about how the project can move forwards at Talk:Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_movement_brand_project#Moving_Forwards, if you don't mind taking a look.

I actually think that there are some problems here. Wikimedia is genuinely a bad name for what the Foundation does, as it can be confused with Wikipedia. It's just that the one name that can be more easily confused with Wikipedia is Wikipedia. And so I think it would be a shame if the Foundation's poor behavior prevented the community from solving a genuine problem. The best solution I came up with was "Wikiverse", though it might require the judicious application of money to acquire the trademark. TomDotGov (talk) (hold the election) 18:17, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

@TomDotGov: I think "Wikimedia" is a great name for Commons, but sadly the history means it would probably be too confusing. For the WMF, some ideas that might spark inspiration:

• Open (/free) Knowledge Wiki Foundation (too long?)
• Open (/free) Knowledge Foundation (is dropping the wiki even acceptable? otherwise doesn't seem bad)
• Wiki Foundation (dropping the "media". trademark problems?)
• Nupedia Foundation (noooo!)
• Wiki Learning Foundation (not that catchy)
• Educational Wiki Foundation (boring but maybe okay?)
• Jimmy Wales Open Knowledge Foundation (you want a connection with Wikipedia without mentioning Wikipedia? here it is)
• Wikiken (wikt:ken#Noun)

— Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 12:27, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021

We invite all registered users to vote on the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey. You can vote from now until 21 December for as many different wishes as you want.

In the Survey, wishes for new and improved tools for experienced editors are collected. After the voting, we will do our best to grant your wishes. We will start with the most popular ones.

We, the Community Tech, are one of the Wikimedia Foundation teams. We create and improve editing and wiki moderation tools. What we work on is decided based on results of the Community Wishlist Survey. Once a year, you can submit wishes. After two weeks, you can vote on the ones that you're most interested in. Next, we choose wishes from the survey to work on. Some of the wishes may be granted by volunteer developers or other teams.

We are waiting for your votes. Thank you!

SGrabarczuk (WMF)

16:08, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

‎Joalpe and Canvassing

Hey there. I'm not sure why you consider Joalpe to have been canvassed. I think they were mentioned in conjunction with their opinion. I don't think that's really something that rises to the level of canvassing, regardless of if there is a rule against canvassing on meta or not. It's probably better to focus on making sure the Foundation doesn't repeat the failures that have plagued the Brand Project up to this point. TomDotGov (talk) (hold the election) 03:39, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

TomDotGov ??? It seems obvious to me. Pharos is running for a position, and pinged Joalpe to the vote. If someone nominates themself for Admin and pings people, you wouldn't consider the votes canvassed? Alsee (talk) 04:36, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

That's not how I read it, I saw it as just a way of attributing the quote from Joalpe that followed, perhaps just using a twitter-like syntax to do so. I think it's fine to assume good faith on this one - for one thing, they only pinged a single user, which isn't much of a canvas if it is one at all. TomDotGov (talk) (hold the election) 04:53, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Az wiki comment

Howdy Alsee, Can you explain your comment here? –SJ talk  01:03, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

SJ I wish you had specified one part, chuckle. I'll run through the items, but unfortunately the topics are complex. My comments below are both too long for comfort, and too short for a full answer.

