User talk:SCZenz/Archive7

Stanfordandson

Don't worry, I look at plenty of unblock requests and tend only to unblock without discussion collateral damage type requests. His block looks fine to me. --pgk^(talk) 11:57, 1 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Re:Image:331133210_l.jpg

Thanks for the heads up. I restored the nsd tag. --cholmes75 ^{(chit chat)} 14:58, 1 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Daloonik

Please do not violate the "no personal attack" rule by looking at all my reverted edits, deciding that they're vandalism, and threatening me with a wikipedia block. Daloonik 15:17, 1 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

SCZenz, please see my latest message to Daloonik on his talk page. I propose another short block after his latest reversions, to give him time to carefully consider his future options. Thanks, Crum375 00:14, 2 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Michael Neary

PaPa 23:00, 2 July 2006 (UTC)Thanks for your prompt help. I was confused about disambiguation!![reply]

Administrator abuse

Please be aware that I am currently preparing a request for arbitration case concerning your recent administrator abuse. It should be up within an hour. Stanfordandson 00:51, 4 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Even if you think someone is trolling, you should show more care not to abuse your powers. You had a content issue with him. His addition was not nonsense by any stretch of the imagination, even if you do not feel it was reasonable to add it. Of course, you will be backed up by the usual crowd of rouge admins but you should be aware that ordinary users feel that admins who are willing to block people on tenuous grounds ride roughshod not only over other users but over the Wikipedia ethos.

Basically, you ought to show patience. If someone is yanking your chain by adding material that you think is nonsense, try not to respond by doing the wrong thing (which this was, regardless that you can find others who agree with your action). Patience and a lack of action are by far the best means to win against trolls, unless you have a particular love of drama. Happy editing. Grace Note 04:51, 5 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have looked carefully at his edits. I don't disagree with your assessment of him and I'm not trying to be ultracritical of you. I made the same assessment about five minutes after he turned up. Check out his talkpage. I'm simply noting that you have to take care not to be embroiled in a ton of bullshit by doing the wrong thing, particularly not over something that can, rightly or wrongly, be characterised as a content issue. I wouldn't have bothered making any comment to you if I didn't feel you were a sound guy who would heed a bit of well-meant advice. I think you were absolutely right when you suggested that he's seeking to entangle someone in something like this. I'm suggesting that you shouldn't indulge him. He'll get himself hardbanned sooner or later; well, basically, as soon as someone has the balls to do it. 203.206.96.136 09:54, 5 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If someone has the sole purpose of disrupting Wikipedia, you're wasting your time blocking them for "vandalism" or posting "nonsense", particularly when they have vandalised nothing and posted nothing that could fairly be described as "nonsense". You simply allow yourself to be outmanoeuvred by a troll and get yourself embroiled in a long battle. Even if you're sure to win it, it's a waste of your time and effort. I wrote this about it[1]: "A dual problem is that too many behaviour cases are decided arbitrarily and that too many are not! It's usually plain to see who's being a fuckhead. We don't need to subject some of our number to a mindnumbing three-month-long parade of bullshit to work it out." Do you see what I'm saying? I'm not saying you called it wrongly. The problem is, of course, if you block the guy indefinitely, he'll be back with a new username. You can't win. You can only lose if you spend hours and hours dealing with it. If I were an admin, I'd have already blocked him indefinitely and let someone else worry about him when he resurfaces. Grace Note 00:29, 6 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thankyou

Thanks for sorting out my user page. Oliver.Shepherd 09:52, 6 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Haham hanuka essay

He put it up for CSD and I deleted it under U1 and closed the MfD. Yet he's added the essay in question to his user page: [2] Is there proof that it is as inflammatory as the IP suggests? I'm going to ask User:Crzrussian for an opinion as I think he is knowledgeable of Hebrew -- Samir धर्म 07:58, 13 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the support!

		Thanks for contributing to my successful RfA!
		To the people who have supported my request: I appreciate the show of confidence in me and I hope I live up to your expectations! To the people who opposed the request: I'm certainly not ignoring the constructive criticism and advice you've offered. I thank you as well! ♥! ~Kylu (u\|t) 02:52, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your support in my recent RfA. I notice you're in nuclear physics? Any chance I can persuade you to find me a reasonable "common sense"-compatible explanation of Hawking radiation sometime? I've asked on the talkpage and still don't get it. :) ~Kylu (u|t) 02:52, 19 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Marudubshinki running unauthorized robots

Hello, I noticed that you were responsible for blocking the robot User:Bot-maru, and thought you might be able to help with a more recent situation with its user, User:Marudubshinki. He has been running bots through his regular user account, and recieves frequent complaints about its errors. His response to these complaints is in general quite callous, and he continues to make automated edits with this user account.

