Sorry, but one more update about you know what

Anybody who knows anything about Wikipedia is sick of the Durova mess. I thought the whole hoohah was about done, until I glanced at the voting on the ArbCom case. For some wild-blue-yonder reason (I suspect temporary insanity) new proposals were added to sanction Giano.

Sure, truthtellers often get the shaft, thanks to good ol' human nature. But this is taking human nature around several bends into literal craziness. Giano's entire offense was that he published Durova's ludicrous "evidence". He should be thanked for adding to the amusement of the world.

This is a deal-breaker for me. If Giano gets any kind of punishment, I'm gone from WP and I've said so on the arbitration talk page. My departure would go virtually unnoticed, of course. But why bother contributing to the project after one of its best members is punished for one of his best actions?

Which would also mean the end of this blog. It's an ill wind...

Fortunately or not, depending on your point of view about me and the blog, the punishment proposals look like they will be voted down.

UPDATE: It now looks like Giano will be punished for telling the truth. One more vote from an arb kicks him off the encyclopedia for three months. That means I'm gone, too. It was fun while it lasted. I will vote for Giano in the upcoming ArbCom elections, but I'll never edit the encyclopedia again.

SECOND UPDATE: ArbCom split 6-6 on punishing Giano. Two of the arbs voting to kick Giano were on the ridiculous sooper-sekrit wpinvestigations-l list, which pursued these laughable withhunts against other Wikipedia editors. It's reprehensible but sadly not surprising that these two arbitrators did not recuse themseves from the case.

Despite the split vote, I've still decided to quit Wikipedia. The level of paranoia in the project has risen so high that I'm not enthusiastic about contributing to the encyclopedia any more. And once enthusiasm ebbs away, it's pretty near impossible to restore. I'm eminently replaceable, and WP will do fine without me. So long.

Play ball

The hoohah over Durova and her goofball mailing lists continues. My guess is that everything will be smoothed over and the clownish lists will continue their high-larious sockpuppet hunts. Maybe they'll find one under the Queen of England's bed. On my user page I've made my final statement on the matter, a quote of the last paragraph in yesterday's blog post.

So let's talk baseball. Durova and wpinvestigations-l have now proved with unimpeachable sooper-sekrit evidence that Alex Rodriguez is a sockpuppet of George Steinbrenner. Oops, got to get my mind off that drivel.

In fact, I've written a few articles on baseball for Wikipedia, including several on league championship series. Here's my account of the melodramatic 1980 NLCS between the Phillies and the Astros. These articles are fun to write because I can slip a little excitement into the prose. Usually, Wikipedia demands a style that's dull as reused dishwater. Try anything remotely colorful, and you get ominous notes about an "unencyclopedic style." I've handed out a few of those ominous notes myself.

But sports articles allow a little more latitude. The people who read them tend to be, surprise, sports fans. So they accept a little oomph in the prose.

I stole the markup for the box scores from other articles on championship series. It's amazing what you can do with those arcane symbols. Batter-by-batter records of the games were easy to find on the web, and I fleshed out the dry details with a few flourishes. Other editors have provided some nice touches, and the article is now more than respectable.

For once Wikipedia worked pretty well. Meanwhile, wpinvestigations-l is checking the umpires for nefarious connections to Wikipedia Review.

The stink that never ends

I really am getting bored with the Durova stink and its mailing lists. But a roster of alleged members of the real sooper-sekrit mailing list has just been posted at Wikipedia Review. This is the supposed investigations list that was spun off from the cyberstalking list which Jimbo says he's a member of. Jimbo also says that he doesn't know anything about the investigations list.

Don't ask me if the roster of alleged members has any validity. The supposed roster would be a high-powered group, with ArbCom members, checkusers, a paid employee of the Wikimedia foundation, and other prominent admins.

The two mailing lists apparently do exist, as confirmed by Guy Chapman and others. WP admin Moreschi has described the investigations list in, let's say, florid terms. He's been slightly less florid about the cyberstalking list, and Jimbo says that list was mostly harmless. Who knows?

The investigations list may be the group that Durova sent her ridiculous "evidence" to. SlimVirgin just confirmed that the "evidence" was sent to the cyberstalking list. To top off all the silliness, there are now rumors of a third mailing list.

I give up. I'm laughing too hard at all this paranoia, middle-school cliquishness, and Sherlock-wannabe-ism. If any of these asinine lists are investigating me, I'm flattered. Sadly, I doubt they even know who I am.

Living people who need living people are the luckiest living people in the world

The Durova bulldoza looks to be running out of gas, and I'm getting bored with the whole stink, anyway. So let's move on to something even more fabulous and fun...living people. In particular, living people with biographies on Wikipedia.

You may remember the Seigenthaler mess, and if you don't, anti-WP folks will gladly remind you. A direct result of the bad publicity was Wikipedia's policy on biographies of persons who have not yet stopped breathing. This policy implores WP editors: "We must get the article right." That sentence even includes a footnote to a Jimbo speech, so it's a Very Important Thing on WP.

The bottom line is that Wikipedia can't contain unflattering information about non-room-temperature individuals without loads of footnotes and references and links and documents and other stuff designed to keep the encyclopedia from getting sued. Frankly, I think the BLP policy, as it's usually acronymed, goes a little overboard sometimes, and I've said so on-wiki. For instance, the article on Crystal Gail Mangum got deleted because WP apparently has to be real, real nice to fantasists who almost ruined the lives of innocent people.

But by and large, I can see the need for extra caution on these articles. A pleasant example for me is the entry on Terry Teachout, an arts critic and blogger. I wrote the original article on Terry and I've updated it now and then. Terry occasionally drops by the article and updates it himself. For some reason that's supposedly a no-no on Wikipedia, though Terry begs to differ.

I also don't understand why still-sentient persons can't edit their own articles on Wikipedia. If they make good edits, fine. If they make bad edits, fix 'em. And you could say the same about any other editor.

The reason that this entry is pleasant for me is that Terry once publicly thanked moi for fixing some crude vandalism to the article. He didn't mention my name, but I preferred it that way. The incident was tiny, but it reminded me that there are real people out there behind those Wikipedia entries. And if I do a decent job, I might even get a thank-you note once in a while. And if I don't do a decent job....well, I'll stay as decent as I can.

Damage control

ArbCom usually moves like me in a hundred-yard dash. Cases sit for weeks and months. But Durova has set off so many alarums and excursions that the arbs are trying to shut down the drama now. They've already started voting on proposals they hope will end the stink.

The items are mostly inconsequential, except that Durova will apparently have to go through another request for adminship now that she's resigned as an administrator and withdrawn as a candidate for ArbCom. Giano won't be punished for publishing Durova's laughable "evidence" against !!, the user she blocked for no reason. But nobody will be allowed to publish the "evidence" on WP. Which is silly because the "evidence" is easily available at Wikitruth and Wikipedia Review. Not to mention that the "evidence" is superb though unintentional humor.

Durova not only blundered with her idiotic block. She also accidentally helped reveal at least two sooper-sekrit mailing lists of powerful people on Wikipedia, up to and including Jimbo and some of the arbs themselves. These lists seem to nourish an atmosphere of ludicrous paranoia against Wikipedia Review and other criticism sites. They also apparently hatch campaigns against Wikipedia editors who don't toe the line on Fear and Loathing of WR and other Officially Disapproved sites.

The members of these lists can't be happy that clueless Durova has inadvertently revealed their existence and purpose. Even Guy Chapman, Durova's number one fan, is thundering: "Boy does Durova ever look stupid here." My guess is that just about everybody on every side wishes Durova would go away. Which is why, as I said before, I honestly feel sorry for her.

List mania

I'm trying hard not to get obsessed with Durova's ArbCom case. But sometimes obsession is difficult to resist. The latest conniption fit is over the sooper-sekrit "list" mentioned in Durova's ridiculous "evidence" against !!, the very good editor she banned.

I thought the list was just a group of BADSITES supporters who really didn't do anything in concert. Oh, woefully naive me. This hush-hush mailing list apparently includes some of the most powerful people on Wikipedia, according to information from an admin named Moreschi. Or maybe there are two lists, with overlapping membership. Moreschi's information has been confirmed by our old friend Guy Chapman, who admits to being a member at least one of the lists.

And apparently these lists aren't just devoted to fun and frivolity. I'm really trying hard not to sound freaked. But some other editors are wondering out loud if they've been targeted by the list(s) for their opposition to BADSITES.

Is there any fire behind this admittedly foul-smelling smoke? Let's hope not. But if a banhammer falls on my BADSITES-opposing head one day, at least I will have some idea where it came from. And this blog probably doesn't help my case with the list(s), if they know or care about me at all.

Jeez louise, I hate sounding paranoid and I really hate being paranoid. Ah, fuhgetaboutit and just edit some articles. I've never been blocked or even warned and I'm not going to start trembling now.

By the way, the folks at Wikipedia Review are turning cartwheels over this stuff, which appears to confirm all their paranoid comments about the Evil Wikipedia Cabal. I'm glad somebody's getting their jollies from this mess.