• They actively sabotaged the community's efforts to clean up pervasive abuse on Azwiki: AzWiki is run by a bunch of holocaust-denialist admins, one of whom was literally running a summercamp recruiting/training people for quote "information warfare". They pushed a fringe political/nationalist POV in general, with assorted tool abuse. The admins themselves of course opposed Requests for comment/Do something about azwiki, but there was otherwise clear community consensus to revoke their admin status. An (unidentified) WMF staffmember offered a Steward a financial package to travel to Azerbaijani and basically run a summercamp for those admins, teaching the admins that information warfare was naughty, that abusive blocks were naughty, and not to be naughty. The Steward then preformed a financial-conflict-of-interest closure, contrary to consensus. (Had the RFC closed in line with consensus, there would have been no admins remaining and thus no financial package to go teach them.)
• the Foundation royally screwed up in the Framban case: First I want to note it began with the Foundation receiving a half million dollar grant to address "harassment" and "incivility".[3] The Board basically ordered staff to start meddling in routine content-and-policy squabbles. Trust&Safety has no business meddling in content and policy matters to start with, and it got impressively-worse from there.
  It is unfortunately impossible to fully and openly discuss the Framban case. T&S not only declared the details secret, attempting to expose a T&S complainant might be interpreted as some sort of outing or facilitating harassment or retribution or somesuch. It's unclear what it is safe to say. I'll start that EnWiki ArbCom saw the secret evidence, ArbCom ruled that the Foundation's Ban was improper and invalid, and that while Fram was not perfect ArbCom found his actions were in general correctly attempting to enforce community policies and guidelines. EnWiki policy explicitly says tracking someone's edits for policy-enforcment purposes is not harassment. The sole charge against Fram is insufficient civility. Fram's edits were exhaustively scoured by the community, including anything that may have been deleted or oversighted. I hesitate to cite anything specific, but from what I have seen and heard the evidence all indicates Fram was sanctioned for becoming understandably-irritated and harsh when dealing with one-or-more individuals who made persistently bad edits even after repeated efforts to educate, warn, and cleanup. I will not cite off-wiki evidence, but I have seen further evidence that Fram was targeted by an organized off-wiki group editing for profit, disregarding content rules and actively subverting consensus for profit. Furthermore there was also a top ranking Foundation individual who had a rather severe personal conflict of interest. On one or more instances that top level Foundation individual intervened to aid problem edits to continue, and they were presumably extremely influential inside the WMF in casting Fram as the villain and casting the profit-editor as a victim. Further, the Foundation has a strong and very public political agenda in favor at least some of the content at issue, further casting Fram as a villain for (correctly) challenging that content.
• doubled-down on that screwup, and is trying to ram this dysfunctional CodeOfConduct initiative down our throats: The Board's solution to the Framban crisis was to direct the Foundation to run a Global Consultation on the matter. The result of the Consultation was clear community consensus that Trust&Safety should return to their traditional role of handling serious cases, and stay out routine content&policy squabbles. The Foundation closed the Consultation with this:
  We hear your thoughts on this issue loud and clear, and we will no longer use partial or temporary Office Action bans. In line with the consultation’s feedback, these policy tools will not be reintroduced to the office action policy until and unless community consensus that they are of value or Board directive. We originally implemented that change to policy believing that better-tailored Office Actions would be less disruptive to the communities. However, we understand that perception of these actions has been quite different. So, point taken: partial and temporary Office Action bans are off the table.
  However the staff and Board that supported Framban in the first place clearly didn't have that outcome in mind when they agreed to a consultation to resolve the situation. There was also still the half million grant and initiative to address low level "harassment" and "incivility". So the the board just plain ordered the Foundation to throw out and violate their own Consultation result. They went back to orders that staff are to get involved addressing the "harassment" and "incivility" in these low level content&policy squabbles, and to cook up rules and processes for it. They declared a resumption of Framban style actions, and unilaterally declared it's OK because they unilaterally declared ta double-top-secret "community" appeal board. The membership of the board is double-top-secret, but almost by definition it must be filled with fringe individuals. (By definition non-fringe members would be in line with consensus, and under the Consultation consensus ALL cases in their scope would be rejected, rendering the board pointless.) And of course they are under orders to cook up this Code of Conduct, ultimately enforced by T&S. They are ignoring the massive objections because those objections are not compatible with competing their assigned job. Alsee (talk) 13:59, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

I meant the first point -- What is the status of Az wiki now, after that intervention? I remember the original discussion here. That didn't strike me as sabotage, just trying something out of band. But I don't know what the followup has been. Thanks for the explanation. –SJ talk  15:26, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

SJ ahh, it would have saved me a lot of time and brainwork if I knew you just meant AzWiki. Hahah. As for AzWiki, I'm hoping for info myself. I don't speak the language, I haven't checked in there, and I haven't heard any reports. I seriously doubt the crew of POVwarrior admins had a deep change of heart, but maybe the Meta intervention scared them enough to ease up at least somewhat. Viewing by Google Translate their Armenian Genocide page is a dumpsterfire - I'm not sure but there might be a few improved pieces. I must quote one bit, it's just so impressively appalling on multiple levels:

Armenian genocide in foreign literature

Literature is a path that leads millions of people to an inexhaustible culture. This path is the path of literary, historical and cultural heritage. We know very well how our wicked neighbors use this road for their own ugly purposes. But this ugly policy has never been in the form of literature before...