My first complaint can be seen at User talk:Marudubshinki/Archive 49 under "Your - the the + the bot". Current complaints can be seen at User talk:Marudubshinki under: "Please stop fixing my double redirect", "Removing whitespace ...", "Robot removing selflinks", "Bot removing self-links is causing grief", "External link bot".

Is there anything you can do about this, as an admin? - Rainwarrior 06:28, 27 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Black hole electron

My User page has been updated, you may have some interest in this. DonJStevens 16:20, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Non-deletion of article

About your decision to not delete Toronto Police tortured Major Keyvan Nourhaghighi, Iranian Senior Fighte Pilot, can you please check the delete log for article created by the author User:Nourhaghighi? I think you will find that he has created many similar articles that have been speedy deleted. He's been doing this for quite awhile now. Thanks. -- Gogo Dodo 07:15, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind. The article has been deleted. -- Gogo Dodo 21:11, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your explanation. I understand your position. The situation was rather frustrating and I did use the wrong speedy delete reason. I probably should have used {{db-repost}} as that article's contents seemed familiar as I vaguely remember reading it before. But the editor was using multiple long article names, so I couldn't remember where I had seen it before. -- Gogo Dodo 04:05, 30 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AN/I

Thanks for mentioning that to me. I replied on my talk page, and have just posted some detailed diffing for a user of Crossmr's choice in the relevant section of AN/I. -Splash - tk 00:11, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Really?????????????????????????????

Thanks for telling me that! I had no idea! Thanks for helping! Tchadienne 18:26, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is this your way of telling me that your request on ANI is spurious? Why are you asking for administrative intervention if you know it's not our job? -- SCZenz 18:28, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You do know who that is, don't you, SC? (I know, comment on the contributor and not the content. Or vice versa :-)) —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 18:31, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't, but I do now. Very interesting indeed. Thanks! -- SCZenz 18:35, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Elephant handling

Some thoughts, since you ask. Most of this centers around the idea that large-scale coordinated vandalism attempts won't be a passing fad, and Wikipedia should have a way to cope that's "scripted" (e.g. 100 admins aren't running around "inventing" solutions).

No one should be blocked indef. after a single (or no) warning.
We need a tag that can be placed on the article page that says, in effect, "such and so source has initiated a large-scale vandalism effort which involves content on this page, see the appropriate policy for more information. Vandalism will be removed."
The affected pages should be protected during the primary period of vandalism, but should be unlocked ASAP.
An article (on meta?) should be created to track the issue
All comments on the talk page relating to the situation should be moved to the talk page for the incident's article so that the main namespace article talk-pages can be used to discuss improving the article without distraction.
The tag for the article page should be somewhat generic (perhaps in a special div), so that down-stream sites know that a certain types of tags should be removed, as they relate only to Wikipedia-specific issues.

These are just some off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts, but the biggie is this: we responded by flailing, and I think many people who didn't know about Wikipedia, and would have become contributors, now have a bad taste in their mouths from reading the flames and disputes over what to do (and in some cases from being blocked indef. for a stupid, but relatively harmless bit of vandalism which many first-time contributors are guilty of). -Harmil 21:36, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've taken the liberty of numbering your points so I can respond to each. My general point is that existing policy, procedure, and custom already allow us to handle the situation. These procedures partially worked (completely so, after a day or two of intense bedlam), and in some cases the problems are due to existing policies not being handled.

Obvious sleeper and vandalism-only accounts, I think, can be blocked without warning. Some of the users you list on your page fit that description; others do not, and I would not have indef blocked them. It was, in fact, a violation of policy to block some of those accounts, and the appropriate response is to talk to the blocking admin about it.
These tags exist for the talk page. A comment can also be written into the article page. But there is broad consensus that non-encyclopedaic content on article pages should be absolutely minimized as much as possible; putting up an ad for the Colbert Report or Slashdot when they cause us grief seems unnecessary to me.
That is precisely what happened. The protections have been downgraded, and it is my intention to start unprotecting the less-visible cases soon.
I think this is best done on WP:AN or similar pages, so all admins can be aware of the discussion. A separate page could be created if it were useful, I suppose; the best place for it would be WP space, not meta.
This is implemented on a case-by-case basis, and can be done by anyone. It became necessary on Talk:Elephant, so I did it; in other cases, it does not seem necessary.

