User talk:UninvitedCompany/archive4

Old talk archived 1 2 3

Our recent interactions

I am uncomfortable with a couple if interactions we have had recently. You are a user I highly respect, someone whose integrity is without question. Early upon coming here you made some very friendly and thoughtful comments to me on IRC which convinced me not to leave the project. You are also one of the core personalities here, and for that reason as well I strongly prefer not to engage in any sort of personality conflict with you. If there are things which concern you, I am willing to discuss. I think there are some meta-issues which we see differently, but I assure you I do not desire to be disruptive nor antagonistic to the best interests of the project. Cheers, Sam Spade

Lilypond

I agree that Lilypond is likely to be the best free-software score typesetting solution for the forseeable future, but I'd still prefer if we avoided simply wholesale embedding Lilypond code into Wikipedia articles, like we do with LaTeX math code. IMO, wikitext ought to remain as close to semantically-relevant as possible, so it can be rendered in a number of ways. LaTeX is so far the only external language that can be directly embedded, and it's not a particularly bad one, because only a subset is allowed anyway, and it's well-defined and, for the most part, semantically meaningful (perhaps not ideal, but not horrendous).

My preferred solution would be to start with a simple markup that would be rendered through Lilypond, but which would be semantically clear enough to be conceivably converted to some other format if others wish to render through a different backend. I guess my main issue is that I think we ought to store notational information in some sort of notation-markup language rather than a typesetting language. Lilypond may be slightly better than rendering with your own preferred software and uploading the PNG, but only slightly, IMO. --Delirium 01:18, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

RfA - Ruhrjung

Thank you for your kind proposal.

Now is not the best time. Due to changes in my professional life, in recent months I've had considerably fewer days each month with opportunity to sleep and eat at home, than I've got used to in the last years — not to mention opportunity for computerized recreation. :-)

Additionally, I think I would be dishonest, if I didn't mention that I'm distressed by what I perceive as Wikipedia's vulnerability for campaigns from determined and energetic Wikipedians with an agenda that only ostensibly recognizes fundamental principles of Wikipedia. This surely contributes to my limited motivation.
--Ruhrjung 08:16, 2004 Nov 18 (UTC)

You might, by the way, want to browse the contributions by User:Johan Magnus. I'm particularly impressed by his ways at talk pages, where his presence seems to defuse disputes, often before they've reached the stadge of potential conflicts. I have intended (I still intend) to nominate him, but I seem to be runing short of time again, and have not yet understood the present methodology for additions at RfA. See: User talk:Johan Magnus#Adminship and User talk:Whiskey#Continuation War where he acknoledge to have what appears to be a decade of experience of internet discussions and diverging views on matters of North-European history and contemporary societies. I know the actual usenet forum, but am not particularly impressed by its appearance. Somewhat more impressing the FAQ at http://www.lysator.liu.se/nordic/ is, that Johas has been one of two editors of. This experience clearly shows in his judgements with regard to recent, possibly controversial, additions.
--Ruhrjung 08:42, 2004 Nov 18 (UTC)

Jeronimo

The user has not been especially active, which brings up the question of their ability or willingness to execute admin responsibilities, unless we feel that adminship is simply an honorific, and I and many others do not. The user has been on Wikipedia during the time frame on the nomination but has not paid attention to this for whatever reason. The RfA page states:

Note: Nominations have to be accepted by the user in question. If you nominate a user, please also leave a message on their talk page and ask them to reply here if they accept the nomination.

and the instructions for promotion say:

1. If [the nomination] is not a self-request, check the user has accepted the nomination

I respect your desire for inclusiveness, but if seven days is sufficient time for 24 Wikipedians to vote for the nomination, it is sufficient time for the candidate to be aware of what's going on. To this end I posted a request on Jeronimo's talk at the same time I extended the nomination. If he/she does not respond, the nomination can always be reposted.