Have payment, will edit

People get paid for editing Wikipedia all the time. There's the reward board, where WP editors offer each other cash or other goodies for articles or photos or backrubs. There are occasional article improvement contests where cash prizes are doled out for, you guessed it, improving articles.

Remember Cary Bass, the paid WP bureaucrat last seen threatening to block anybody who might embarrass Durova by posting her laughable "evidence" against an excellent editor? Bass announced that the Wikimedia foundation was making twenty grand available to editors who chipped in better illustrations to the encyclopedia.

So when a guy named Greg Kohs offered his services to organizations to write Wikipedia articles for them - at $49 to $99 a pop - it really shouldn't have been a big deal. But Kohs made the mistake of rubbing Jimbo and (gasp) the dreaded Durova the wrong way. Pretty soon he was blocked, banned, executed and later brought to trial for, well, doing what the Wikimedia foundation does itself with that twenty grand - running an edit-for-pay service.

Kohs has retreated to Wikipedia Review, where he gleefully skewers various Wikipedia editors and events. His comments on the latest fundraiser have been dead-on, though Wikipedians aren't even allowed to quote them on the encyclopedia, much less link to them. If any editor put a link on Wikipedia to Kohs' stuff, the BADSITERS would get him every bit as blocked, banned, executed and later brought to trial as Kohs himself. The dispute between Kohs and Durova turned particularly bitter, with nefarious allegations flying hither and yon and back to hither.

I never understood the fuss. If Kohs made good edits that improved Wikipedia, who cares if he got paid for them? And if he made bad edits, other editors would clean up the mess sooner or later, just as they do every day on the encyclopedia with thousands of other bad edits.

Kelly Martin, who I've been unkind to here, made the same point in her comment on, ironically, Durova's ArbCom case: "If Greg Kohser [sic] wants to edit Wikipedia productively, let him, too -- even if he does get paid for it."

But way too much bad blood has spilled between Kohs and the WP poobahs. He stands no chance of getting back into the project, paid or not. Meanwhile, other editors quietly edit for pay and nobody cares. It's a wonderful wikiworld. Now if somebody would only pay me...

Durova bulldoza III

It was inevitable. Durova is going to ArbCom. No, she hasn't been elected. She's going the way you don't want to go, as the subject of a case.

I'm starting to sympathize more than a little with Durova. Yes, I've been nasty to her on this blog, and she deserves at least a little ribbing for her delusions of investigative grandeur. But when you honestly think you're Sherlock Holmes, and the world suddenly and very publicly discovers you're Inspector Clouseau, it's got to hurt.

My opinion on the case is summed up well by Doc's first paragraph. Durova's been humiliated enough, and she'll never be able to block anybody again except on the most ironclad evidence. So why proceed further?

I'm very uncomfortable with Doc's second paragraph, though. That sooper-sekrit "evidence" of Durova's should have been leaked. If Giano gets the ax because he published the painful but necessary document, a lot of people will be very justifiably p.o.ed. Unfortunately, Jimbo is threatening exactly that. Giano has been one of the encyclopedia's very best contributors, far more valuable than the "sleuths" checking beneath every bed for sockpuppets and Satan.

My guess (or maybe hope) is that the case, after nearly infinite hoohah and hubbub, will peter out to not much. Giano and Durova will both get a talking-to but no real punishment. Everybody will be told to get back to work on articles. Hey, I never stopped working.

Keep them funds a-raisin' Rawhide!

The endless fundraiser won't go away. But somebody's got to pay Sue Gardner's half-mill, so Wikipedia keeps begging from high school students. I guess the kids could spend their money on worse things.

The bump in contributions from the new and unimproved and even bigger and uglier begging ad quickly vanished. By Thanksgiving Day, ironically, the daily take had dwindled to a new low of $13,463.10. Floflo blamed it all on the US economy, but nobody else in the world seemed much inclined to contribute, either. Things are tough all over, right, Floflo? Or maybe people are just tired of having to write the encyclopedia and pay for the servers - not to mention moving the bureaucrats to San Fran.

Then the WP poobahs hit on a bright idea: a begging blog! It seems to have worked, at least a little. The daily haul has jumped to 25K or so. Not spectacular but better than the previous week.

Some comments on the blog would make the Wicked Witch of the West giggle. OMG! Wikipedia is gone! I’ll flunk my exams! Pal, if you rely on WP to get through your exams, you must attend the Famous Idiots School. Or your college specializes in Pokemon and inventive sex techniques, both of which get oodles of Wikipedia articles. Come to think of it, a lot of colleges do specialize in the latter, at least. So maybe the kid's right.

Eric Möller, a WP brass-hat who looks and sounds like a '60s hippie-dippie wannabe, wrote a long screed that Wikipedia would be defiled by accepting ads. So that's why they run one of the Internet's most annoying ads at the top of every page!

Eric's funniest assertion among a whole bunch of them: "How would the rest of the non-commercial cultural and intellectual world see us: universities, schools, broadcasters, libraries, archives and museums — if the first thing they see on the Wikipedia article about 'coffee' is a link to Starbucks? Would we still be seen as a mission-driven charity that wants to bring free knowledge to developing nations? How would it affect our credibility?"

I assume Eric typed this with a straight face. But it had to be a chore not to laugh out loud at the idiotic notion that Wikipedia has any credibility to lose with universities, libraries, museums, blah-blah. Those snooty types think the encyclopedia sits somewhere between a bad joke and a real threat. I'm sure the muckety-mucks at Harvard would suddenly and drastically revise their opinion of Wikipedia downward if a couple Amazon.com ads showed up on the site. Why, the Harvard bigwigs think so highly of WP already!

If you're gonna beg, just go ahead and beg. Don't bother with these ridiculous excuses for why Wikipedia won't sell a few ads to keep the servers running.

But I have to admit, Eric's nonsense does seem to have goosed contributions a little. P.T. Barnum was right, after all.

UPDATE: The effect of the begging blog seems to be wearing off already. Hey guys, why not doll up Sue Gardner (no glasses, please) and put her in a video in the obnoxious begging ad? Sure, that would be non-p.c., but it might coax a few more pennies from the high-schoolers. And Sue should do something for the half-mill allocated to her office.

Durova bulldoza II

The Durova drama has reached new heights of entertainment. I wish WP offered such fun every day.

One of Durova's non-fans has published the "secret evidence" she used to drop the banhammer on !! Her comments are unintentionally hilarious for their paranoid, self-important, hush-hush style - even Walter Mitty didn't sound this silly, and Thurber was trying to make him sound silly. By any reasonable and some unreasonable standards, Durova's "evidence" is pathetic. With this garbage, you could convict anybody who edited for a while under an IP address and learned about Wikipedia before registering a user name. My first edit had an edit summary. So ban me! Though I don't know German.

And, as I expected, one of Durova's fans has deleted the "evidence" from Wikipedia because it's so embarrassing for her. By the way, I posted about that fan, Guy Chapman, a while back on this blog. At least the "evidence" will survive on Guy's favorite hate-object, Wikipedia Review. Another enforcer named Cary Bass - a paid bureaucrat of the Wikimedia foundation and boy, do we need more of them - has threatened the banhammer to anybody who reposts the "evidence." Sorry, Cary, the cat is out of the bag and wandering free at Wikipedia Review, a site fortunately beyond the control of the almighty foundation.

Wikipedia Review has been the main target of the BADSITES crowd, a.k.a. the mysterious "list" in Durova's laughable "evidence". The BADSITERS insist that WR is completely unreliable and silly and stupid and not worth anybody's notice...but then they flatter the site by organizing Brigades of the Righteous to fight it. They sure are acting as if Wikipedia Review is one of the most important sites on the web.

The WR-ites are gratefully accepting all this flattery. Wikipedia Review has an Alexa ranking somewhere around this blog's, so they crave such attention. The BADSITERS seemed determined to get WR into the top ten on Alexa.

Maybe the most interesting question is how Durova's goofball "evidence" leaked in the first place. Somebody sent the high-larious document to her adversaries on Wikipedia. The mystery might remain WP's equivalent of Watergate's Deep Throat silliness.

Media and pedia

The professional media, who get paid for their stuff, regard Wikipedia warily. They're more than happy to spread dirt about a volunteer competitor. Mediots jumped all over the Seigenthaler and Essjay rumpuses, and they whooped it up when WikiScanner revealed a lot of conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia. Unfortunately for the media, WikiScanner revealed that some of those questionable edits came from their own computers, as the BBC had to confess.

But like everybody else, mediots often use WP as a quick source of information. John Derbyshire, a pundit at National Review and other right-wing outlets, once harrumphed that he wanted Wikipedia sued into oblivion. Then he started actually using the encyclopedia, and he suddenly became a big fan of how handy WP is.

Wikipedia often takes revenge for media criticism by pointing out examples of mediots plagiarizing WP. A typical case was the, ahem, borrowing of Wikipedia material about the Khobar Towers bombing in a book on the oil industry. Of course, Wikipedia hardly has clean hands itself on plagiarism, as I discussed in a previous post. But it's always nice to embarrass your critics.

