User:Ta bu shi da yu/NPR response

Andrea Seabrook wrote an article on NPR about Wikipedia. In the article she was effusive about us: she liked how open it was and the sources of information that it provides to the general public. She writes how she would like NPR to be more like Wikipedia. The following details a response by a critic of Wikipedia, and below that my response to that critic.

In the comments, we got the usual supporters and detractors. Among the comments was one by Blissy2u of the Wikipedia Review, which is known to harass and stalk people they don't like. Sorry, no link as they keep IP addresses of all visitors and they don't mind violating privacy. Anyway, he wrote:

Blissy

Andrea,

To be blunt here, I think that you are quite naive about what really happens at Wikipedia. Perhaps you are just looking as an outsider who has never edited Wikipedia and never seen the internal processes in all of their glory. But the reality is that Wikipedia does not actually do what it says it is. It is not transparent at all, it is not working to fight vandals, and in no way is it achieving what you think it is. It is also a terrible reference.

Most web sites would require for you to identify who you are - Wikipedia doesn't. On Wikipedia you can edit without even creating an account, and if you do create one, you don't have to so much as submit your e-mail address, let alone making sure that it's one account per person, a valid e-mail address, or anything like that. On top of this, even administrators can't see your IP address - unless you don't have an account. The vast majority of the "vandalism" could be handled by Wikipedia simply having better checking procedures. Wikipedia could, in short, make improved security in their software and then they wouldn't need to do any of this. Do you really think that Wikipedia is being attacked en masse? Of course not. Some people have described it as a "game of cops and robbers." Wikipedia encourages vandalism, so that they can then say that they need to have all of these administrators, with all of this power.

But when you get in to the nitty gritty, a large amount of what we brush off as vandalism is not vandalism at all. It is in reality a form of censorship, that Wikipedia uses to silence criticism and to push their own agenda and change history. A number of viewpoints that are not popular amongst the Wikipedia heirarchy are quite simply squashed from the entire process, the people with the viewpoints banned and trashed and all evidence supporting their viewpoint destroyed and deleted. They even use something called a spam blacklist as part of this censorship, and frequently add sites that are not used for spam at all - just to push a particular point of view. At present, over 50% of the sites listed in the spam black list are actual reference sites.

Wikipedia does the same thing with critics. They do not deal with their critics properly, instead calling them "a bunch of banned users, trolls, and conspiracy theorists," and will make up any story that they can find to discredit them. If critics are not banned users already, they will soon be banned. Just look at how they have treated the recently created wikitruth.com http://www.wikitruth.info/ site.

Wikipedia's processes in general suffer from a severe lack of transparency. A big part of this comes from their aim for the unattainable "Neutral Point of View," a policy created by Larry Sanger, the person who first had the idea to use Wikipedia as a "fun version of the more serious Nupedia," who has since been fired and is now considered to be a critic of Wikipedia. Neutral Point of View aims to get rid of all bias, or at least all "obvious bias" from an article, yet it fails to acknowledge that everyone has bias, for all but the most trivial and generally useless factual information, and that even the concept of removing "obvious" bias is biased in itself because it depends on what you think is obvious. The end result of this is that Wikipedia still has bias - it's impossible to get rid of it (in spite of Sanger's claims that Wikipedia is just not enforcing it properly, it's actually not possible). But Wikipedia hides this bias, and has a severe lack of transparency. The transparency problems are so bad that there is a group of mostly high ranking administrators who get together to push a point of view across the whole of Wikipedia, a group that is often called "the cabal." People get banned for going against them, this group can do what they want, and they always push what they believe is right, regardless of facts, evidence, or anything else.

Wikipedia has lack of transparency with their "CheckUser," something which on most sites all administrators would have, but on Wikipedia an ultra-secretive select group of users get and then won't tell anyone what they've actually proven. They have an Arbitration Committee, supposedly to uphold serious disputes, but in reality has no rules governing it and frequently will ban the person who has made a complaint, and their reasons are regularly farcical. And then of course the worst of them all is WP:OFFICE, which allows for Wikipedia to censor articles, and not even tell people what they've done or why, yet you can be permanently banned if you so much as talk about it. Then there is of course the spam blacklist. And of course the issue of deleted pages.