If I were stupid-rich I'd love to throw money at a professional translator and just single-edit blast the English article over there. Alsee (talk) 17:22, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Could you please help

Hello Alsee, I hope you could help me with an answer in a way that seems to be deadening. We had a short conversation about FaWiki about 3 years ago [[4]]. Since collecting enough evidences needed lots of time and energy, I didn’t follow the matter at the time. However, about two months ago and following my conversation with one of the top FaWiki admins (they call themselves managers) I studied one of the FaWiki articles. This study was the beginning of a new research on FaWiki. In brief, what I found (I can give you step-by-step details of it with references) was utilizing Wikipedia as a propaganda machine. When I tried to mention this to FaWiki “notice board”, after a few conversations I was blocked “forever” (the account I made to protect my privacy during the research). The top admin was not interested to talk about it, and the press department of the foundation did not reply to my inquiry. I was looking for a way to escalate the issue that –I believe- would undermine Wikipedia’s neutrality. Therefore I provided my suggestions on “Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard” [[5]]. Later I remembered our conversation and when I read it, I found your suggestion to take the issue to “Meta:Babel”. In the next step, I made a shorter list (2 suggestions out of 4) to this board, but user:Billinghurst removed it without any explanation. I want to know if Wikipedia Foundation is not going to listen or act on these issues, I stop following from now on. Thank youErfan2017 (talk) 14:09, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

@Erfan2017: I think that you will find that I explained why in the edit summary in which I removed your off-topic and pinged you. special:diff/21743525  — billinghurst sDrewth 14:59, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Erfan2017 you are getting nowhere because you are just making vague and unsupported complaints. No one is going to act on that. A lots of people get blocked from a lot of wikis for a lot of reasons. Unless there is substantial evidence of systematic abuse, the presumption is that they were blocked for good reason.

Successfully challenging the management of an entire wiki is not easy. It requires substantial evidence, with requires significant effort to compile. And even with strong evidence, the process will be slow. You basically have two choices: (1) compile and present your evidence, or (2) drop it.

Evidence generally means links to pages (usually to a specific page revision) and/or links to individual edit diffs. Useful Kinds of evidence:

• You assert there is a propaganda problem. You could make a list of several articles, and show that they they seriously conflict with all of the equivalent articles in other major languages. I would suggest comparing with at least English, German, Spanish, maybe more. Google Translate may be used for this.
• Show a pattern of Administrator abuse. This is potentially a vague category, but it could include abuse of Admin tools to enforce bias in the articles identified above, systematic use of fringe/unreliable sources to push a viewpoint, systematically blocking users who present valid sources, abuse to subvert or prohibit normal consensus processes, collusion to keep ideological-control over who may become admin, or anything else that flagrantly violates the international norms and principals and public-service mission of our movement.

Tip: Try not to focus on yourself as a victim. Showing that the general public is being harmed by grossly biased articles, or a pattern of editors being abusively blocked or threatened, is generally more effective than whining about being blocked yourself. If you show me some sample evidence, I'll take a look at it and let you know whether it is worth developing it into a proposal for global action. If it is, I can help building it into a good proposal, and with posting it properly and getting it advertised. However I don't speak the language so you would have to collect the evidence. Also note that you haven't posted any evidence yet. I hope you can understand that my presumption is that you were probably blocked for a good reason, and that I'm being generous explaining the process and offering to help if/when you present good evidence. Alsee (talk) 16:29, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

@Alsee: Thank you very much Alsee, I am very grateful that you have so kindly considered and responded to my question in detail. I will try my best to be brief; however the text may get a bit lengthy regardless. Sorry for the trouble.

Actually I don’t mind being blocked during my research on FaWiki, instead I'm deeply concerned about my people; those who are not only under toughest economic sanctions ever [6], but caught under huge waves of propaganda. Every day social media is flooded with fake, misleading and highly polarized news/stories. In this atmosphere it is natural, but unacceptable to see the most popular source of information on internet being abused in the same way as a propaganda machine. I’m not judging between right and wrong –that is people’s choice- but they have right to know all sides of a story as Wikipedia’s pillars insists (being neutral).