For the most part, Jimbo does a good job with the media. He doesn't take himself too seriously in interviews with mediots, and he's willing to accept criticism of WP. If he started getting defensive and circling the wagons, the media would sense a messy kill. As it is, mediots mostly leave Wikipedia alone, except when the latest embarrassment erupts.

Floflo speaks

Sometimes an interview makes you want to laugh and barf at the same time (which ain't easy to do at the same time). Florence Devouard, a highfalutin muckety-muck in the WP bureaucracy, recently granted a giggle-and-vomit-inducing interview to the encyclopedia's house newspaper.

As you might expect, it was the mushiest of softball interviews. But Floflo, as she is non-affectionately known at Wikipedia Review, managed to fluff the first question: "Lady, just what do you do around here?" (Okay, they phrased the question far more gently.) She floundered for a while, quoted some bureaucratese, and finally announced that she gives great meeting. Which is what Wikipedia desperately needs, more great meetings for irrelevant and expensive bureaucrats.

Asked what Wikipedia's greatest weakness was, she replied...understaffing. Right, a volunteer encyclopedia that gets all its real work for free urgently requires more bureaucrats to eat that hilarious $4.6 million budget. Not to mention the absurdly unnecessary move of the bureaucracy to San Francisco, one of the most expensive locations on the planet.

Floflo has a funny thing about money. She apparently thinks filthy lucre is not nice, except when it's paying her plane fares to Africa and elsewhere. She whines that the latest round of begging isn't going so well and fantasizes about "getting one big grant."

Except the people who dole out grants aren't about to shower cash on the site that gave the world Seigenthaler and Essjay and too many other examples of inaccuracy and embarrassment. WP could sell a few ads and pay for all of Floflo's plane tickets with no trouble. But Floflo disdains ads, except those gigantic obnoxious begging ads at the top of every WP page.

What Wikipedia needs is a few advertisers to keep the servers running. What Wikipedia doesn't need are bureaucrats chewing up cash on trips to South Africa and moves to San Fran.

Durova bulldoza

Former WP admin Kelly Martin has retreated to catty comments on her blog. So a current WP admin named Durova has picked up the slack in creating drama, goofiness, entertainment and general good times. This admin fancies herself a super-sleuth at uncovering sockpuppetry and other evil conspiracies against the holy citadel of Wikipedia.

The Youtube video of Durova suggests a female Walter Mitty with dreams of exposing miscreants and malefactors. This impression is widely shared at Encyclopedia Dramatica and Wikipedia Review, which have gleefully recounted Durova's endless investigations of other WP editors to see if they're sockpuppets, trolls or witches.

Of course, sooner or later one of her crazed-Nancy-Drew trips had to go wildly wrong. Out of the deep blue sky, Durova dropped the banhammer on an established WP editor named !! (honest, that's his user name). A little over an hour later, she had to admit she got it all wrong, and she rescinded the ban. Screaming ensued. Swatjester more or less summed up my view of Durova's myopic private eyeing:

"The question here isn't 'was Durova wrong to have blocked !!', we already know the answer to that. The question here is why are we supporting a continuous failure to assume good faith, and what place does 'sleuthing' have on this project? I thought we were here to write encyclopedias, not to dig up dirt on other editors, certainly not to character assassinate them with evidence that won't be made public by someone heavily involved in the SEO industry using their proprietary tactics. That's just wrong to me. We don't answer to them, we answer to the community, and the community is obviously NOT O.K. with private sleuthing being used without revealing the evidence and the methods involved."

Durova is now running for ArbCom. I'm half-inclined to vote for her just for laughs. But she probably stands no chance after this fart-up. Maybe she'll go out in a blaze of glory and ban Jimbo as a sock of Rudy Giuliani.

Another article too awful for Wikipedia

This is getting to be fun. I can thumb my nose at the deletionists by posting deleted articles here. This time it's an entry on Gabriela Pachia, a Romanian poet and translator. She's rendered some of her stuff into English, and it's really not that bad, especially compared to most modern poetry. (My long-ago Latin classes also enabled me to decipher a little of the Romanian versions.) She has published widely, but the damn deletionists run Wikipedia nowadays. So her article looks like it's going away.

But the deletionists don't run this blog, so the article will live peacefully on Google's servers. It's very, very nice that the jerk deletionists don't run Google. The entry:

Gabriela Pachia (born June 16, 1955) is a Romanian poet, essayist, literary critic and translator.

Life and career

Born in Timişoara, Pachia graduated from the faculty of Philology-History at the University of Timişoara (chief graduate in 1978, after receiving a scholarship in the UK, 1976). She taught English with a "first degree" in 1990 with the thesis on "The Triontic Approach to the Literary Character in the Romanian and American Contemporary Novel." She has taught in secondary and high schools (Secondary School No. 21 in Timişoara, The C. D. Loga National High School in Timişoara) and at the university level (1990 – 1993, as a lecturer in English Literature at the Faculty of Philology, in the West University of Timişoara). At present she teaches English at the Banat National High School in Timişoara. She is also a member of the editorial board of Anuarul de martie. She was awarded the "Gheorghe Lazăr Diploma" (2007) for her teaching, as well as the International Writer Certificate for Excellence by the Directory of International Writers on August 29, 1991. Her publication debut was in the review Orizont (Timişoara, The Romanian Writers' Union), XL, no. 13 (1152), March 31, 1989, p. 11 (poems).

She has contributed original poems and studies on the history and theory of literature, along with translations of poetry (Romanian and English), in a number of literary reviews: Albatrosul nisipurilor (Bechet), Anuarul de martie (Timişoara), Caietele Dacoromâniei (Timişoara), Caietele/Les Cahiers/Notebooks Tristan Tzara (Moineşti), Gracious Light (New York City), Logaritm (Timişoara), Lumina (Novi Sad), Orient latin (Timişoara), Orizont (Timişoara), Poezia (Iasi), Rostirea românească (Timişoara), Timşah (Timişoara), and the web-reviews Agero (Stuttgart - www.agero-stuttgart.de) and Noi, Nu! (www.revistanoinu.com).

Critical commentary

"By means of her bilingual Antologii Loga de poezie românească – I – Ars poetica / The Loga Anthologies of Romanian Poetry – I – Ars Poetica, Gabriela Pachia finds the solution for twin problems of the lyrical thesaurus – the former concerns a fairer and larger circuit of the Romanian lyric poetry in the universal sight of the Logos, by an impeccable translation into English, a language admirably mastered by Gabriela Pachia, who perfected her studies in the UK as well; the latter refers to the didactic desideratum of achieving operational thematic anthologies, as in the case of the present "ars poetica", the anthology authoress investigating the 19th and the 20th centuries, from George Coşbuc (1866 – 1918), with his 1892 poem, The Poet and the Critic, to Ion Pachia Tatomirescu (b. 1947), the author of the striking paradoxist poem (dating from November 10, 1983), On the Condition of the Planetary Poem. Nevertheless, "the nucleus" of the anthology is not represented by the inter-war generation of Tudor Arghezi (Mouldy Flowers) or Lucian Blaga (I Do Not Crush the World's Corolla of Wonders), but by the impressive generation of poetic resurrection from 1965 to 1970, whose landmark poets are: Ion Miloş (b. 1930 / Poesia non muori), Petre Stoica (b. 1931 – A Casket of Snakes), Nichita Stănescu (1933 – 1983 / Ars Poetica), Anghel Dumbrăveanu (b. 1933 – Under the Glass of Several Words), Grigore Vieru (b. 1935 – The Harp), Marin Sorescu (1936 – 1996 / Burglars), Ioanid Romanescu (1937 – 1996 / To the Minister of Poetry), Cezar Ivănescu (b. 1941), Ana Blandiana (b. 1942), and Marius Robescu (1943 – 1985)."
Ioan Cârssia, Arte poetice, in Rostirea Românească, anul X, no. 7-8-9 / 10-11-12, July-August-September / October-November-December, 2004, p. 111.

Bibliography

Prizonier in fier / A Shackled Prisonnière, poems (bilingual edition: Romanian-English, the author's English version), Timişoara, Aethicus Publishing House, 2007

Antologiile Loga de poezie românească / The Loga Anthologies of Romanian Poetry, Vol. I, Ars Poetica (Editor and translator into English), Timişoara, Aethicus Publishing House, 2003

Ion Pachia Tatomirescu, Despre fructul curcubeului / On the Fruit of the Rainbow, Timişoara, Aethicus Publishing House, 2007 (Poetry, English version by Gabriela Pachia)

Ion Pachia Tatomirescu, Salmi – pentru "Premiul Nobel" al rândunicilor / Salmes pour "Prix Nobel" des hirondelles / Salms for "the Nobel Prize" of the Swallows / Salms für "den Nobel Preis" der Schwalben, Timişoara, Aethicus Publishing House, 2000 (English version by Gabriela Pachia)

Ion Pachia Tatomirescu, Regalianus' Dacoromania / Dacoromânia lui Regalian – The Independent State of Dacoromania (258 – 270), Founded by Regalianus, the Great Grandson of the Hero-King Decebalus, Timişoara, Aethicus Publishing House, 1998 (English version by Gabriela Pachia)

Ion Pachia Tatomirescu, The Tale of the Emperor in the Azure Mountains / Împăratul din Munţii de Azur, Timişoara, Aethicus Publishing House, 1996 (English version by Gabriela Pachia)

Ion Pachia Tatomirescu, Mihai Eminescu şi mitul etnogenezei dacoromâneşti, Timişoara, Aethicus Publishing House, 1996 (English version by Gabriela Pachia)

External links

Poems by Gabriela Pachia in ''Noi, Nu!'' – Romanian with English translations

Review of Prizonier în Fier in Romanian, with selected poems by Gabriela Pachia in Romanian and English

Category: Romanian poets
Category: Romanian literary critics
Category: Translators
Category: 1955 births
Category: Living people

Again, just a horrible article, no? Wikipedia can find space for 88 gazillion articles on Pokemon, but not one brief article on a serious poet and critic. Oh well, the lousy deletionists can't touch the article here.

