User talk:Newyorkbrad/Archive/2010/Jan

Availability note
Travelling with very limited Internet time until Monday. Happy New Year to everyone. Newyorkbrad (talk) 02:08, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

My email regarding the Rational Response Squad article
Hi, Brad. Sorry to bug you, but did you get my email regarding the RRS article? Thanks, and Happy New Year. Nightscream (talk) 01:26, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

United States territorial courts
Seablade (talk) 07:11, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Status and availability note
I will be travelling for work for about 10 days and will have limited Internet time and access. During this period and until further notice, I will be inactive on all arbitration matters with the exception of the Tothwolf case, and do not anticipate having much wikitime.

I will catch up with various pending matters (not to mention my intended mainspace editing) after I return. In the meantime, my apologies to people whose posts on this page or e-mails have not yet received responses. Newyorkbrad (talk) 14:32, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

WP:COI and deletion discussions
This is in reply to your statement “I am not certain that reasonable participation in a deletion discussion by an editor with a conflict of interest is problematic” in this edit.

Personally, after Theserialcomma’s bad-faith deletion proposal for my own MaraDNS, I have put a lot of thought in to how much I can participate in a hypothetical MaraDNS deletion discussion. Quite frankly, the same WP:COI guidelines for edits in article space should apply:


 * The conflict of interest must be made clear in one’s vote.


 * An editor with a conflict of interest should limit their discussion to adding reliable, third-party, notable sources describing the subject that have a conflict of interest with, and should not reply to editors who vote to delete the article in question.

An arbitration decision telling editors with a conflict of interest that they should not participate at all in deletion discussions does not help the Wikipedia. I like the “an editor with a conflict of interest should usually limit their discussions to adding references” guideline, but even that may be too restrictive.

Also, I would like to see a precedent on whether an editor with a conflict of interest can remove a PROD tag. Samboy (talk) 16:25, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Availability note
I'm back in New York, but will have limited wikitime through the weekend. Hopefully back to ordinary activity by Monday. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:27, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day NYC
You are invited to celebrate Wikipedia Day and the 9th anniversary (!) of the founding of the site at Wikipedia Day NYC on Sunday January 24, 2010 at New York University; sign up for Wikipedia Day NYC here. Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends! This has been an automated delivery by BrownBot (talk) 01:03, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced BLPs
Hello Newyorkbrad! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 4 of the articles that you created  are tagged as Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons. The biographies of living persons policy requires that all personal or potentially controversial information be sourced. In addition, to ensure verifiability, all biographies should be based on reliable sources. If you were to bring these articles up to standards, it would greatly help us with the current Category:All_unreferenced_BLPs article backlog. Once the articles are adequately referenced, please remove the unreferencedBLP tag. Here is the list:

Thanks!--DASHBot (talk) 18:06, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Joseph M. McLaughlin -
 * 2) Roger Miner -
 * 3) Chester J. Straub -
 * 4) Norman H. Stahl -

New essay
In response to various issues concerning younger people who edit Wikipedia, I have posted some thoughts as an essay at Guidance for younger editors. Issues covered in this essay include safety and security issues for minors who edit as well as common issues confronting and mistakes sometimes made by the younger cohort of editors.

Comments and questions concerning this essay are welcome, as well as thoughts regarding whether it should be considered at a later date for policy or guideline status. In addition, as I will have limited wikitime for the reminder of the day, I would appreciate any assistance in publicizing this essay on the appropriate noticeboards. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:08, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

New page
As part of ongoing community discussion concerning issues surrounding interpretation of our policy on biographies of living persons, I have posted BLP examples for discussion. This page contains five examples of situations in which application of the BLP policy could lead to disagreements among good-faith editors. The examples, based on specific articles but intended to be discussed more abstractly, are designed for discussion either on-wiki and also as an aid to discussion of the problem at meet-ups where there is a session scheduled on BLP issues. Input is welcome. In addition, as I will have limited wikitime for the reminder of the day, I would appreciate any assistance in publicizing this page on the appropriate noticeboards. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:11, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Request
If anyone is aware of any transcript of the keynote speech I gave at last year's Wikiconference New York, please let me know. I am not asking anyone to transcribe the speech if it has not already been done, but if a transcript does exist it would be helpful in connection with a longer piece I am drafting about BLP and related issues. Thank you. Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:13, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

