Foo-fighter

Revision as of 19:21, 3 November 2005

Revision as of 01:28, 4 November 2005

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In seeing the FIRE description and the couple of times the Brainwashing page has been vandalized, that must be a lot of work!

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No, not official at all, I hope I didn't give that impression. There really is no hierarchy on wikipedia. There *are* administrators, who have the power to "ban" people, but the bans are only temporary (most of them last six, twelve hours), and I've never seen them abuse their power, or even come close. Nobody has the authority to step in to "settle" disputes, it's pretty much up to the people involved to figure out what to do.

I just kind of wander around. If you look at your user page, you'll see you have something called a "watchlist"; you can add pages to your watchlist (click "watch" on the article in question.) When a change is made to that page in the last few days, it shows up on your watchlist. I forget why FIRE and B101 were on my list; probably I came across them related to the ACLU page.

Actually, vandalism is not too much of a problem. For a "major" article like the ACLU, there are probably twenty people watching it, maybe even more. Anything like vandalism gets taken care of within a few minutes (and the ACLU article is pretty much complete so the work is all done.) Probably a vandal (or just a sort of well meaning person who super super hates or super super loves the ACLU) hits the page once every few days, so it means I end up fixing the page once every month, even less.

For a less major article like FIRE or the B101 page, about currently less-well-known topics, there are usually a limited number of people who have an interest. For example, the person I worked with on the FIRE page had had a run-in with FIRE when they were involved with a case at Columbia. Generally, that stuff gets worked out once, and then it's done; personally, I believe the article we have on B101 right now is very hard to object to reasonably, and so anything new that happens is going to be petty vandalism.

In the end, I have about twenty pages in my watch list. Most of them are about pretty uncontentious subjects; I just watched them because it's kind of cool to see people take something you've written and improve it, add more info, etc..

The biggest problem I've encountered is with the [[CAIR]] article. You can imagine, tensions run high, and unfortunately, the article still has a "NPOV" tag at the top. It's unfortunate, because I think the article on CAIR is very good, very informative and should probably be the first place someone goes to learn about the organization. I'll try again to get the "warning label" removed, but it's tough.

[[User:Sdedeo|Sdedeo]] 01:28, 4 November 2005 (UTC)