Troll feed

An ancient (meaning a couple decades old) axiom on the net is not to feed the trolls. Hard experience has taught me the value of the advice. If somebody's really trying to get my goat, I usually deprive them of the horned trophy. A couple laughs and a quick switch to another subject work wonders. While I've gotten into a few knockdown-dragouts, life is too short and my blood pressure too volatile for many such indulgences.

Which doesn't mean that I don't take an evil, sadistic, nasty, and truly not nice pleasure in watching others duke it. I've mentioned Wikipedia Review several times on this blog, and their staff of fully qualified and licensed provocateurs always provides not-so-family entertainment. Which wouldn't be possible without plenty of sustenance from several Wikipedia editors.

One of the Wikipedians who provides nourishment to the Reviewniks is admin JzG, who gives his real name as Guy Chapman. He's a fortyish Englishman who likes to bicycle and seems chipper and reasonable in a stereotypically British way...except when somebody whispers "wikipedia" followed by "review." Then screeds like this tumble out, prompting a weary response from a Wikipedia arbitrator: "If people are limited to 500 words in a case, I don't see that we have to read 2300 in a clarification. Could you take down this manifesto, and ask a simple question if you want a simple answer?"

And, of course, such rants prompt much joy at Wikipedia Review itself, where the merry elves have opened a section of their board dedicated exclusively to JzG. By now the fight has grown so overdone that even my evil self is getting bored. Guy and guys, can we call it off before everybody dozes off?

Are we stable yet?

A specter haunting Wikipedia is "stable versions." This doesn't have anything to do with Bethlehem and no room at the inn. The phrase refers to more-or-less locked versions of Wikipedia articles that would be presented to casual readers of the site.

The devil really is in the details here. Right now, almost any article on Wikipedia is completely open to editing by any nutcase (like me) who happens by. Of course, this creates an enormous vandalism problem. Except vandalism may not be as huge a problem as some like to imagine. An academic study found there's well under a 1% chance that a viewer will encounter any vandalism at all, and that most vandalism is quickly fixed. Automated vandalism repair looks to be protecting the encyclopedia from crude defacement, and human intervention seems to be cleaning up the more subtle graffiti.

But some WP bigwigs want the project to get respectable. They're tired of the Onion parodies. So they want to present only a shiny, spiffy version of an article to the drive-by reader, a version that can't be edited by just any schmuck. This idea used to be called "stable versions" but has now resurfaced as "flagged revisions". I guess the proponents think flagging is more palatable to the WP masses than stable-ing.

I don't like the idea under any name. I want my Wikipedia raw and unfiltered, and I want to be able to edit just about any damn article in the encyclopedia. Either the whole idea of Wikipedia - editing by the people for the people - is flawed, or we scrap this notion of protecting articles from the hoi polloi. My egalitarian self trusts the hoi polloi a lot more than appointed "experts" who would keep flagged or stable or nifty-difty versions of articles away from editing by ordinary schmoes.

If I want an "expert"-controlled project, I'll head for Citizendium. Their approved article process is just what the flaggers on Wikipedia want. As far as I'm concerned, the flag folks can decamp to CZ.

Half project, half donkey

Baseball fans will get the reference. The rest of you can check this article. I'm using the phrase to introduce the wonderful and sometimes donkey-ish world of Wikipedia projects.

A WikiProject (cute name, no?) is a group of contributors who want to network, baby. All right, the stated goal of a WikiProject is to form a group of editors interested in improving particular types of articles. Like articles on midsized Chicago suburbs. That would be WikiProject Midsize Chicago suburbs, which doesn't exist yet but may be coming soon to a Wikipedia near you.

These folks like to tag articles, and you know my attitude towards taggers. At least WikiProjects usually leave their ugly calling cards on talk pages instead of the entries themselves. Here's an example from WikiProject Novels. The tags are often harmless grades doled out to articles by people who like to grade articles, for whatever reason.

I'm a member of one project, WikiProject Wikify. Yep, they tag articles for "wikification." I confess to being "casually active" on the project. But I don't attach tags; I remove them after (let's hope) improving articles enough to escape immediate re-tagging.

Some projects get the WP poobahs upset because they seem more like social networking than encyclopedia-writing. Many poobahs don't do much encyclopedia-writing themselves, but that's another rant. The biggest stink arose over something called Esperanza. The name alone grated on me. Sounded like $1.99 perfume.

Anyway, the Esperanzans awarded prizes for each other's user pages and other trivial pursuits. Sure enough, the poobahs cracked down on editors having, omigod, fun. The Esperanzans got their project canned, and most of them were sent to the WP Gulag, a.k.a. article-writing. This is where I'd like to send all the WP poobahs for thirty-year sentences, but that's another...

Progress report on begging

The Wikipedia fundraiser continues, which means the garish begging ad still disfigures every WP page. I've charted the progress of the beg-a-thon here. There was a noticeable upturn in donations after the new, even more obnoxious ad went up November 4. But the effect seems to have worn off. Not only are total daily donations falling sharply, but the average size of donation has hit the skids.

Which may indicate that WP has picked all the low-hanging fruit of substantial contributions. This is not surprising, since people don't like getting panhandled. Internet users have gotten used to content paid for by other people, namely advertisers. They don't like getting hit up for money to keep a site going.

That doesn't mean they won't ever shell out. The latest round of Wikipedia begging has picked up 600 grand so far, and the fundraiser will certainly do more than a million. It runs at least until late December.

But if WP's budget continues to spiral upward, the site has to find a new and more reliable source of funding. Paid advertising is the obvious answer, but WP insiders have an ideological abhorrence of ads - except godawful, obnoxious begging ads, of course. Veropedia, a for-profit fork of Wikipedia launched by Danny Wool, shows that ads don't have to be obtrusive and irritating. Wikipedia could easily tuck similar ads into its pages and relieve its money problems forever.

There's always talk of grant money, but it never seems to materialize in large enough quantities. Wikipedia has a checkered reputation at best, and the people who dole out grants aren't thrilled by the site's less than stellar renown for accuracy. Paid advertisers, on the other hand, aren't as fastidious. They want viewers, and WP can provide zillions of 'em.

UPDATE: The Wikimedia foundation has revised the numbers on its summary site. The daily totals are still going down quick as the effect of the new begging ad wears off. But the average size of donation is holding up. Anyway, unless some big money starts flooding in, the fundraiser will fall nine miles short of the ridiculous $4.6 million budget.

Check your socks

Sockpuppetry is generally considered a not nice thing on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia defines a sockpuppet as "an additional username used by a Wikipedian who already has one or more accounts." Why everybody can't just edit under their real names is a deepest, darkest mystery to me. Larry Sanger had a good idea when he slapped a real-name policy on Citizendium.

Accusations of sockpuppetry fly every day at WP. The game has grown sillier and more boring than solitaire. The latest example of the nonsense was Greg Maxwell's allegation against a user named Majorly. The accusation just happened to occur in the middle of Majorly's request for adminship. He was trying to get the tools back after voluntarily giving them up a few weeks ago.

Maxwell was last seen consorting with other poobahs to once again allow anonymous accounts to create articles. His sticking of his nose into Majorly's RfA set off alarums and excursions. Majorly eventually withdrew the request even though he seemed sure of approval, and a major stink erupted about Maxwell's busybodiness.

There's this hush-hush thing called "checkuser", designed to ferret out evil and wicked and not-kosher sockpuppetry. Actually, what checkuser is designed to do is keep the peons in line. Favored editors on the encyclopedia can sockpuppet all they want. Anyway, the checkuser results on Majorly seemed to indicate that this sockpuppet allegation was pure crap. But I can't know for sure because my peon self isn't allowed to see the oh-so-secret evidence.

Majorly apparently got screwed, but at least I don't have to worry about this particular inquisition. I've never operated a second username and I'm not about to start. If they want to railroad me out of Wikipedia, they'll have to find some other excuse.

UPDATE: Greg Maxwell is having a tough time all round. His out-of-the-blue decision to once again allow anonymous accounts to create new articles is getting drubbed here. It looks like there will be no consensus to allow anons to write new articles, so Maxwell's proposal won't go into effect. I agree with Maxwell on the issue, but his decision-making process was high-handed and almost certain to backfire.