And if you think that Wikipedia is doing this purely for legal reasons, you are wrong. Wikipedia hates legalities so much that they have a policy to permanently ban anyone who makes a legal threat. Or even hints that perhaps someone else might have libelled them. Cases like Ashida Kim, Daniel Brandt, QuakeAid and Jack Sarfatti, were all libelled by Wikipedia, and continue to be libelled, yet because they told Wikipedia about it and tried to get them to stop, they were all banned and the smear made worse. Wikipedia indeed you could say has no interest in abiding by the law, and uses detailed ways of wriggling out of their legal responsibilities. The only reason why they actually abided by the law with regards to Seigenthaler was because it was mentioned in USA Today. Yet because the main media ignores the majority of their indiscretions, people like those listed above get their names smeared and cant do anything about it.

NPR shouldn't aim to become like Wikipedia. And you should aim to have a more balanced approach when talking about it. Wikipedia is a bad source to use. Look at their General Disclaimer, and you'll see that Wikipedia itself asserts no guarantee of accuracy on any article. It is not a good model.

Of course, "Encycloblog" or "Jimbos Big Bag O Trivia" is doing well. But "Wikipedia" is not.

Ta bu shi da yu response

Here is my response, slightly formatted for readibility:

I have a number of comments I would like to add in response to Blissy2u, who is a member of the Wikipedia Review:

"But the reality is that Wikipedia does not actually do what it says it is. It is not transparent at all, it is not working to fight vandals, and in no way is it achieving what you think it is. It is also a terrible reference."

It is extremely transparent. Almost all decisions are done on publically accessible forums on the site. There are several exceptions: the admin IRC channel, used for discussion of sensitive matters (this is not actually that confidential now that apparently an admin or admins are running Wikitruth.info); the ArbCom mailing list, which deliberates on Arbitration issues; and the Office Actions team, which removes sensitive information from Wikipedia. Each of these private out of band channels are necessary, not for censorship but to protect the site. Perhaps the most naive person here is Blissy, who believes we can keep any information and still remain legally immune to libel laws.

"Most web sites would require for you to identify who you are - Wikipedia doesn't. On Wikipedia you can edit without even creating an account, and if you do create one, you don't have to so much as submit your e-mail address, let alone making sure that it's one account per person, a valid e-mail address, or anything like that. On top of this, even administrators can't see your IP address - unless you don't have an account. The vast majority of the "vandalism" could be handled by Wikipedia simply having better checking procedures. Wikipedia could, in short, make improved security in their software and then they wouldn't need to do any of this. Do you really think that Wikipedia is being attacked en masse? Of course not. Some people have described it as a "game of cops and robbers." Wikipedia encourages vandalism, so that they can then say that they need to have all of these administrators, with all of this power."

Again, it appears that it is actually Blissy who is extremely naive. No website that I know of requires enough personal information to be supplied to definitively identify the contributor to the website. I can't think of one site (including the Wikipedia Review) where you cannot register an account under an anonymous pseudonym. Saying that supplying an email address is needed for identification purposes is absurd when there are innumerable free email services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.

It is true that site administrators can't see posters IP addresses, however there are those on the site with CheckUser powers - they *can* check IP addresses. I would like to take the opportunity here to note that having someone's IP address is by no means a foolproof way of identifying someone's identity. We know this at Wikipedia as we have had - and in fact still have - numerous issues with vandals who use various proxies to mask where they are coming from and evade edit blocks (these proxies may be both anonymous proxies, or larger proxies run by ISPs such as Australia's Ozemail and the U.S.'s AOL).

"Most web sites would require for you to identify who you are - Wikipedia doesn't."

This is not correct. Even on Wikipedia Review you don't need to give your real name and more than a throw away email address. I should know, I registered on their old site before with a gmail account and without supplying my real name!

Blissy also says that we should have better checking procedures. I invite him to tell us what he feels these should be, though I have no doubt that he would not like it if the site he contributes to, the Wikipedia Review, suddenly implemented them. As for Wikipedia administration being a "game of cops and robbers", I am not entirely certain what is meant by this comment. It's certainly very vague and unsubstantiated.

"Wikipedia encourages vandalism, so that they can then say that they need to have all of these administrators, with all of this power. But when you get in to the nitty gritty, a large amount of what we brush off as vandalism is not vandalism at all. It is in reality a form of censorship, that Wikipedia uses to silence criticism and to push their own agenda and change history. A number of viewpoints that are not popular amongst the Wikipedia heirarchy are quite simply squashed from the entire process, the people with the viewpoints banned and trashed and all evidence supporting their viewpoint destroyed and deleted."

