FeralOink

Welcome to my talk page!

Wikisymbols ɛ•ɜ

Please enter any comments by creating a new section, and specify if you are leaving me an action item. I don't visit here too often, so if your message is time-sensitive, I would ask that you consider using my Wikipedia (en) talk page instead.

Thank you for visiting.
--FeralOink (talk) 23:14, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

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1. Welcome to Meta!

Hello, FeralOink. 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 (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing! -- 05:06, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

OT

FeralOink:When I wrote about getting all defensive, there were many people who were involved in providing the response that you linked to and quoted from. You chose to interpret what I wrote as accusing you of something, and you chose to interpret that something as being misbehavior. Getting all defensive means appearing to be very anxious in the face of challenge, anxious to deflect or avoid criticism, and prone to seeing an attack where there is none. Defensive people often are working from a self-protective instinct and are trying to avoid others attacking them by preemptively attacking others first. Again, I'm sorry that you feel accused of misbehavior FeralOink, but I feel my words have been misinterpreted. If you have more to say that's NOT about a serious flaw in the privacy of default Mediawiki installations that breaks the Foundations Privacy Policy, please start a new thread. Now, can we un-derail the conversation and get back to THIS vulnerability?--Elvey (talk) 17:47, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

I cannot believe this! YOU said to ME,

"FeralOink: the appropriate response is to fix the problem, not get all defensive. It's already been shown how this could, for example, easily leak information endangering someone's job to their colleagues or conceivably enable RL stalking. It's not an edge case that this discloses the identities of editors to other users who share their IP, through no fault of the editors..."

Apparently, I cannot read, or rather, my comprehension of the English language is deeply flawed. Fine, Elvey. You ARE RIGHT. I AM WRONG. I CHOSE TO MISINTERPRET being told that I am "all defensive" after seeing it appear directly after my name. I should be able to read your mind. You win! Go ahead and believe in the wonderful powers of Open Source projects security because the US government said it is true. What do I know? I'm barely literate. And thank you so very much for taking the time to define "getting all defensive" to me here. Who knew? Not I!

This is SUCH a non-toxic editing environment! --FeralOink (talk) 17:04, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

What is this thread about? PiRSquared17 (talk) 17:30, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Elvey calling me out, I guess. I don't really understand why I need to be publicly chastised here by him. What is "OT"?--FeralOink (talk) 18:03, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Lots of things, but in this case, it's probably "off topic". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:59, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, WhatamIdoing. Given that it is off-topic, perhaps it could be exported somewhere less publicly humiliating, please? This is embarrassing, for all parties concerned, no? I know that I wish I could make it go away. In the future, I'll focus on what I know best e.g. commenting on budgets. --FeralOink (talk) 07:10, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Per your request, and since the comment was clearly addressed solely to you, I have moved it to the page that it ought to have been posted on in the first place. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:35, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

On a completely unrelated note

Did you know that Meta has no rule against users removing anything from their talk pages that they don't feel a need to keep around? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Also off-topic, thank you (all involved) for your contributions to Meta. PiRSquared17 (talk) 22:38, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, PiRSquared17 and WhatamIdoing! You are kind.--FeralOink (talk) 22:44, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

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Question about controversial political views

I'm wondering how much "global" control can be applied to users expressing controversial political views. If a user expresses support for ISIL, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthi movement, on some wikis, they may be forced to remove such statements, while on other wikis, they may be banned. However, what if a wiki decides to permit such statements? Can stewards or other advanced global user groups take action against the user expressing such views, or even desysop admins on the wiki for allowing this? Does the Universal Code of Conduct or some other policy have provisions for such cases? Kk.urban (talk) 00:19, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

I was confused by your entry until I glanced at your edit history. Sheesh, you are a good soul! You clean up some really awful un-encyclopedic content that "supports"... let's call them "bad actors", specifically, US- and EU-designated terrorist organizations. I consider this to be vandalism: Editors aren't supposed to be expressing their own political views, controversial or otherwise. Yes, I realize that they do sometimes. I find it annoying and on occasion, emotionally upsetting, even if the views aren't pro-ISIS/ISIL or pro-Hezbollah or pro-Hamas or pro-Pol Pot etc.

A few hours prior to reading your question, I noticed a characterization of Muslims as "religious nutters" and it bothered me a lot; both the rudeness of the initial remark and the defense by others of the editor who made the remark. I realize that your expressed concern was about political not religious views, but they can be intertwined, e.g. Protestants versus Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland; Shia versus Sunni and sometimes Ba'athist in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; Zionist Jews versus atheist American left-wing Jews.