MIA

Spent a little time yesterday browsing the Wikipedia-hating pastures of Wikipedia Review. Amid the paranoia and silliness, I came across a link to a WP page I'd never seen before: Missing Wikipedians. The page proved almost poignant.

This list of missing editors is where former Wikipedians go to...well, not exactly die. In fact, there's another list of deceased Wikipedians. I'll comment on that page when I'm feeling really wistful.

Some of the comments about missing editors were either sad or silly, depending on your personal cynicism index: "Very sad. Notheruser was a great contributor." "He will be missed by many." "A respected administrator; last edit August 1, 2006. His final edit summary was Last edit...good night."

That last edit summary struck me as a stylish way to bow out of the project. Maybe when I end this blog, I'll post a two-word "Good night" entry. Or "Good morning" if it's 9:00 AM.

I recognized several of the dearly departed. Essjay quit because of "the New Yorker mess." Yeah, I've edited the article. Katefan0 was hounded off the site in a very nasty episode. Zoe got p.o.ed at Jimbo and stormed out. Flcelloguy seemed like a very nice editor, but that weird thing called real life turned too busy for him. CharlotteWebb got tangled in a TOR web, which I never understood because I don't know what the Hades TOR is.

Many of the reasons cited for leaving boiled down to burnout: "lost interest", "closed up shop", "I just feel like part of a mob", "grew tired", "felt fed up", "time here has passed", "it wasn't fun anymore", "no interest", "nobody will listen to you", "just not fun anymore", "not worth my time", "gotten tired". When it gets to be a chore, it's time to find the door.

Some left over specific issues: advertising, administrator actions, the reward board, the userbox flapdoodle, "vandals, trolls, and malefactors", conflicts over particular articles, criticism on the user's talk page. The funniest exit line was: "This contributor is currently under the impression that Wikipeia is a complete waist of time. (except for a spelling lesson)." But most just up and left because they felt like up and leaving. As one note said: "Disappeared without any notice or indication of reason."

That's the way to go.

Mumbo-jumbo

Click the edit tab on my user page and a pile of bizarre symbols will tumble onto your screen. This is Wikipedia markup language. Which is sort of like HTML, the lingo that drives the web, and sort of not.

The language is definitely not easy to master. It takes a lot of mumbo-jumbo to get the screen to display what you want in the way you want it. You have to learn the language by making every conceivable and several inconceivable mistakes. Luckily, you can always bury your mistakes by using the preview button. That button is your best friend - maybe your only friend - on the encyclopedia.

I like to hunt around pages and see the markup behind their format. Some user pages, in particular, are so pretty that nerds like me just have to see the markup driving them. This gives me all sorts of bad ideas for festooning my own user page with silly doodads.

Like userboxes. Those are the cute little things that announce I'm alive and I've got 11,000 edits and I know who Jimbo is. I've stretched some boxes out and squished some down to make a big diamond. As one of the userboxes says, I like diamonds.

Believe it or not, userboxes actually set off controversy on Wikipedia. What doesn't set off controversy on the encyclopedia? One day Jimbo was musing that userboxes were too divisive because people were actually, gasp, expressing opinions in them. Sure enough, some gung-ho admins stared deleting scads of the boxes, which got scads of other editors screaming. Lots of people like to put the little thingies on their user pages.

Eventually some weird solution was reached where userboxes are in some space instead of some other space. Don't ask me the details because I don't know them and I don't want to know them. I just learn what I can from the markup behind the boxes.

Something nice for a change

Just looked over the recent entries, and I have been a grump lately. So I'll be sweeter in this note. As my user page says, I'm a sweet little thing...most of the time.

I've done a lot of work on Wikipedia's Citizendium article. Citizendium, for those not endlessly fascinated by online encyclopedias, is a nascent competitor to Wikipedia started by Larry Sanger. Depending on who you believe, Sanger was a co-founder of Wikipedia or just one of Jimbo's hired hands. There's little doubt that he played a major role in WP's first year before leaving after various disagreements with Jimbo.

Working on the article hasn't always been pure joy. Larry didn't like some of my additions and wasn't shy about telling me so on the article's talk page. He's still not my biggest fan, as his comments on this blog make clear. Another editor axed much of my stuff as too detailed. Some of the cuts were justified, but he also eliminated a valuable selection of media comments about the project.

But that's WP life. You can't please all the people all the time. A lot of my work survives in the article, and WikiDashboard still lists me as the entry's top contributor. So it was pleasant news that the article was nominated and then selected as one of Wikipedia's good articles. This is AAA ball, one step below the major leagues of featured article status.

The good article project is really a good idea. Hauling an entry through the excruciating featured article gauntlet is no fun, as I found out with the Henry James article. It's nice to have a less painful system for recognizing good work in the encyclopedia.

Drama never ends

SlimVirgin, blogged about previously, has returned to editing. Sure enough, her enemies - in particular, Judd Bagley of Overstock.com - are pledging more attacks. At Wikipedia Review Bagley has posted details of what looks to be inconsequential sockpuppetry by SV. He promises redder meat at Antisocialmedia.net, his personal anti-Slim site.

Will anything come of this? Not unless it gets into the mainstream media. Right now the unmistakable mustiness of stale conspiracy theory hangs about the Slim-bashing by Bagley, Daniel Brandt and others. Slate offered a brief mention of the main allegation: SV had/has connections with intelligence agencies, who are using her entrée into the highest circles of Wikipedia poobah-dom to influence sensitive articles on the encyclopedia.

Is the allegation true? I have no earthly idea. But WP poobahs are banning, blocking and censoring with a BADSITES vengeance anybody who breathes a word of this allegation anywhere close to the site. I wouldn't put this entry on the site myself, and I'm a blissfully uninvolved skeptic on the whole issue.

The loopiest conspiracy theory from Wikipedia Review is that SV's month-long absence from editing was some kind of behind-the-scenes punishment by Jimbo. I really don't buy this one, and even WR itself alleged that Slim was editing under other accounts over the last few weeks.

The nightmare scenario: the conspiracy theory proves true and mainstream media - especially the left-wingers who predominate there - pick up the story. Spymasters use agent to influence Wikipedia.

This would make Seigenthaler and Essjay look like teensy-weensy potatoes. Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com and another SV enemy, recently muttered that reporters are already working the story. I don't know if I believe him. I sure don't want to believe him.

Playing tag

Anybody who glances at Wikipedia nowadays can't avoid the blizzard of tags attached to articles. Just to make sure nobody misses their electronic graffiti, the lazy-ass taggers, who can't be bothered to work on the articles themselves, usually splatter their butt-ugly tags at the top of the entries they deface. It's amazing that editors who work hard at improving articles put up with these jerks. At least I'll bash them here.

A typical example is the Deal or No Deal article. The asinine taggers have marred this entry with six tags that say nothing more than "I don't like this article." There are three tags that whine exactly the same complaint about "trivia" (meaning any content the moronic taggers don't like.) Another tag bitches that the article is too long. Breaks my heart, idiot. Another wants "table format", whatever that means. I'd like to table him.

These taggers have done precisely nothing to improve the article. Any halfway rational reader will ignore their nonsense and concentrate on the article's substance. Fortunately, the article has been built by people who want to write an encyclopedia, and offers a great deal of information on the show. It's too bad that some "editors" have to dump imbecilic comments in crappy boxes all over other people's work. I just hope their vandalism won't deter users of the encyclopedia.

All such tags, if used at all, should go onto an article's talk page. After all, lamebrain taggers of the world, the talk page exists for comments about an article. Even the wikify tags, which I use to find articles to work on, should rest quietly on the talk page and not scream at the top of an article.

Another example is an article I worked on today, Henry George Theorem. This brief entry about a mildly interesting bit of economic theory was festooned with three tags that took up more space than the article itself. I had no trouble finding references for the article and making the other demanded changes. But taggers can't be troubled to do a little real work. They just want to run up their edit counts with their useless goofball scrawls.

UPDATE: The Deal or No Deal article no longer has six tags. An editor took a meat-ax to the article. The wholesale destruction eliminated most of tags, along with much useful information. Deletionists are almost as much of a pain as taggers. Unfortunately, this deletionist is also a tagger. He hung two more tags on the article that say nothing more than "I don't like how this article is written." Of course, such comments should go on the talk page, but the urge to deface the article was too strong.

Old timers

By Wikipedia standards I'm a mere pup. I didn't start editing much under my real name until late 2005, well after the website started on Wikipedia day, January 15, 2001. Sure, it's only a few years, but WP "old-timers" tend to consider themselves privileged on the encyclopedia.

This became painfully apparent when Jimbo Wales recently decided to throw his Wikipedia weight around. Last week, just before he left on a camping trip, Jimbo permanently banned an editor named Miltopia. The banning was somewhat controversial because Miltopia has made some useful contributions to WP. He's also questioned the Wikipedia poobahs about some of their policies and decisions. To at least a few editors, it looked like Jimbo was trying to squelch dissent.