Please let me walk you through my recent research. It works as the sample evidence you mentioned. I picked this article: [7] and found several issues:

Significant parts of the article are based on the person’s own narratives. No one could confirm or deny what she said like {Google Translate}: “She released an audio file from inside the prison, explaining that officers beat her and grabbed her by the hair on the street asphalt without any explanation, and after beating her, with a bloody face and no shoes or socks.”… This is sort of WP:OR, which is not allowed on WP. However they justify it with a trick (using an anti-Iranian government media as a source; even an unknown website like here “she got fractured hands and legs in jail” based on an anonymous website: Ref: 32[8]). This trick does not change the nature of the statement, but it looks acceptable according to WP.

Focusing in on some of the issues raised about the article mentioned, and issue endemic to many of its kind, lots of the references are referring to anonymous websites. You can’t find any information about their owners, writers or supporters. In the above mentioned article references 7, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38 and 43 are totally anonymous, some others have only a phone number. There are only 3 large media which are known to be politically opposed the Iranian government. They are mainly funded by the US government or Saudi Arabia like Radio Farda [9] , Voice of America Persian News Network [10], and Iran International [11].

Another rout for these articles to pose as well documented is increasing the number of references. When something happens worthy of considering to be used against Iranian government every opposing media entity reports it. It means one specific piece of information is repeated by several media. Creators of these pages mention all of them as separate references. In this specific article for example the last 5 references are statement of an opposition leader (the son of last Iranian King) in his Telegram Channel, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and on one of those anonymous websites.

It is obvious that if sources are polarized and picked from just one side of the story, the result would not be anything but a politically biased statement. For example if we write an article about Donald Trump just by what CNN says, it would be totally different compared to an article made using Fox News. A neutral article should cover both. Besides, people are not journalists or media experts to realize the difference between claims and facts. When they read “Hands and legs got fractured in jail” with a reference number on Wikipedia they believe it to be a fact. Or when they see 43 references at the end of the article, they believe this to be a well-supported and true story. Moreover, the way this article (as a sample) is written does not look like an encyclopedia page.

Considering the above mentioned facts I started what turned to research, by asking about the reason behind using anonymous references and unfounded claims on the discussion page of the article creator [12]. This is the exact translation of part of his answer: “This is very clear that human right violations in the totalitarian and censoring regime of Islamic Republic could not be proved easily. This is because they do not leave any such documents and evidence behind as best as they can. Because of this, we have to believe what the oppressed and the prisoners say unless the opposite is proved.” In my opinion this is a mere political statement and it is a clear violation of neutral point of view (NPOV).

Since it was a serious violation I decided to escalate it to a higher level. So, instead of editing with an IP address I created an account [User:Eastermoon]. I took the issue to noticeboard of administrators [13]. I asked for a clear comment on the political bias. Instead of answering, one of the admins “Jeeputer” closed the discussion and referred me to “dispute resolution”. I tried to bring my reasoning about why this is not a dispute between two users on his discussion page [14]. In part of his answers he supported the article creator and said that he does not see anything wrong with the article. When I insisted he said that I have some personal conflict with this article and he is not going to continue the discussion.

Again I took the issue to the notice board [15]. Another admin “Shahnamk” confirmed “Jeeputer” and denounced using Iran’s internal news agencies as sources since they are biased. They never doubted opponent sources like [Iran International] even after I mentioned The Guardian as my reference [16] (While Saudi Arabia shows zero tolerance for criticism of its absolute monarchy, as underlined by Khashoggi’s murder, it is setting up media organisations in other languages promoting free speech, particularly about Iran.). Following this conversation, they blocked my account permanently with the pretext of having a second account (what I told them myself) [17]. With this account I never edited any article, never voted and never had a personal dispute (you can check “Eastermoon”’s contributions). The only matter of my concern was politicizing WP.

Later when I checked [18] history, I found the “Jeeputer” as well as “DejaVu” (who blocked me permanently) as contributors.

Please let me add that in this article the mentioned person is identified as a lawyer while her name is not in the Iranian Association of Lawyers [19]. So those involved use this title to get more public attention.

According to my experience and in my perspective by looking at several other political articles, this one is not an isolated article or occurrence. This is only a sample of what is going on in FaWiki.

To sum up the issues I found with the specific article mentioned in this piece:

Firstly: None of the admins (managers) opposed the political statement or viewpoints of the initial user “Sayenevisande” that was totally political. They instead support it.