Wikipedia certainly does not encourage vandalism. On Wikipedia, vandalism is classed as the malicious addition of inaccurate material, the removal of good material or just the addition of puerile text like "OMG FAG!!!!" or swear words. These edits are normally removed extremely quickly from the site. I suspect that the complaint about vandalism is being fuelled by sour grapes because Blissy's own theory of the Australian Port Arthur Massacre. His theory did not get much as much time or space on the site as he would have liked and Blissy was in fact banned from the site for massive POV-pushing (POV-pushing is a Wikipedia term that means the pushing of one's own point of view in an article to the exclusion of all other points of view, or to deliberately slant the article in one direction). His viewpoints have in no way been "squashed" from Wikipedia, however conspiracy theories don't really get that much time on the site. If they did, then the site really wouldn't be of much use as a reference site and he would right to rubbish it for its information quality.

(The infomation added by Blissy can be found in the article history. We have in no way deleted his revisions, though they are not in the most current revision of the article).

"They even use something called a spam blacklist as part of this censorship, and frequently add sites that are not used for spam at all - just to push a particular point of view. At present, over 50% of the sites listed in the spam black list are actual reference sites."

The spam blacklist that Blissy refers to can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist It is a list of all domain names contained in external links added to Wikipedia which we considered unsolicited advertising. A spam blacklist is a necessary evil on Wikipedia because, like email and newsgroups, we are constantly being attacked by those who wish to use our site to advertise their products. There really is no excuse for adding spam to Wikipedia, though of course there may be a minority of URLs that are considered as potentially spam but within the context of the article are appropriate to be added to the article. However, I invite readers to review the blacklist for themselves to see if, as Blissy claims, 50% of of the sites listed are actual references sites.

If we did *not* have the spam blacklist, I believe that Blissy would be attacking us for allowing spam. He and other members of the Wikipedia Review have certainly attacked us in the past for allowing our content to be freely mirrored and used under the terms of the GFDL. Their argument is that because our content is so free, spammers use it to gain a higher place in search engines. Honestly, you can't have it both ways Blissy!

"Wikipedia does the same thing with critics. They do not deal with their critics properly, instead calling them "a bunch of banned users, trolls, and conspiracy theorists," and will make up any story that they can find to discredit them. If critics are not banned users already, they will soon be banned. Just look at how they have treated the recently created wikitruth.com http://www.wikitruth.info/ site."

This is largely a complaint about the way in which editors of the Wikipedia Review perceive themselves to be treated. It is a fact that most of the contributors on the Wikipedia Review are banned users who are disgruntled with some aspect or aspects of Wikipedia. These people, I regret to say, are largely immature and obnoxious. One contributor, Selina, posted a pornographic image of an extremely obese woman on the site with the caption that it was one of our female administrators. They poked fun of another administrators bad teeth. Ironically, considering Blissy's opposition to censorship, they banned myself from their site for not agreeing with them, which lasted until another administrator removed the ban. As for looking at how Wikipedia treated Wikitruth, I'm not rightly sure that we can be said to have mistreated the contributors of this site, unless of course Jimbo Wales' comments that he believes that the contributors are not Wikipedia administrators and that the site is a hoax, or the fact that the Wikipedia entry was added to the articles for deletion process, can be considered to be abusive. A short note on the attempted deletion of the Wikitruth article: this failed and the article is still on Wikipedia.

"Wikipedia's processes in general suffer from a severe lack of transparency. A big part of this comes from their aim for the unattainable "Neutral Point of View," a policy created by Larry Sanger, the person who first had the idea to use Wikipedia as a "fun version of the more serious Nupedia," who has since been fired and is now considered to be a critic of Wikipedia. Neutral Point of View aims to get rid of all bias, or at least all "obvious bias" from an article, yet it fails to acknowledge that everyone has bias, for all but the most trivial and generally useless factual information, and that even the concept of removing "obvious" bias is biased in itself because it depends on what you think is obvious. The end result of this is that Wikipedia still has bias - it's impossible to get rid of it (in spite of Sanger's claims that Wikipedia is just not enforcing it properly, it's actually not possible). But Wikipedia hides this bias, and has a severe lack of transparency. The transparency problems are so bad that there is a group of mostly high ranking administrators who get together to push a point of view across the whole of Wikipedia, a group that is often called "the cabal." People get banned for going against them, this group can do what they want, and they always push what they believe is right, regardless of facts, evidence, or anything else."