So a brave-to-the-point-of-foolhardiness admin named Zscout370 (why can't people just use their real names?) reverted the ban. Jimbo got back from the camping trip, was not amused, and promptly kicked Zscout370 off the admin list. This produced enormous wailing and gnashing of teeth. You can witness some of the ruckus here. To give Jimbo credit, he buckled under the hollering and restored Zscout370's admin status.

Another ancient Wikipedian named Greg Maxwell casually announced the other day that anonymous editors - who edit under their IP addresses without user names - would be allowed to start creating new articles again. After the Seigenthaler oopsie-doopsie, anons weren't allowed to begin new entries, but only to edit existing articles. This always seemed like a stupid PR ploy to me. Why should an oddball user name suddenly entitle an editor to write new articles?

So I agreed with Maxwell's decision, but the decision-making process was the height of autocratic presumption. Apparently Maxwell got together with a couple other poobahs and decided to make the change, after no consultation at all with the broader range of Wikipedia editors. Gee, us broader-range types only write the damn encyclopedia, Greg.

I really don't buy the constant whines about an evil WP "cabal" that supposedly controls all aspects of the encyclopedia. But when old-timers like Wales and Maxwell start acting like they own the site, I almost want to decamp to Wikipedia Review and yelp. Which is exactly what Miltopia and Zscout370 did.

Wikipedia is a top ten Internet site now. It's no longer a tiny club where the old-timers can casually dictate to everybody and expect quiet obedience. If WP can have a bloated $4.6 million budget, the project can also start respecting its editors a little more, even if they question the sacred decisions of an old-timer or three.

Hooked and loving it

Now and then I tell myself that I can stop whenever I want to. Then something happens to prove how ridiculously hooked I am.

There's even a test for Wikipedia addiction. I'm afraid to take it because I don't want the bad news. Although I speculated about "burnout" a few entries ago, that's only fantasy. Somebody bashes around an article, and off I go.

Last Saturday an admin with 88 gazillion edits suddenly decided the Criticism of Wikipedia article wasn't up to snuff. So he started dumping "citation needed" tags with challenging edit summaries all over the entry. If I could really walk away from WP whenever I want to, I would have ignored the tags. Maybe I would have gotten around to answering the requests after a week or four.

Instead, I feverishly hunted down references to eliminate all the tags. I slapped one reference after another into the article, anxiously trailing behind the admin's requests. Finally, I got everything cited that he wanted cited, and he even left me a thank-you note on the talk page. Which was very nice of him (honest!)

Luckily, it's all too easy to find references for every imaginable criticism of Wikipedia. The Internet is loaded with whines about the encyclopedia. Almost all those whines come from sites with Alexa rankings nine miles below Wikipedia's. Net green eyes, you might say.

A less frantic but still convincing proof of my addiction was the latest article I picked from the wikify list: A Maid of Constant Sorrow. The title intrigued me, because I wanted to know which maid was constantly sorrowing and why.

Turns out it was the title of Judy Collins' first album. I don't even like Judy Collins. Her stuff doesn't rock anywhere near hard enough for my headbanger tastes. But I plowed through many edits to raise the article to acceptability. I even uploaded an image of the album cover. And uploading a file nowadays is real proof of addiction, because you have to jump through nine hoops to dodge the WP copyright police.

My way and the highway

After my sour japes on the begging notice, which still bugs the Hades out of me, I'll be sweeter in this entry. A few posts back I mentioned my forays into highway articles on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia offers scads of articles about those things your car rumbles over. A typical example of my efforts in this little-known patch of WP territory is Alabama State Route 21.

I don't think I've ever travelled this Alabama thoroughfare. In fact, I can't remember spending a minute in the Sweet Home state. But I couldn't resist a road that passes near the Talladega Superspeedway. Down home with NASCAR is where I wanna be - on Wikipedia, anyway.

These articles have acquired a rigid set of Wikipedia conventions. They have to be written just so, with the correct infobox and title and road symbols. Otherwise, irritated messages start turning up on your talk page. There was actually an ArbCom case about the naming of these articles. Hilarious edit wars had erupted over whether "Route 21 (Alabama)" or AL Route 21" or "AL 21" or "Alabama State Highway 21" or "Fred Flintstone's favorite road" was the proper naming convention.

Once you understand such arcane technicalities, the articles are seductively easy to write. Just haul out a road atlas and start tracing the route through its various windings and intersections. There's usually some helpful material on the web, especially from state transportation departments. Those are the people who (very) eventually fix potholes.

It's also fun to find photos of the roads on the web. For some highways you can find an entire page of down-home pictures. I found a site for AL 21 that tracked the whole route in photos, right down to the Florida border. The web gallery honestly made me feel like I'd been there and done that.

Begging

If you've looked at Wikipedia lately, you've seen the irritating, ugly, and utterly-without-redeeming-social-value begging notice. Wikipedia wants your money, again and again and again. These fundraisers are endless because Wikipedia won't sell a few ads to raise the few bucks truly needed to keep the site running.

Florence Devouard, an apparatchik appointed by Jimbo to some highfalutin position, huffs: "Advertising is out of the question: it’s a moral issue for us." Of course, morality is relative. Florence doesn't mind the obnoxious advertising for the fundraiser on top of every WP page. After all, that advertising pays her travel expenses.

And it pays a lot of other expenses. Wikipedia's budget has exploded to $4.6 million. In 2004 the budget was $79,200. Yes, the encyclopedia is bigger, but it still gets almost all its real labor for free, from saps like me. What's happened is that a sizeable bureaucracy of people like Florence has growed like Topsy. Right now the WP bureaucracy is moving to San Francisco, a ridiculously unnecessary expense that will chew up hundreds of thousands of dollars better spent on hardware to keep the encyclopedia running.

If I sound like a pinchpenny curmudgeon, that's because somebody should start pinching a few pennies at WP. The most recent audit suggested, very mildly, that the organization develop "basic year-end bookkeeping and accounting" skills. Amen, brother auditor. It might help if a green-eyeshade guy began holding down expenses.

All that said, I chipped in fifty bucks anonymously - though I guess it's not anonymous anymore. That makes $175 I've given in three different fundraisers. I shouldn't encourage them, but I do. Just don't tell me about that African kid we're supposedly writing the encyclopedia for, Jimbo. I'll pay an extra $50 if you promise to shut up about that kid forever.

Sad bit of editing

"Sad" is meant in the literal, not the ironic sense. Last night I noticed on a game show web page, of all places, that an actor named Lee Patterson had died in February of this year. For some reason the death wasn't widely known until just a few days ago. In the sick way I have about such things, I looked Patterson up on Wikipedia. There's nothing like the grim reaper to get me scrounging around WP.

Patterson already had a reasonable bio on Wikipedia, which concentrated on his career as a soap opera actor. The date of death was in the article, with a rather pathetic "citation needed" tag. Seeing the chance to pile up my edit count, I went to work on the entry.

All right, I'll confess to a slightly more sentimental interest. I had seen Patterson recently on reruns of an ancient 77 Sunset Strip knockoff called Surfside 6. The show surfaced on a tiny cable outlet - owned by the Moonies, of all people - which rather grandly dubs itself AmericanLife TV Network. Now and then I'll peek at the channel for nostalgic reasons. They feature TV shows from my all-too-distant youth. I've worked a lot on the network's WP entry, too.

Patterson was hardly a great actor, and he didn't fancy himself one - at least as far as my inexpert self could tell from his natural, unpretentious acting style. But he was versatile and professional, with some maturity and screen presence. Which enabled him to pile up a formidable IMDb page, spanning over four decades of work in movies and TV.

So I rewrote the WP bio with a lot more on his career besides the soap operas. One thing I wondered about was the delay is his death becoming widely known. The hints from Google indicated that he was something of a loner, never much interested in the limelight or in schmoozing Hollywood reporters. I wanted to slip a little of this personal stuff into the entry but resisted.

The grimmest part of the rewrite was changing the "Living people" category to "2007 deaths". Sooner or later, we all get that category switched.

From scratch and elsewhere

It's been a while since I wrote a WP article from scratch. When I first started as a mostly anonymous nerd in 2005, I created lots of articles about Henry James' works. I also wrote various articles on baseball, highways, and other riffraff from only the blank page WP gives you for a new entry. It was sort of like writing this blog, where you get only an empty box and no particularly helpful instructions on filling it in.

Maybe I've gotten lazy in my WP old age. Now I almost always work only on articles that already meet a reasonably high standard. That's what I like about the wikify list. The articles on the list aren't in hopeless shape. They just need a little work, which is all the work I fell like putting into Wikipedia any more.

Burnout? Could be getting close. I found myself in a shouting match on the talk page for the Criticism of Wikipedia article. All right, "shouting match" is a little strong, but the argument was still more heated than I like.

Seems that censors are ripping out every mention of Wikipedia Review, a harmless whine site about Wikipedia that sometimes offers useful and valid criticism of the encyclopedia. I should just keep things in perspective and let the censors rip. I can still read WR whenever I want. But I've allowed the idiotic censorship to bug me. One admin in particular is scouring many links to WR from Wikipedia. The site has retaliated with giggles about the admin's editing of articles on porn stars.