My email
Thanks, I resolved it with Jimbo Wales. Happy New Year! Nightscream (talk) 23:14, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Status
Hi. You are currently listed as "inactive or away" here, but you have recently participated at RfAr. Would you like to be moved to active? Cheers, Tiptoety  talk
 * I've moved myself back to active on that list, as I had done yesterday on WP:AC. Thanks for the heads up. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:39, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Again
I asked you a month ago if you could send back to me a copy of an email I'd previously sent. It's very important to me that I get that email soon. Please send it back as soon as possible. -- JohnWBarber (talk) 17:27, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Done. Please confirm receipt and that this is what you needed. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 17:36, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Received. That's the one. -- JohnWBarber (talk) 17:50, 19 January 2010 (UTC)


 * My response to the AUSC report is here . I want to make absolutely sure you've been given a chance to respond to it. -- JohnWBarber (talk) 22:45, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * (Sigh) On top of every other frustration Wikipedia can throw at me, I can't figure out if you're still a member of the AUSC or actually participated in either the deliberations on my case or the vote. According to this page you're a member. According to this page, you aren't. Please clear it up. -- JohnWBarber (talk) 23:35, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I was for awhile but I had to step off the subcommittee because I have heavy travel commitments this month and next. (I expect to return to it later this year when my schedule is better.) I'll ask someone to update the page. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:50, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

"The idea that this should be pursued as a copyright violation is fanciful"
As expressed [ here], I'm in complete agreement with Chillum. I find this comment of yours to display spectacularly poor judgement, coming both from a sitting arb and a purported lawyer. And in the single year I've spent here, I've now witnessed you dropping off similar comments completely dismissive of copyright issues and the copyright cleanup effort on three separate occasions.

When a sitting Arb regularly posts in complete contempt of the WMF's term of use, how exactly do you expect us to then continue telling any contributor who copy / pastes content without authorization that "Wikipedia takes copyright issues seriously" as most of our templated message states? I don't know where this comes from, but I firmly believe that as a community member and a copyright cleanup volunteer, I'd expect a sitting arb to at least publicly refrain from holding policies in contempt that may one day end up in front of the committee, and to avoid undermining the work and effort of the tiny group of volunteers who work their asses off every day to try and combat Wikipedia's long standing reputation of being a haven for copyright violators and plagiarists.