Secondly: The article looks more like a story written in a party magazine not in an encyclopedia. This article is proved and edited this way by a few of admins. Also when admins only consider anti-government sources as valid references and denounce internal news agencies as pro-government or under government pressure (so not good for use), the result would be biased.

I hope this sample evidence could explain what I was going to say. I would be happy to translate or collect more evidences if you would like. Let me insist again, this is not about who is wrong or who is right; it is about following the rules and guidelines on a global platform. Please let me know what would be the next step.Erfan2017 (talk) 23:01, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

1. I advised you Try not to focus on yourself.
2. I said Useful Kinds of evidence: Show a pattern of Administrator abuse. You have not done so. The only instances of admin tool you have remotely mentioned is the fact that you personally were blocked. Meta will not investigate or get involved in an individual whining about their own block.
3. I said Useful Kinds of evidence: You could make a list of several articles, and show that they they seriously conflict with all of the equivalent articles in other major languages. You have presented ZERO such articles.
4. Regarding the one article you did cite, it would require substantial and challenging labor for me to attempt to evaluate the quality of foreign language sources in that article.
5. If I am not mistaken, you have presented exactly ZERO sources contradicting the content of that article.
6. You appear to misunderstand the No Original Research policy. If something is cited to a source, then it is not Original Research. (Alternately, you could say that sources are expected and allowed to engage in original research, editors are not.)
7. You say [people] have right to know all sides of a story as Wikipedia’s pillars insists (being neutral). That is false. Neutral Point Of View means that we accurately summarize what Reliable Sources say about a subject, roughly in proportion to the prevalence and significance of those views in those sources. If Reliable Sources only present one view, or overwhelmingly present one view, then that is the view we present. Note that news agencies which are subject to a repressive or controlling government are not considered independent or reliable, except for the purpose of stating the position of that government. I mainly encounter this in relation to Russia, but as far as I am aware it is also true of news sources inside Iran.
8. You appear to be concerned with, and arguing, fact and truth regarding that article. Such arguments are invalid and carry zero weight. I often warn people that persisting in such arguments will get them blocked. If the majority of science texts say the moon is made of cheese, then Wikipedia policy is to accurately summarize those sources: The moon is made of cheese.

Erfan2017, I am overwhelmed with other important tasks I need to work on. I took time here because I know there are wikis with problems and there is always a chance someone is trying to address a genuine problem. However if you review 1,2,3 above you have failed to give me anything I asked for. Regarding number 5 it appears you failed to present sources to me or anyone else. People who argue and argue with zero sources generally end up blocked. It's probably time to drop this. Don't continue unless you present multiple articles that seriously conflict the equivalent articles in major langues, or you present a pattern of blatant admin abuse not involving yourself. Alsee (talk) 23:47, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi Alsee, Now I have a better understanding about what you asked. I believe there are some misunderstandings about what I said, but I don’t want to explain. Just let me tell you two short facts: 1- You asked me for “sample evidence”, so I focused on one. I tried to show you how admins process and respond to mentioned issues as their usual pattern of action. 2- I’m a journalist and I represent people. When I interview or when I do research, it is not about me as a single isolated person/user. I had never allowed myself to take your time and energy if it was just about a personal complaint. I will try to do what you asked. Thank you very much for your time. Erfan2017 (talk) 14:52, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Pedido de voto a favor da Wiki Bíblia

Alsee, por favor, mude sua opinião para votar a favor da Wiki Bíblia. Eu criei a proposta para a Wiki Bíblia porque creio na Bíblia. Estou divulgando a palavra de Deus. Portanto, evangélicos, por favor, votem a favor da Wiki Bíblia.

Leonardo José Raimundo (talk) 10:08, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Por que você insiste em votar contra a Wiki Bíblia? Se existe a Wikipédia, o Wikcionário, Wikinotícias, Wikilivros, Wikidata, Wikimedia Incubator, Meta-Wiki, Wikisource, Wikiversidade e Wikivoyage, a Bíblia também merece seu próprio Wiki. Evangélicos, eu peço urgentemente que votem a favor da Wiki Bíblia antes que essa proposta seja rejeitada e as passagens da Bíblia que estão no Wikispore sejam transferidas para o Incubator Plus. Leonardo José Raimundo (talk) 23:02, 8 March 2022 (UTC)