Such silliness would never have concerned me before. I would have gone on editing articles about my areas of interest and ignored all the nonsensical wikidrama. Maybe I should start writing articles from scratch again. There are still lots of Henry James stories that need entries, and even a few highways remain article-less.

Keep those cards and letters coming

My user talk page is pretty sleepy compared to many others on Wikipedia. Read Jimbo's talk page for a perpetual yellfest. Maybe I'm not doing enough to p.o. other editors. And I'm trying so hard! Still, enough complaints have rolled over the electronic doormat to fill several archives.

Not everybody writes to whine. I once got a very large flower (okay, a very large picture of a flower) for removing some goofball hoax articles from the encyclopedia. And most of my tag-team partners on the talk page have been cordial even when they disagreed. The orange bar announcing that I've received a new talk page message is usually a pleasant change from the monotony of editing article after article.

The latest note on my talk page, for instance, was an excruciatingly polite discussion about, of all people and things, Lee Harvey Oswald. I'm still not comfortable with the "alleged" in front of "assassin" for Oswald, but the quibble wasn't worth fighting over. Which is why most of my talk page disputes die quickly. I just don't want to holler back-and-forth for very long.

Makes for a boring talk page...and for significantly lower blood pressure.

It's all about the...something

Remember those vaguely creepy ads for Overstock.com? The ones with the brown-haired girl cooing, in a glazed-over spacey way, that "it's all about the O"? The ads have mostly vanished now because Overstock.com has run into rough financial waters. But it a weird and wonderful way, it's still all about the O...on Wikipedia.

Seems that Overstock.com's worst enemy is a financial reporter named Gary Weiss. He's constantly bashing the company, which oddly enough has seen something of a recovery in its share price as its fortunes have improved.

So how does Wikipedia get into this corporate picture? A Wikipedia account called Mantanmoreland, considered by some though by no means proven to be Weiss himself, supposedly forged an alliance (sounds like Survivor, no?) with powerful people on Wikipedia. Weiss' critics charge that the alliance enabled Mantanmoreland to gain at least some control over the Wikipedia articles on Weiss himself and on naked short selling, a stock-market practice that Overstock.com's chief exec alleged was used to bash his company's share price.

Meanwhile, Weiss' enemies at Overstock.com were exiled from WP for various crimes and misdemeanors. They retreated to whine sites like Wikipedia Review and Antisocialmedia.net, where they complain about the unfairness of their treatment by the encyclopedia. In particular, Judd Bagley, an Overstock.com official who runs Antisocialmedia.net, has played some cute tricks on the Wikipedia hierarchy in revenge. Much of the recent BADSITES hoohah was about Bagley's site and how aggrieved the Wikipedia poobahs feel about it.

Yes, it's a hilariously tangled web. Which happens to be the title of this blog entry from an observer who seems slightly inclined toward the Gary Weiss side of the spat. As the entry points out, the New York Times took note of the dispute but didn't fill in many of the details about Wikipedia. Now you know the rest of the scrambled story.

Draggin' the line, watchin' the list

The page I call up most often on WP is probably my watchlist. I'd give you a link, but the watchlist is hidden behind my super-secret, super-strong, really nifty password. (As the announcer on the ancient game show Password might whisper: "The password is...super-secret, super-strong and really nifty.") My watchlist shows the latest edits on about 500 items I've selected from the encyclopedia. That way I know when something awful, something great or something in-between is happening to various pages I'm interested in.

This can get to be an addiction. A sadly confessed wikiholic shivered over the temptation of "just one little peek at my watchlist." I've got the same problem, Jorge. When the watchlist items have piled up very high, trudging through them can make One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich look like a beach party with the Playmate of the Year.

But I do it because I'm hooked. Checking the watchlist is the easiest way to eliminate really lame vandalism from the encyclopedia. And believe it or not, the changes are sometimes worthwhile and get me off my cyberduff to add more content to articles.

As I type, the latest change on my watchlist is a note that Henrik Ibsen has an article on the Hindi Wikipedia. Or at least I think it's Hindi - my knowledge of the script isn't reliable. No doubt the note would have enormously amused the permanently p.o.ed Norwegian. If you're wondering why I watchlisted Ibsen, I once added some verbiage to the article about Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder, two of his plays that I can endure.

Now and then I clear an item off the list when I've lost interest. Ironically, the blog article got the ax because I don't care that much about other people's blogs. Uncharitable, I know.

Birth of the blues

We all have to start somewhere, and on Wikipedia I started with Henry James. If you follow the link to the article, you might notice the little star in the upper right-hand corner. This denotes a "featured article," which means the HJ entry is supposedly one of Wikipedia's best. You can decide that for yourselves.

I made my first edits to the article, and to Wikipedia in general, in February, 2005. I made the edits anonymously because I'm such a shy, retiring type. That's an alleged joke, of course. In fact, at the time I'm not sure that I even knew about creating an account under my real name. It just seemed so weird that I could edit the article and see my changes immediately. How does this encyclopedia work, anyway?

The earliest edit under my user name, a.k.a. my real name, occurred on March 10, 2005 at 14:13 WP time, which is five or six hours ahead of my local time. It was this note on the talk page of the Henry James article, where I bashfully confessed to having made recent edits to the entry anonymously. I continued editing mostly anonymously for the next several months. Finally, about the start of 2006, I decided to edit all the time under my real name, unless I forgot to login.

Besides the James article itself, I wrote or revised dozens of articles about his novels, tales and nonfiction. If anybody on WP noticed me much, which was difficult as long as I stayed anonymous, they probably thought I was a harmless HJ-obsessed nerd. They were right.

Henry James ain't exactly the most controversial subject, though his sex life (or lack thereof) has attracted plenty of speculation. So my debut on Wikipedia was relatively low-key. Which is probably the best way to slip into any Net community.

After a while, I started to branch out: other literature, baseball, TV, business, pop culture...you can read all about it on my user page. Two-and-a-half years and about thirteen thousand edits later (including the anonymous edits) I'm still at it. One thing I've tried not to branch into very much is the huffing and puffing on WP's policy and dispute pages.

I keep track of how many edits I make outside the encyclopedia's actual entries. If I find myself dallying too much on other pages, I pull myself back to what most people read Wikipedia for, those interesting little things called articles. Though I admit that I've been active on several articles that are Wikipedia-related.

One more note on the Henry James entry: I finally pulled the article up to the coveted "featured article" status I mentioned above. The process went pretty smoothly compared to what many other articles endure to get FA status. But it was still a genuine pain, as I had to listen to various reasonable and unreasonable suggestions for improvement. I'm mostly a reasonable guy (chuckle) and I eventually pushed the entry through.

I'm thinking of running the gauntlet again with the article on James' biographer, Leon Edel. But that will have to wait until I find enough time to improve the article substantially. And until I summon enough courage to face the FA inquisitors one more time.

Neutral and neutered

NPOV is not the Soviet secret police, as one anti-Wikipedia wag once semi-humorously suggested. It's "neutral point of view," a supposedly "absolute and non-negotiable" pillar of Wikipedia.

Trouble is, people tend to use this pillar as a club every time a dispute, however trivial, arises on the encyclopedia. I've been given an NPOV lecture on such life-and-death issues as whether a minor poet named Rosemary Tonks can be fairly described as "disappeared." (She hasn't written anything for a long time and has dropped from public view, though her publishers seem to be in contact with her.)

And when the NPOV club starts swinging, people get their blood pressure up, because an accusation of POV-pushing is fightin' words to any self-respecting Wikipedian. Everybody likes to think that their contributions to the encyclopedia are utterly unbiased, though some will make the ritual confession that everybody and everything is biased to at least some degree. That ritual confession is actually true, but tends to get forgotten in a hurry when the feathers fly in an NPOV spat.

The safest bet is to balance everything that could conceivably be labeled opinion with a vigorous opposing opinion. I've often tried this trick on the Criticism of Wikipedia article. Which, as you might suspect, is an especially acute test case for the famous Mr. Npov. So far the trick has worked pretty well. At least I haven't been blocked, banned and executed.

And make no mistake, insufficiently neutral or neutered (ouch) editors are banned every day on WP. The result is too often bland or waffling prose in articles, as editors run scared of the ban-hammer if they offer any opinion about anything. Sure enough, a criticism of such waffling prose can be found in Criticism of Wikipedia. We get you coming and going.

Two pundits named John

Most of the articles I edit on WP are low-temperature and non-controversial. But I'm not completely shy about warmer subjects. A couple of biographies, John Podhoretz and John Derbyshire, are on my WP resume, and they haven't exactly been quiet oases of cybernetic peace and brotherhood.

In fact, old versions of the Podhoretz article were frankly disgraceful. The entry once asserted that this married father of two is an "admitted homosexual" and that he "wrote a novel on the mating rituals of horses". Very slightly more amusing was the claim that his rapper name was "Jonny P". These were just more sad examples of the crap that Wikipedia splattered on people in the pre-Seigenthaler days.

So all that had to be cleaned up, and it eventually was before I ever arrived at the article. Podhoretz has even joked about the bad old days of his WP bio, as now mentioned in the entry. I've added lots of material to the article on his various political opinions and provided extensive sources and a bibliography. There are other things I'd like to add, but reliable sourcing rules forbid them.