Perhaps Wikipedia, or rather, the WMF overall, has become more subjective in what it considers controversial political views. Case in point, and also something I first stumbled upon earlier today: This humorous essay. Upon reading the second paragraph, I immediately noticed the inclusion of "nationalist" in the list of objectively bad article attributes. I realize that I am more traditional/conservative than many Wikipedia editors, yet still felt it was wrong. I enjoyed everything else. The essay was humorous, self-aware, and pleasant. Before making a BOLD edit, I checked the page's edit history. Apparently, there were MANY other, prior readers who had tried to remove that one word from the list; each was reverted. I was curious, and went further back in time, to approximately 2008, then worked my way forward. The list of bad attributes didn't include nationalist until 2012. I suspect that expression of pro-Hamas sentiments were less common prior to October 2023. Despite the lack of any national boundary changes in the Middle East, there have been numerous edits to English Wikipedia, including article renaming/page moves, about the State of Palestine. This has rippled through to maps and other geographical images on Commons as well. Talk page observations of inconsistency, e.g. that the Palestinian National Authority article is now the West Bank only, whereas the State of Palestine encompasses both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, are largely ignored. The State of Palestine article grew to over bytes in length during the past six months, without there being any change to borders or the creation of nation states in the real world. What is controversial or factual doesn't have much bearing to Wikipedia, apparently...... 17 April 2024

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Internet Archive backups

Hello. On the basis of this conversation, I appreciate your offer. If you want to search or ask on Archive forums about their backup an contingency plans, and perhaps other possible safety measures (for example, earthquake-proof equipment or read-only storage media), it would be a really good thing to know about. I don't want to create an Archive account only for this, but it's something that has been worrying me for some time: they say that they have a copy in Alexandria (Egypt), but it's only the Wayback Machine archive as it was more than 20 years ago, without updates, and its webpage went offline (I don't know if the contents themselves still exist), in 2016 they said that they would create a full copy in Canada, but there's no more news about it, and there are mentions to a "partial copy in Amsterdam", but no more details are provided, other than generally they only host 2 copies of all content, both in their 3 or 4 datacenters in San Francisco area. Only 2 copies, none offline, is a bad practice. Having both copies not too far from each other, is even worse. But when they are both in an area prone to really strong earthquakes, and when we'are talking about the biggest archive, and biggest collection of human knowledge that was ever built (all Wikipedia content, in multiple revisions, is also there, among many other things), I think it's a terrible decision not having more copies (or even moving some datacenters to a distant region with less natural risks, for example). MGeog2022 (talk) 11:58, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

Hello, MGeog2022. Thank you for stopping by. Yes, I am totally aware of why it is bad to have physical backups in a geographically nearby location which is well-known for extreme seismic disturbances due to plate tectonics! The WMF has oodles of money ($177 million for a yearly operating budget is vast given that servers and the Wikitech team only cost about $5 million at most), but they prefer to spend millions on new furniture and social justice projects unrelated to the open knowledge movement. Brewster Kahle solely funded the Internet Archive for years, but he has started looking for contributions recently. He only has a few employees, and he is getting older himself now.

I gather from your message above that you personally don't want to get involved with the Archive forums to broach the subject of geographically separate backups. I am not going to do it on my own. With another person such as yourself, I would consider it. I'm kind of puzzled that you won't create an Archive account but say that backup redundancy is a concern for you.

I have never even heard of backups of the Archive that were located anywhere other than the San Francisco Bay Area. I don't think there is much more to say.--FeralOink (talk) 14:14, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

@FeralOink, well, I have no ideas in mind for contributing content to Internet Archive (other than anonymously using "Save page now"), that's why I said that I hadn't plans to create an account there (I think of such forums as forums for users that have already contributed to the project, but perhaps it is not so; maybe I'll create one; if I do, I'll keep you informed here).

The WMF has oodles of money ($177 million for a yearly operating budget is vast given that servers and the Wikitech team only cost about $5 million at most), but they prefer to spend millions on new furniture and social justice projects unrelated to the open knowledge movement: that sounds really shocking, and sad. Those projects can be a good thing, but they shouldn't take such a vast part of the budget of a Foundation which has other main purposes.

Yes, I am totally aware of why it is bad to have physical backups in a geographically nearby location which is well-known for extreme seismic disturbances due to plate tectonics: I can't figure out why such an obvious thing hasn't been addressed before, even without much money (only with a better geographical distribution of the 4 datacenters they have, it would have been achieved), and why so few people are expressing concern about it. I don't think I have the capacity to be "the one who saved Internet Archive because almost no one there had realized before", but perhaps making some noise about it on Archive's forums, gives it enough publicity so it becomes a greater concern, and more likely to be addressed. MGeog2022 (talk) 18:49, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

@FeralOink, I wrote it in the forum while pinging you, but, in case you haven't seen it, I created an Archive account and published about this on their forum, and I talked about it also in Wikipedia's Village Pump. You can comment on both if you want. MGeog2022 (talk) 11:50, 22 April 2024 (UTC)