I would ask also that you inform your nominees that they must accept their nominations on the RfA page. It is simple respect for the community, in addition to being a rule. As of the moment, three of your nominees have not accepted or rejected their nominations after being posted for 24-72 hours. I left a message earlier today on each nominee's talk. Cheers, -- Cecropia | explains it all ® 01:08, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

To acknowledge your point, of course Jeronimo may simply be unaware that he was supposed to formally accept, which is why I posted a note to him and extended the nomination. I will see if he logs in during the next 24 hours to determine whether he is likely to be aware of this. Kind regards, Cecropia | explains it all ® 01:23, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Well, UC, to be blunt, I am not imposing a 24-hour anything. Jeronimo had seven days to accept the nomination. Now he has eight days'. The rules clearly state that the nomination must be accepted for promotion. You say: "The purpose of requiring nominees to accept a nomination is to prevent unwanted or frivilous nominations. I don't believe that insisting that a nomination be accepted in a certain manner and within a certain timeframe is required, nor should it be. If the candidate wants the nomination, that's good enough for me. I believe that it is quite sufficient that candidates either give permission in advance or accept after being nominated. We joke about this being a bureaucracy, but let's try not to live up to that overmuch." But you, as I, are one person; you have an activist view of adminship. I don't have an argument with your core belief that adminship should be open, but you appear to be willing to oppose any procedure whatever.

As to my "moratorium," note that I asked editors to respect it. I ran a poll when there was opposition, and I respected the result. The whole process was over in a couple of days. -- Cecropia | explains it all ® 16:56, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Request for Arbitration Against UninvitedCompany

You are hereby notified of the request for arbitration made against you in light of your:

1) improper removal of my nomination for ArbCom election 2) vandalism of my user page

Reithy 12:44, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

Election endorsements problem

Hi, since you're apparently helping administer the Arbitration Committee election, I think an opinion would be called for to settle the dispute over how to structure the endorsements page. --Michael Snow 19:40, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Reithy and Chuck's candidacies

Another user pointed out to me that Chuck F is a candidate for the arbitration committee. It's hard for me to disagree with your handling of the Reithy situation, as Reithy is a very abusive user, but I think that Chuck and Reithy have to be handled equally here. My opinion is that the spirit of their temp injunction doesn't prevent them from running for the arbcom. I believe Chuck's statement should stay. And I think you should reinstate Reithy's candidacy statement, but truncate it to the 250-word limit and remove personal attacks. I think his block should continue, since Reithy has violated the injunction from so many sockpuppet accounts. But above all, Chuck and Reithy must be treated equally on the Arbcom candidacy page. Thoughts? Rhobite 19:56, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

Need administrative help

I'm not sure if you an admin or not, but I'm assuming you are since you have been nominating so many people. User:Dr Zen has been flaming me on both Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/LGagnon and Talk:Stephen King for the past few days. He has tried putting words in my mouth (which I definitely did not say) in an attempt to discredit my performance on Wikipedia. This is not only disrupting a conversation on Talk:Stephen King but also putting my status as a admin candidate at risk by misleading voters. I am asking you to please stop him from harassing me so that I can continue on with my work in peace. -- [[User:LGagnon|LGagnon]] 04:18, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

Barnstar

I, Lst27, award you this barnstar for your kindness and your suggestions in my past RfA's.

I award you this barnstar. Enjoy!

Statistics question

UninvitedCompany, are you aware of a source that allows one to determine how many active editors are currently working on Wikipedia? Say within the last week, the last month, and the last six months?

Some users are throwing around claims that imply that they know the sentiment of the average editor, and I would like to be better informed as to how many editors there really are, actively making contributions to articles.

I am really surprised the developers of the Wiki software didn't see fit to build a polling mechanism into the client front end, because given the number of editors I think there may be, the error in almost every poll I've seen must be huge (as to how representative it is of the actual opinions of the editors out there).

If this is not your area of expertise, I would be indebted to you if you would pass this query along to the proper individual whom you think would best be able to provide some answers.

Per a recommendation by Theresa Knott, I will cross post this message to Danny and Elian, in the hopes that one of you will know the answer.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

--DV 03:44, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi David. I think your question is an interesting one and very much worthy of some analysis time. At present there is no source for accurate information about user editing patterns. I have downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia database and have run some queries here locally to come up with what information is available. The queries are lengthy and would place a substantial load on the Wikimedia database if they were run there. You have probably seen Wikipedia:Another list of Wikipedians in order of arrival, which answers a different question but is based on the same data.

I believe from what data I have seen that the number of casual contributors to the project, who either contribute anonymously or log in and make a few dozen edits before losing interest, is far greater than is widely realized.

I will run some queries and try to get some facts for you. The data will now be a month or two old, because it has been that long since I downloaded the "old" table, a process that requires some days even with a high-speed internet connection.

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 16:01, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)