I fail to see how Wikipedia's processes suffer from a lack of transparency. All new policy is formed on Wikipedia and is debated extensively on talk pages. All changes are in the article history (and I mean ALL changes, every revision is kept on the site). The Neutral Point of View policy (NPOV) is certainly difficult to attain, but I doubt that it's impossible to achieve in the vast majority of cases. Saying that Larry Sanger was fired does not mean that Larry could no longer contribute to the site, by the way. Larry left the site on his volition, and on relatively good terms. NPOV is certainly an ideal to strive for as it does tend to remove bias from articles. How Wikipedia hides bias is not made clear by Blissy, however, so I leave it to the reader to judge the site's contents for themselves. If they do see bias (it is there, for sure), then I welcome them to modify the article with factual, sourced and verified content to correct the article. I would also counter the claim that people get banned for going against high ranking administrators. Most people who are banned permanently are obnoxious and refuse to write from a neutral point of view, or or they are deliberately trying to harm the site by adding absurd or harmful information (such as personal information or libel).

"Wikipedia has lack of transparency with their "CheckUser," something which on most sites all administrators would have, but on Wikipedia an ultra-secretive select group of users get and then won't tell anyone what they've actually proven. They have an Arbitration Committee, supposedly to uphold serious disputes, but in reality has no rules governing it and frequently will ban the person who has made a complaint, and their reasons are regularly farcical. And then of course the worst of them all is WP:OFFICE, which allows for Wikipedia to censor articles, and not even tell people what they've done or why, yet you can be permanently banned if you so much as talk about it. Then there is of course the spam blacklist. And of course the issue of deleted pages."

This is clearly absurd. Not all administrators on all sites have access to IP addresses. We also value privacy and have given only a few trustworthy contributors access to the IP logs. Office Administration (WP:OFFICE), a way of removing libellous material from the site in a speedy fashion, is also necessary. I don't believe that I need to spell it out that libel is not a good thing not just from a legal point of view but from a ethical point of view also. Incidently, I'd like to point out that the Office administrators will not ban those who are not making libellous comments on the site and who complain about their actions. To say otherwise is highly misleading. As for the ArbCom not having rules governing it, by typing in WP:RFAr into the search box on Wikipedia a reader can view the cases they have before them and the cases they have ruled on. I leave it to the reader to judge whether the ArbCom abuses their power and whether they use their common sense in conjunction with the three important policies of Wikipedia: Write from a neutral point of view, don't contribute original research, and don't make personal attacks. I would also like to point out that the primary purpose of editing Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia, which is something I think many banned editors either forgot about or just plain didn't understand about the site.

"And if you think that Wikipedia is doing this purely for legal reasons, you are wrong. Wikipedia hates legalities so much that they have a policy to permanently ban anyone who makes a legal threat. Or even hints that perhaps someone else might have libelled them. Cases like Ashida Kim, Daniel Brandt, QuakeAid and Jack Sarfatti, were all libelled by Wikipedia, and continue to be libelled, yet because they told Wikipedia about it and tried to get them to stop, they were all banned and the smear made worse. Wikipedia indeed you could say has no interest in abiding by the law, and uses detailed ways of wriggling out of their legal responsibilities. The only reason why they actually abided by the law with regards to Seigenthaler was because it was mentioned in USA Today. Yet because the main media ignores the majority of their indiscretions, people like those listed above get their names smeared and cant do anything about it."

I agree with Blissy that removing libellous material is not done for purely legal reasons. It is done because firstly it is against the neutral point of view policy to attack someone (to libel someone is hold an extreme and malicious position on a person in order to attack them. Wikipedia's policy is to not hold one position or the other but to document what those positions are). However, it is also done because it just the right thing to do. Nobody likes being libelled, and we don't like it when someone uses our site to do libel another person. Again, I invite readers to review each of the articles held by Blissy to be articles where someone has been libelled. The current revisions of each of the cited articles do not, I believe, contain any libel. If it does, please type in WP:AN in the search box, click on Go and leave a message for an administrator to assist with the removal of the material. Better yet, remove the libellous material yourself!