We handle large-scale vandalism all the time; we don't need special instructions just because it's coordinated. All that being said, I did miss the initial flurry of activity on this issue; I'm sure it was worse than when I got to it, but I think following existing policy is still sufficient. -- SCZenz 21:48, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WAnted to respond last night, but was at a weekly game. Let me just consolidate my answer, since I fear the point-by-point thing will miss the core ideas, and focus overly on the details of a (potentially flawed) single suggested solution.

Over the course of three nights, dozens of admins did their own thing, many working at cross-purposes, to resolve this issue. I'm proposing that that confusion begs for some sort of review and codification. Moving Elephant to Elephant/development, and thus blanking the history on Elephant; blocking users with no warning; and many other actions (some quite reasonable, some not) should all be taken into account, and the NEXT time, there shouldn't be quite the same amount of flailing.

Now, I know large-scale vandalism happens. The last time I *recall* was the last wave of GNAA vandalism surronding the old VfD process. In both that case and this one, I think that a talk-page tag is vastly insufficient, but even then the tags used today don't tell admins what steps would be most effective (even just as a guideline), they don't propose any mechanism for preserving the sanity of the talk page, they don't give people any sense of what the scope of the vandalism is (it would have been nice for non-admins like me who were reverting vandalism to know what pages to put on our watchlists), etc. All of this really begs for a special ARTICLE-page template (because you want users who will never see the talk page to understand that the admins are on it) with three links: one to the policy; one to the article page that describes the activity; and one to the talk page where admins and normal users can freely discuss the activity (which is not appropriate for any normal article's talk page). How all of that happens, and what the details are, I'm not going to be fussy about, but until that happens, large-scale vandalism will continue to disrupt pages like Elephant, IMHO. -Harmil 14:00, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Moving the Elephant article was exceedingly irregular. It is kind of hard to make a policy that predicts admins doing unusual things in tense situations without discussing them first.

I suppose if the page is protected, we could include some mention of the issue being due to a high-traffic site and how this is (roughly) dealt with in a special version of {{sprotect}}/{{vprotect}}. In fact, I suspect something like this may exist already.

One problem with new templates and new policies is getting the word out. I suspect that somewhere there is already good advice on dealing with this situation, but not everyone had read it. (My actions, for example, were mostly based on the custom I had seen and on common senes.) It is not clear to me that adding more good advice elsewhere would improve things—yes, you can add info to the template, but you still need someone to show up who knows the template exists.

That being said, I have no problem with enhancing the availability of existing policy and sensible advice on dealing with these episodes; if your major issue is a lack of coordinated response, I suspect that will likely address things. -- SCZenz 18:03, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think I'll work on writing up an advice page on handling these things; I think most of your issues can be handled by referencing the right parts of exiting policy, and it's just a matter of putting it together. I'll let you know when I've got it started. -- SCZenz 21:46, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Making it a special version of the sprotect/vprotect templates makes a lot of sense. Clearly the first n people to respond are going to be oblivious to the location of the fire escapes (if I can muddy my metaphors), but if there's a clear plan (maybe not even a strict policy, then the people who come in with level heads will all have roughly the same game plan to point to. Your advice page is a great idea. Let me know if I can help.

PS: My user page was vandalized, so I hope you didn't assume that that was my comment about Colbert's joke being "very funny". -Harmil 23:38, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not delete useful, appropriate templates without discussion

The template you deleted was perfectly acceptable, as per 'Jimmy' and his recent repeated use of the deletion reason 'human dignity'. Also, you messed up an official policy page as well as the Village Pump, where the template was being discussed, with your wanton and reckless action. Please be more careful in the future. Red Baboons 23:05, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Are you going to discuss this, or just continue vandalizing Wikipedia? Red Baboons 23:16, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:AN/I#Template deleted per IAR; review sought. -- SCZenz 23:18, 4 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]