And while something like this will certainly never go to court, I shudder at the thought of what will happen when we get dragged in over an actually actionable copyright issue and the claimant's attorney starts his opening statement with "We will demonstrate that the Wikimedia Foundation is not entitled to the DMCA's safe harbour provisions, and we will prove not just their failure to exercise due dilligence but their total contempt of intellectual property, a systemic problem that ranges from the simple editor up to their arbitrators". MLauba (talk) 01:38, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I hasten to respond to this, because I think you misunderstand my general position on the importance of respecting copyrights and intellectual property rights more generally. Perhaps to an extent this is my fault as I may not have expressed myself as clearly as I could have in this instance.
 * As you observe, I'm a member of the Arbitration Committee. One of the first decisions I drafted as an arbitrator was Requests for arbitration/Betacommand 2. In a set of principles that were accepted unanimously by my fellow arbitrators, we reemphasized the importance of complying with our project requirements concerning non-free content and added that "[e]ditors who review images uploaded to Wikipedia and identify those that fail to satisfy the NFCC or are missing the necessary documentation play an important role in safeguarding the free nature of the project and avoiding potential legal exposure." Although the Betacommand 2 case specifically concerned image content, the same principles are equally applicable to those who keep their eyes open for copyright infringement and plagiarism, and who modify or delete content as necessary and warn or block violators. You and other administrators and editors who perform this important work have my appreciation and that of everyone else who values the success of Wikipedia as a free and honorable project.
 * That being said, copyright compliance involves multiple facets. One is making sure that we adhere to free-content or at a minimum to fair-use requirements in making use of content imported from outside sources. Although every good-faith user should agree that this is a basic precept, there will always be differences of opinion on how both legal rules and our project policies apply in a given instance, particularly where any assertion of intellectual property rights would be purely theoretical in nature. For example, legal and project concepts such as "fair use," as you know, do not have crisp and well-defined answers. (This, of course, is how the intellectual property bar makes a living.) That I may have expressed disagreement with your, or others', interpretations in a given instance does not negate my support for the overall concept.
 * A second aspect of copyright compliance is trying to ensure that when Wikipedia content is reused in other venues, the attribution requirements of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license or (as to older content) the GFDL are observed. This has historically been a losing battle; in fact, I can barely recall any instance in which a fork or mirror site or other site reusing Wikipedia material has complied with all aspects of the licensing requirements. While one recent case holds that willful failure to satisfy the license requirements transforms otherwise permissible use into infringement, as a matter of reality enforcement is not going to occur in this context, and I have long thought our volunteers need to understand that de facto, though not de jure, content posted to Wikipedia is going to enter the public domain insofar as less scrupulous operators than ourselves are concerned.
 * A third aspect is copying from one page of Wikipedia to another. In that context, application of copyright principles and the attribution requirements can be all the more abstruse. For example, my comment that you object to above arose from a discussion on ANI involving a situation in which one user had bodily lifted another's userpage, barnstars and commendations and all, and was using it as his own. What I said or meant to say in this instance is that analyzing problems through the lens of copyright issues is not always the best or most effective way of addressing them. To determine whether a copyright infringement had occurred here as a matter of law and theory, we would need to assess the content of the userpage to determine whether the content constituted copyrightable subject-matter (the answer would presumably be yes, as the creativity requirement for copyrightability is minimal in the United States), and whether the reuse of the userpage constituted fair use (evaluating the fair use factors, the use of the entire page would cut against a finding of fair use, while the lack of any economic damage would cut in favor of it).
 * But rather than engage in this multipronged inquiry, the matter was best viewed as a matter of user conduct. Arrogating another user's page, including barnstars and the like, as one's own is uncivil, harassing, should not be permitted, and indeed will not be permitted so far as I am concerned. (Indeed, if I recall correctly, the ANI discussion effectively ended when the user guilty of the userpage borrowing was blocked as a harassment-only account while the discussion was going on.) Introducing copyright licensing issues was not the most effective way to resolve this issue and took the discussion off onto an unnecessarily complicated tangent and that is what I meant to convey in the post you have quoted above.
 * I hope that this helps to address your concerns about my attitude toward copyright issues. But I also hope that on rereading your message, you can appreciate that your concern would have been conveyed at least equally effectively if you had adopted a somewhat more civil tone in your posting to me. As indicated, I have great respect for the effort you have put into copyright compliance work on Wikipedia, as well as your content work, during your year of editing. But after my own three and one-half years of dedicated work on this project, it was not necessary for you to posit that I feel a "total contempt [for] intellectual property" because you disagreed with one or even a series of comments that I made, without even asking me to justify my position. Nor was it appropriate for you to describe me as a "purported lawyer," which carries an extraordinary assertion of bad faith, after my real-world identity has been well-known for two years. I hope that in the future, if you disagree with anything I write, which is entirely your prerogative, you can do so without implying that I am an imposter or a supporter of plagiarism. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:14, 20 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I appreciate the clarification. My worry over this comment also follows, most specifically, the exchange that happened at User talk:Coren/Archives/2009/July, and that one, again, only reads in a different light when combined with the above statement.
 * My concern is that your words have a lot more weight because of both your position here and your real life activity, and without the above explanation, convey a truncated message that most definitely gives a wrong impression. I also know from exchanges with others that I am not the only one who got the wrong message on these matters.