I would like to point out to readers that there is a "No Legal Threats" policy. The link to the policy can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_legal_threats. The page itself states that editors should "use dispute resolution rather than legal threats, for everyone's sake. We respond quickly to complaints of defamation or copyright infringement. If you do take legal action, please refrain from editing until it is resolved." The site itself explains itself very clearly why we have such a policy, but I'll reproduce it in this comment anyway:

• Don't make legal threats against other users of Wikipedia. Apart from being incivil, doing so causes a number of serious problems:
• It severely inhibits free editing of pages, a concept that is absolutely necessary to ensure that Wikipedia remains neutral. Without this freedom, we risk one side of a dispute intimidating the other, thus causing a systematic bias in our articles.
• It causes bad feelings and a lack of trust amongst the Wikipedia community, damaging our ability to proceed quickly and efficiently and with an assumption of mutual good faith.
• Wikipedia has had bad experiences with users who have made legal threats in the past, and by making legal threats, you may damage your reputation on Wikipedia.
• A legal threat may lead to you being blocked from editing (on a case by case basis), so as not to exacerbate the problem through other than legal channels.

I personally think that the reasoning is fair, and can't see how anyone would object to the policy.

"NPR shouldn't aim to become like Wikipedia. And you should aim to have a more balanced approach when talking about it. Wikipedia is a bad source to use. Look at their General Disclaimer, and you'll see that Wikipedia itself asserts no guarantee of accuracy on any article. It is not a good model."

Whether Wikipedia is a good or bad source depends on the state of the article being viewed. We have always said that we should be a first point of call for research, and we have never stated that we are the final source of information. We also very clearly say that you should not believe anything on the site in our general disclaimer (ironically, Blissy complains about this very disclaimer! I address this issue below) but follow up on further material from other sources if you want anything other than a general overview of a topic. I have always wondered why this is such a suprising truth to people! Certainly it has always been the case with the web that you should take any information taken from it with a grain of salt. In fact, I believe that you should do this for *any* information source, and that includes the media!

As for the General Disclaimer: it is true that we don't guarantee accuracy on the site. But then, neither do other reference works. Our disclaimer can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer. However, to view a comparison of our disclaimer with other disclaimers it would be well worth the reader's while to also review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-Wikipedia_disclaimers and chase up the links to the disclaimer of such sites Encarta and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Chris Sherlock

Ta bu shi da yu

Wikipedia administrator (writing from a personal capacity)

Blissy response

I have really said all that I need to. TBSDY, I thought you were a good administrator, and I am deeply disappointed. You will find that you cannot sign up to Wikipedia Review with a "throwaway" e-mail address. Just ask Eloquence, who was banned for making multiple accounts with throwaway e-mail addresses.

Of course, expecting a critic site to therefore be above any criticism is ridiculous to say the least. Wikipedia Review is not trying to be an encyclopaedia, therefore it should not be held up to the same levels of scrutiny. It is a forum for people to participate. Compared to the general standard expected of forums, it is actually very highly rated.

As for the "banned users", TBSDY should note that when Wikipedia Review started there was a total of ONE (1) banned user, that being Lir. As a direct result of people posting there, and identifying themselves as critics of Wikipedia, an additional 9 users have been banned from Wikipedia. In addition, 2 administrators who supported Wikipedia Review were desysopped because of it.

Of course, this is the same thing that Jimbo Wales says of wikitruth.info. When he says "They are just a bunch of banned users" what he means is "when we catch them, we will ban each and every one of them". They are not banned yet. I know who they are, and so do the "inner circle" of Wikipedia Review, but we aren't going to tell you. While you have shown that there are unfair bans on Wikipedia against critics, purely for being critics, we are not going to sell out the few good admins that there are.

We don't support 100% what wikitruth.info does, but overall we regard it as a quality reference.

And yes, I am talking on behalf of Wikipedia Review in saying this. And I can say that because we did polls. Then you know what the majority thinks. Oh, and we have a forum, so we can go through arguments too. Why doesn't Wikipedia do that? Oh right, because that'd be transparent...

James Turick

While TBSDY is correct in some regards, amazingly he manages to say flagrant falsehoods. "All changes are in the article history (and I mean ALL changes, every revision is kept on the site)." Incorrect. You fail to mention that things can be deleted from the article history and the history of deleted articles can only be viewed by administrators. You also forget that the archive table has been lost before. "Most people who are banned permanently are obnoxious and refuse to write from a neutral point of view, or they are deliberately trying to harm the site by adding absurd or harmful information (such as personal information or libel)." This is not so much incorrect, but it leaves out that many accounts are indefinately blocked for just the accusation that they are the sockpuppet of some banned user. You would have to be extremely naive to believe that there has not been a single false positive. "All new policy is formed on Wikipedia and is debated extensively on talk pages." Also incorrect. ArbCom, WP:OFFICE, clerks, and to some extent CSD T1 were all dictated and not made by the community at large.

