dose

So i had my first run in with a wikifascist and am exhausted by the whole thing. what a nightmare it must be to try to run that project - it’s so big, and has so many rules, so many acrimonious people. of course without the rules it would be chaos, without the people it would be nothing , but it is no fun when you run into petty-wiki-beurocrats, pedantic about enforcement of the particular half of the rules they are enamoured with.

The story: a project I’m committed* to, LibriVox, produces recordings of public domain audiobooks. Part of our cataloging process has been to add a link on the page of relevant text (so, for instance, when we finish White Fang, someone or other will go to the wikipedia’s White Fang page and add the link, usually right under the link to the Gutenberg text).

Now one of our volunteers added 37 such links in the past 2 months (without logging in). She got tagged as a “linkspammer” and warned with the following message:

“Please stop. If you continue to use Wikipedia for advertising, you will be blocked from editing. –Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 12:28, 11 March 2006 (UTC)”

What followed was a long drawn-out, and exhausting debate with said Mel Etitis, some of which you can find on his Talk page here: User_talk:Mel_Etitis; and the other half of that at my talk page: User_talk:Mackinaw.

Now wikipedia has guidelines regarding links & “linkspam.” (see External_Links):

Links to Normally Avoid:

• Links that are added to promote a site.
• A website that you own or maintain (unless it is the official site of the subject of the article). If it is relevant and informative, mention it as a possible link on the talk page and wait for someone else to include it, or include the information directly in the article.

And in this corner:

What should be linked to

• An article about a book … should link to the actual book.

This debate raged on and on all day yesterday. My favourite bit was this:
HUGH WRITES:

1. given: wikipedia policy states: “An article about a book…should link to the actual book”
2. given: librivox catalog pages contain “the actual book” in audio form.
3. then: the policy states that wikipedia “should” link to the librivox page.
so:
1. do you agree with 3?
2. and if so, are you saying that wikipedia articles SHOULD link to librivox catalog pages, but librivox volunteers are not permitted to make the links?

To which the wikicrat answered:

In short (though I’ve said enough to indicate that there’s more to it), yes.

At which point I had dreams of finishing The Trial, which has been stalled at LibriVox because of an equally …annoying… copyright issue.

Shortly after this, Jimbo Wales weighed in (after I sent him an email), very diplomatically:

I wonder
On the Librivox thing, they seem like good people, and good links, I wonder if you could give some advice on how we all (you, me, them) might all work together to have a group of disinterested Wikipedians go through as a project adding any and all relevant links?–Jimbo Wales 21:02, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

And a crazy kind of compromise was reached (involving us putting links into the talk pages, seeing if they were put up, then contacting the admin inquestion if they were not, so that he could put in the links); I agreed to the compromise, seeing no alternative. But everyone at LibriVox got pissed off at wikipedia, and for the moment no one seems to want anything to do with it. Which is ridiculous for many reasons, but I must say for the moment I agree. Very sour taste in my mouth.

So to finish it all off I posted this at User_talk:Jimbo Wales:

well, it looks like I jumped too soon to accept the Mel Etitis proposal: librivox volunteers didn’t react very well and there’s a fair bit of disenchantment over there about wikipedia right now. This is probably a drop in the bucket wrt wikipedia’s significant challenges, but it’s unfortunate that a big online community, based on wikipedia’s ideals, and working towards the same goals, should be transformed from great wikipedia boosters, to a group many of whom seem to be saying a version of: “my opinion of Wikipedia is much less right now than it was yesterday.” Tho I do realize that this was just a debate with one admin, not all of wikipedia, but disenchantment seems to be the pervasive reaction among core LV volunteers at the moment. which is too bad. and what that means is there aren’t any ready LV volunteers to post links to appropriate wikipedia pages (talk or otherwise) — at the moment, anyway, though that may change. Our cataloging process is kind of arduous; we had a step in there to add the relevant link in wp. Looks as though that step is gone now; and perhaps it contravened wp rules. (a solution would be to inform some non-LVer wp editor when we have a new file and let them add it if they wish).

So I guess it’s now up to the wikipedia community to decide whether the LV links should be there or not, and if they should, who/how they should get there. for reference, here is the LV catalog page:

http://librivox.org/catalog

There *is* a wikipeida policy question here, though, worth looking at, re: linking:
wikipedia has prescriptive and proscriptive policies about links. The prescriptive says: “an article about a book … should link to the actual book,” (see external_links) ie if there’s a gutenberg text, (or I would argue, a LV recording) , ie the “actual book,” it should be linked from the article. The proscriptive policy says, among other things, that, “Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files.” So in deciding whether or not a link like this ought or not to be included, it seems to me the process should be: “is it the actual book”? Yes –> include it; No –> then evaluate based on other criteria.

Perhaps I am wrong. There’s a question of process over content (ie who can add the link, versus whether the link should be there); and the claim (from the admin) seems to be that process wins over content.

And now I have first hand experience of the joke about wikipedia & saussage: you may like it, but you probably won’t like how it’s made.

UPDATE:
A different, reasonable, admin stepped in and we had a long and productive discussion. I explained LibriVox; he explained wikipedia policy. The upshot is still crazy in my opinion:
the links *should* be there, but *LVer shouldn’t* make those links … but it is explained in a sensible way. Wikipedia makes the rules. If you are interested, you can check WAS_4.250, and also my talk page here: Mackinaw

*Joke:
Q: what is the difference between committed & involved?
A: when considering your breakfast of bacon and eggs, you can be sure that a chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.