 * Regarding the rest of your remarks, the meaning was to convey how your words were read and received, not to make assumptions about your feelings, a topic on which I have little insight. The term purported was used, clumsily, to signify that your profession was only know to me through hearsay rather than any direct statement of yours, but I do realize that this verb was an ill-chosen translation of the French expression "réputé être avocat" that would have been both less loaded and devoid of the assertion of bad faith that was not intended.
 * In light of the clarification, I do regret the tone of my message, in particular the implications they raised. I stand, however, by my point that your comments such as the one in the ANI thread, because of what you represent, cannot stand alone as they are, lest they convey the entirely wrong message. MLauba (talk) 16:49, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I should have realized that "purported" had probably lost something in translation. Thanks again for your efforts on these issues, even if we may disagree about details or prioritizations from time to time. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:21, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Questions regarding Arbitration
I have two questions regarding the Evidence page and the scope of this case.


 * 1) Are Durova's actions within the scope of this case, particularly her previous feuds with Thekohser and her penchant for needlessly involving herself in matters completely unrelated to her?
 * 2) The evidence presented by Arcayne may prove problematic as he has failed to mention the user in question and has concocted an elaborate story. Is Arcayne's evidence within the scope of this case? Should his evidence simply be discarded?

I'm using your talk page because it seemed as reasonable a place as any. If there's somewhere else I should be posting, please let me know. Thanks! --MZMcBride (talk) 18:23, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
 * The talkpage of the evidence page is probably the best place for these questions, so all arbitrators will see them. The drafting arbs may take the lead on answering your questions, but I may add something after I've had a chance to take a look at the evidence page. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:09, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick reply. I've posted on the talk page. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:28, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

User talk:Risker &mdash; I think there needs to be very serious consideration of the consequences of such a post by Durova being true or false. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:34, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

BLP arb com
Please read my argument, just added there. The others are moving much too fast.  DGG ( talk ) 17:25, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I've read your statement and am continuing to monitor the situation. I'll have my own comments posted as soon as possible. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:18, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

User:Wiki Greek Basketball
I received a recent email request from the user for restoration of talkpage access. Since I suspect that I am only one of dozens of admins who received this email, I have made a short note of it on the user's talkpage. If, based on what WGB wrote to you earlier, you would prefer that the page remain blank, feel free to remove my note or contact me for any clarification. Regards. Abecedare (talk) 18:37, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * As you may have seen, there has been extensive discussion of this user's request on the unblock-l mailing list. The consensus there, with which I find myself in agreement, is that it is better to leave the talkpage blocked. I see no problem with a short note there to that effect. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:18, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Oversight please
Can you take a look at User_talk:0XQ please? I think we need a quick oversight there. Thanks! Toddst1 (talk) 19:14, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I will take a look when I have a moment&mdash;I will be buried in real-world work through this evening&mdash;but you will probably get faster service if you go to Requests for oversight and follow the instructions there. Thanks, Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:16, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Email to Arbcom
I emailed Arbcom (throught the email this user function on the Arbcom userpage) in response to a request by you on the Request for Case page. I won't mention the case, I'm sure you'll understand why. I got an acknowledgement from "arbcom-l-bounces" saying it was awaiting moderation as it was from a non-member to a members only list. That was 17 hours ago, and I've had no indication that the email has been passed to the list. I know that there were problems not so long ago with Arbcom's spam filter trashing emails, please could you check to see if the email has been received, and let me know if it has. I'll email direct to you as well. Thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 16:03, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * We did receive the e-mail and it is under discussion. I am sorry if you did not receive an acknowledgement as is our usual practice, but you will understand that the arbitrators have been pretty busy in the last couple of days. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:15, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks for letting me know. DuncanHill (talk) 16:20, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

CDA
Hi, I'm just following up on the comment you made in discussing the CDA proposal. You mentioned that the wording about users in good standing raised complications regarding persons under ArbCom sanctions. If the issue can be fixed, I'd like to do so, so please let me know your thoughts about it when you have time. Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:59, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I will do so over the weekend. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:16, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks! --Tryptofish (talk) 17:32, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Posted on the talkpage now. Sorry about the delay. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 18:37, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The advice and insights are much appreciated. (Maybe we'll even win you over to supporting the proposal eventually!) --Tryptofish (talk) 19:23, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Kristian Ayre
Hi. Can you offer your opinion in this discussion? Thanks. Nightscream (talk) 23:55, 25 January 2010 (UTC)