Ta bu shi da yu response to James Turick and Blissy

James Turick is correct, I made one mistake in my last post, and probably need to clarify another. Blissy's points, however, are rather besides the point and he doesn't respond to everything I said in my last post.

The first point that I do humbly apologise for is that not all policy has been created through a democratic process. James is correct: ArbCom, WP:OFFICE, clerks, CSD T1 were all to some extent policies that were implemented without going through a normal process of community discussion. In addition the 3 reverts rule (3RR) was created without community discussion. Each of these policies, however, is vital to the ongoing running of the site.

WP:OFFICE (found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:OFFICE) was created because of an increasing number of complaints from various external parties that they were being libelled on the site. This is highly regrettable, and in fact critics like Daniel Brandt have covered it extensively. Again, the article on the site explains the need for this policy adequately, but the part that is relevant is as follows:

"The Wikimedia Foundation receives an increasingly large number of phone calls and emails from people who are upset about various things on the site. Sometimes these complaints are valid; more often they are not. However, in most cases, even with the invalid complaints, there is a short-term action which can and should be taken as a courtesy in order to soothe feelings and build a better encyclopedia in the long run."

I fail to see how this is a bad thing. As I stated in my last post, we have a responsibility to remove libel and take complaints seriously. Having libel issues run through discussion may be a lengthy process, and would not be fair to the one being libelled. Again I reiterate that we are an encyclopedia, not a democracy. An encyclopedia, especially one that treats neutrality with the seriousness that Wikipedia does, should not have libellous material on the site. WP:OFFICE is the only responsible and appropriate mechanism that we have for dealing with this situation. Ever since the John Seigenthaler Snr. situation (he was libelled on an article that has since been fixed) we have been increasingly aware that we cannot just rely on community discussion to resolve libel issues. Again as I stated before, we remove libel not only because of legal liability, but also because, ethically, it is just the right thing to do.

The Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) was created to deal with an increasing number of complaints about disruptive editors who refuse to play by the rules. The ArbCom was created at the beginning of 2004 as Jimbo Wales was originally handling most dispute issues and, as with most things he deals with directly, he wished to hand dispute resolution over to the community. It has been a vital part of our website ever since. However, I would like to point out that although the formation of the committee was done solely by Jimbo, ArbCom members must be elected annually by regular members of the Wikipedia community. As most people know, you can edit pretty much anything on the site (with the exception of protected pages). This means anyone's work can be wiped out at any time. Some editors who refuse to be reasonable use the freedom to edit the site to abuse other editors or try to push their point of view to the exclusion of all other points of view. As such an arbitration committee was formed in order to deal these editors in a fair and reasonable manner. The ArbCom, I should note, is the last point of call in a Wikipedia dispute resolution process and should only be used when all other avenues have been exhausted on the site. (The dispute resolution guidelines can be found at the following URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution).

With the increasing popularity of Wikipedia we have seen a corresponding increase in the number of disputes taken to the ArbCom. ArbCom was always a difficult job in that it is almost always impossible to satisfy everyone when a decision is made, and as you may imagine it takes up a good deal of time to process each request for arbitration accepted by the ArbCom. I was once asked privately whether I would step forward for the job, and I declined - I would rather be editing articles than dealing with the thankless task of untangling and making decisions on tricky disputes! Nonetheless, the ArbCom members continue to provide a valuable service to Wikipedia. However, due to the amount of work and time needed to process arbitration requests, the ArbCom unanimously voted to approve an ArbCom Clerk's office. The Clerks assist the Arbitration Committee by reviewing and summarizing evidence submitted on evidence pages, they help write the decisions rendered, and they open and close cases which have the required number of votes. It is worthwhile noting that Clerks are assistants to the Arbitration Committee. Being a Clerk does not make one a reserve Arbitrator, although a reserve Arbitrator may serve as a Clerk. Clerks are not empowered to vote on decisions, nor do they have exclusive right to summarize evidence or suggest decisions, analysis or other methods of assisting the Arbitration process. In fact, those interested in assisting the Arbitration process in any way, including as Clerks, are encouraged to do so.