For instance, after watching his frequent tangles with Derbyshire at the National Review website, I'm inclined to believe that he can hardly abide the other John in the title. But maybe they're big buddies, and I can't find any evidence for personal dislike beyond their political disagreements on issues like Bush, immigration and the VA Tech massacre. So no comments about personality clashes have crept into the article.

Derbyshire's entry hasn't endured quite as much nonsense. Maybe that's why he's become a big fan of Wikipedia, after earlier denouncing the encyclopedia as a crock that should be sued out of existence. Still, his idiosyncratic, self-identified "racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one" views have attracted more than a fair share of hot-blooded edits. I'm not a Derb fan by any means, so I try to "write for the enemy" and keep the article as straight-and-narrow as possible. Extensive and exact quotes from Derbyshire's own writings help keep things reasonably balanced.

God-king

I've referred to Jimbo Wales so much on this blog, it's time that I should give my unvarnished on the WP god-king. That mock-title might make me look like a Jimbo-basher, but I'm really not. After all, he got the whole ball of [fill in nice or naughty noun] going, and I'm having fun contributing to it.

By and large, I have no complaints with Jimbo's hands-off style. A micro-manager would be a horrendous misfit for such a free-wheeling project as Wikipedia, which literally depends on the kindness of strangers. Sorry for the invidious comparison, but Larry Sanger's tight squeeze, a la Citizendium, would drive me to figurative drink and literal vandalism. Jimbo usually sits back and lets the good, bad and indifferent times roll at Wikipedia. He seems to be a lot more interested in Wikia nowadays, and that's oh so fine with me.

I once partially reverted an edit by Jimbo, with some trepidation. He screwed up a bunch of footnotes, and that had to be fixed. (Yes, I've done the same thing myself.) I almost reverted the entire edit but decided that discretion was the better part of saving my ass. You can read my sorry hemming and hawing on the revert here.

Jimbo did step hip-deep into it with the Essjay hoohah, and I haven't been kind to him in my edits on the WP article about the mess. At least he recovered and did the Right Thing...eventually. Wales also gets a bee in his bonnet about Larry Sanger's claim to be Wikipedia's co-founder, which doesn't make either gentleman look good. I wish they would both laugh off the silly spat - because lots of other people are laughing at them over it.

The most convincing complaint about Jimbo is that he often expresses an airy wish for something on Wikipedia, and then lets others do the dirty work of carrying out the semi-command. For instance, after the Seigenthaler disaster Jimbo mouthed platitudes about better sourcing for WP biographies. But it took a lot of effort by other people to improve the encyclopedia's treatment of those pesky persons who get upset when their WP articles announce that they're baby-killers or Carrot Top fans.

I'd still rather have Jimbo play aloof monarch instead of nagging boss. He gives great interview, can laugh at himself, and handles the media well. He makes a nice figurehead most of the time, and a competent manager when necessary.

Laugh riot

Not sure exactly how it happened, but I've gotten sucked into editing the recreation article. You'd think this entry would be a quiet backwater that receives little attention and less vandalism. You'd think wrong.

The problem is that "fun" is redirected to this article. Sure enough, various jolly souls drop by to share their ideas of fun. These often involve hot chicks and unusual sex positions. Nothing wrong with them, as Seinfeld might say, but they make the article a little less authoritative.

An especially persistent jolly soul named Erudecorp has shown up at the article. His major, actually only, contribution: "An example of fun could be that some people are having fun viewing this article, amusing themselves over the fact that this article even exists." This is not rib-tickling material, at least to my ribs, but Erudecorp gets touchy over any attempt to remove it. See this edit summary if you don't believe me.

The article already lists "using the Internet" as a form of recreation. This would seem to cover any amusement a reader might get from the existence of the recreation article. I've pointed this out to Erudecorp on the talk page, to no avail. He's blitzed me with acronyms to show that his opinion on the article's amusement value is protected by Wikipedia policy, the Bill of Rights, and Billy Mays' money-back guarantee.

So I've surrendered. In fact, I kind of like Erudecorp's irreverent attitude towards WP. Oh sure, nobody's really going to get any chuckles over the existence of an article on recreation. By objective standards, Erudecorp's edit is nonsense.

But the sheer goofiness of his idea is a helpful corrective to the solemnity of much Wikipedia rhetoric. I cringe whenever Jimbo invokes the famous African kid that we're supposed to be writing the encyclopedia for. Maybe we need a little nonsense sprinkled here and there.

UPDATE: Another editor removed Erudecorp's attempt at humor. I have to agree with the removal, though I still think WP could lighten up a little.

Money, money, money

Lots of people chip in lots of free labor to Wikipedia. Okay, it's not really labor, just a nice hobby for people who like to tap keyboards. Still, nobody's getting paid, or at least nobody's paying me. There are a few salaried employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the encyclopedia and related sites. There are also for-profit sites that scoop up Wikipedia content and repackage it with ads sprinkled in, like Answers.com.

And then there's Wikia, the for-profit operation set up by god-king Jimbo Wales and his queen consort Angela Beesley. Their idea was, frankly, to cash in on Wikipedia. The company hosts specialized mini-Wikipedias for a cut of their advertising revenue. Wikia has attracted a lot of venture capital from investors hoping for the next big Internet thing.

Wikia has also spawned predictable complaints about Jimbo and Angela and their nefarious cabal living off the hard work of unpaid Wikipedia drudges. Seth Finkelstein, prominent Wikipedia basher, has been particularly vocal about this evil and awful and not nice exploitation. (I had originally written "injustice", but Seth tells me that he likes the e-word better.) As an unpaid peon, I really don't mind Jimbo making a buck from Wikipedia's reputation. Wikia is a separate operation from the encyclopedia, though it undoubtedly exists only because Wikipedia has been so successful. But Answers.com and others are already selling the deathless prose I've splattered on WP, and I'm not seeing any of those pennies, either.

So sleep is not being lost, at least at my house. If Wikipedia ever becomes a job like my real work as an actuary, then I'll expect a check. But for now WP is still fun, something I want to do and don't have to do. So I'll continue to do...without the money. And I don't plan to invest in Wikia, either.

Getting violated

Writing is hard and stealing is easy. Or at least stealing on the web is easy enough for people to scoop up large swatches of other peoples' prose and dump it into Wikipedia. This is called copyright violation, for all you would-be ambulance-chasers out there. And WP occasionally seems to specialize in it.

Not that an ambulance-chaser would get rich in this racket. Suing a nonprofit for swiping a few paragraphs of nondescript prose will not bring millions, or even dimes and quarters, in contingency fees. But the obvious filching still irritates and embarrasses. Long-time WP foe Daniel Brandt made a big stink about it a few months ago, which got five minutes from the mainstream media.

Wikipedia polices itself halfway decently on plagiarism, and even runs a page full of examples unearthed by snooping editors. I once got involved in a minor scuffle on this page. Not for anything I did, but for a silly mix-up on the article about writer Steven Millhauser. This time the plagiarism ran in the opposite direction: a used-book site borrowed a few lines of blurby prose from the article and used them to plug the novelist's work. I helped straighten out the goofiness.

The reason I'm chatting about copyvio is an article I picked up from the wikify list today: Elba, Alabama. The title intrigued me because it seemed to tie Napoleon to Sweet Home You-Know-What. In fact, there was a connection, though tenuous and long-ago-ish. There was also a huge swatch of stolen prose from the town's web site, dumped word-for-word into the article's "History" section.

I did a complete rewrite to eliminate the obvious copyvio. Coincidentally, the section received a more encyclopedic tone, whatever that means, because I cut a lot of gushing about cutesy twists of town legend. The kid (and his mail bag) who got rescued from the flood is still in there, though.

Criticism of Criticism of Wikipedia

A cute bit of software called WikiDashboard reveals that I'm the most frequent editor of the Criticism of Wikipedia article. I first heard about this compendium of fair and unfair swipes at WP from the god-king himself, Jimbo Wales. He called the it "a fine article" in a debate with some Encyclopedia Britannica functionary. I checked the entry and started correcting some footnotes. I've been hooked ever since.

Others don't think so highly of the article. It has survived five attempts at deletion by non-fans. As you might expect, the article is regularly vandalized by "editors" announcing that Wikipedia sucks, blows, or sucks and blows. Every assertion in the article also receives a lot of legitimate scrutiny, since some people just don't like Wikipedia getting criticized on its own dime. Which is okay. Those legit questions keep me on my toes to find good sources for every bit of prose.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I spend so much time on this article. Maybe I'm basically skeptical of WP myself, and working on the entry assuages my conscience. Trouble is, I disagree with lots of the anti-WP whines quoted in the article. A Britannica ex-staffer's comparison of Wikipedia to a filthy john is typical of the weird and unjust criticisms splattered heavily throughout the entry.

Maybe I like the challenge of remaining unbiased on such a controversial subject. If I can edit this article extensively without getting blocked, banned and executed, maybe I'm doing something right. Or maybe I'm heading for a bloody crash and don't know it.