CSD T1 refers to templates for speedy deletion. Speedy deletion refers to various circumstances where a site administrator may immediately delete material from Wikipedia without going through the normal channels of deletion. There are a number of criteria that are specified on the site (the URL for the policy is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CSD). CSD T1 refers to the speedy deletion of templates (pages that can be reused in articles on multiple Wikipedia articles) that are divisive and inflammatory. This was a highly controversial move, but is necessary as not all templates are appropriate for the site and didn't do anyone any good. However, I must admit that in this case I believe that James has a good point, and I have never been entirely comfortable with this policy.

The 3 reverts rule is a rule that editors must not revert (changed back an article to the previous revision) any single page in whole or in part more than three times in 24 hours. Any editor who does do this is blocked for 24 hours. This policy was created to stop people from participating in edit wars - what was happening was that one or two people engaged in a dispute over content were able to revert on the site continuously, effectively stopping editing of the article from proceding further. This policy has largely halted such edit wars and has forced people to discuss their edits on the talk page.

James also write that "You fail to mention that things can be deleted from the article history and the history of deleted articles can only be viewed by administrators. You also forget that the archive table has been lost before." This is correct, however revisions that are deleted are solely ones that libel other people or provide dangerous information (such as someone's home address, phone number, bank account details, etc). This is not a bad thing, and I have already stated why libel should not be acceptable on Wikipedia. I fail to see why libel should remain in the edit history of Wikipedia article for people to link to. Those being libelled also believe this as well, and I don't blame them.

As for the response to my comment about permanent bans that "[t]his is not so much incorrect, but it leaves out that many accounts are indefinately blocked for just the accusation that they are the sockpuppet of some banned user. You would have to be extremely naive to believe that there has not been a single false positive", I would encourage you take list those who have been permanently banned incorrectly. If there are, may I suggest you take it up for review on the Wikipedia administrators' noticeboard. Most times such bans may be overturned if it appears the block was unfair.

In response to Blissy's comments, I am sorry that you think that I am not a good administrator because I disagree with your comments. I refuse to apologise for my comments themselves however. I would like to point out that you have not addressed my response in full:

1. My point about websites not requiring enough personal information to positively identify their contributors stands. Even if you don't use a throwaway account, you can still use a regular free email account. I may have mislead you before about my email address I used for Wikipedia Review: I used ta.bu.shi.da.yu@gmail.com, which is a regular email address I use for Wikipedia correspondence. I did not provide my full name when I registered with your site. However, using your own site to illustrate my point about being anonymous on websites: on the new Wikipedia Review I notice that you don't allow free email addresses to be used in your registration procedure. That's fine, but again it does not necessarily positively identify the person who contributes to the site. It is not hard to register a domain name and setup a POP3 mail server and remain completely anonymous. You certainly don't ask for the real name or personal information of the contributor to the Wikipedia Review - contributors to your site can remain completely anonymous should they wish to!

2. In response to the banned user issue, perhaps I was out of line in saying that most of your Wikipedia Review contributors are banned. Certainly there are a considerable number of banned users on your site! Some of them are quite nasty, like Selina (she is the one who posted the pornagraphic image of a morbidly obese lady and said it was one of our female administrators). Wikipedia does not take banning a user indefinitely lightly, and to be banned indefinitely an editor must have demonstrated that they would be so destructive or disruptive to the operation of the site that they cannot ever edit it again. In every case that someone has been banned indefinitely, I believe that there have been good grounds with which to do it.

3. You have most certainly not addressed my points that pretty vile personal attacks have been made against Wikipedia contributors on your site, certainly no apology has yet been given. For instance, Selina has not apologised for the pornographic image incident, neither has their been a proper apology that I can see about the bad teeth comments. You have also not addressed why I was banned temporarily from the site, which is ironic considering your stance on blocking editors on Wikipedia.

Truly, saying that you are not an encyclopedia site and thus you shouldn't have to be held to the same standards as the site you criticise doesn't really cut it with me. If you wish to be taken seriously at all I would have thought that you would strive to be *better* than the site that supposedly is doing terrible things to their contributors! It certainly seems a terrible double-standard.

3. You have not further explained your comment about the Wikipedia blacklist. I would appreciate a response on this issue.

4. You have not explained how we have a lack of transparency.

5. You have not explained how the CheckUser process is abusive.

6. You have not responded why our general disclaimer is any different to Encarta's or Encyclopedia Britannica's.

Chris Sherlock, Ta bu shi da yu, Wikipedia administrator (writing from personal capacity)