User talk:Damis

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Be generous! Trust your limits! Think before you write!

Contents

[edit] Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Damis, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  KillerChihuahua?!? 01:30, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Response

Hi, there! Just for clarification, administrators cannot delete accounts; only a developer could perform such an action and as far as my memory serves I do not believe that has been done in any cases. As for blacklisting the website, I'm not sure what you mean. If it is no longer possible to add that link to Wikipedia, it would have been blacklisted by an administrator on the m:Spam blacklist on Meta. I am not an administrator there, so it would have been someone else who did that. As to the blocks, I acted upon a concern brought up on the administrator's noticeboard visible here, where several other users agreed that the use of the links on the talk pages classified as spam, though of course I was not aware of the details at the time. Are any of the accounts still in use? I'll leave a note on the administrator's noticeboard to see about unblocking them if it is requested. Thanks for telling me of this! Cowman109Talk 21:33, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

crossposted from User talk:Cowman109Hi. If you would like to discuss the use of Wikimedia resources in your classroom, please feel free to contact us at info AT wikimedia.org -- however, in the future, please don't harangue our local project administrators for doing their job. Thanks for understanding, and I look forward to any further discussion by email. Jkelly 22:53, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
As someone with some experience in science-based informal education, I'd like to point out that your students did "learn(...) how to become Wikipedia editors", in a very real world way. The simple exercise of adding your link to learn the medium was educational -- it taught them (and may I suggest, you) something about how wikis work. Frankly, if I were in your class I would have written a killer paper about linkspam, and how wikis deal with it. The simple technology of a wiki is available to you for any experiences you want your students to have using the medium, as it's open souce. If the experience you wanted your students to have was how to become Wikipedia editors in a real world context then, to me, you have an intellectual responsibility to either design your activity so that it creates the experience you want (in this particular case, Wikipedia's policies, guidelines and experiences with linkspam are all readily available) or accept the data of of your real world experiment (creating a large number of accounts, quickly, from the same IP and having them all insert an identical link results in a block). The blocking adminstrator acted completely within Wikipedia's standard practice here -- nothing you have criticized him for is regarded as even slightly irregular. I believe that the burden here is on you, to either research the assignments you give your students more thoroughly, and shape them to create the experience you want, design your own wiki to control your results, or accept the results of the experiment you created. It sounds like a really great class, by the way. Cheers. Dina 04:10, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Some possible alternatives...

Hi. If your looking for a wiki where you can do anything you want, then might I suggest Wikia.com. Wikia is a project started by the same person who started Wikipedia. There you can setup your own wiki where your students can do anything you want them to do without the fear of disrupting other users. A sandbox in essence. Another alternative is the wikispaces website. They have a different system, but the concept is the same everywhere.

Alternatively, if your school has it's own web server you can freely download the software that makes wikipedia work and load it on your own server. You can even load a chunk of wikipedia into your own server. (see WP:MIRROR). I actually started my own wiki doing exactly that.

Good luck... if you have any more questions feel free to reply on my talk page or send me an email. ---J.S (T/C) 07:28, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Blocking my students

Dear Andrew,

Recently one of the Wikipedia adminstrators has blocked the user pages created by students enrolled in one of my classes (Com 435, Emerging Communication Technologies, Purdue University). He labeled them as "spam" pages because they included a link to my webpage. The link was present on those pages because I showed the students how to create a link on their user pages, using as an example a hyperlink to my webpage. This was meant to be a simple exercise and temporary. The administrator has interpreted this, however, to be the work of a spammer who has created a bunch of sock puppet accounts. I do not know what kind of evidence he used to conclude that, but when appealed, his decision was confirmed by you. In addition, my URL, matei dot org has been blacklisted. I think that your own research in the matter was at the very least superficial and your decision rash and uninformed. I demand that you unblock my students' accounts immediately and you take my page off the blacklisted list. All the student accounts are legit. The students want to be Wikipedia editors and you should give them a chance to learn how to use it. Your behavior cannot but turn people off from using and improving this site.

I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

For a track record of the actions, please refer to this.

All the best,

Dr. Sorin A. Matei Purdue University

s m a t e i a t p u r d u e dot e d u —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Damis (talk • contribs) 03:15, December 14, 2006 (UTC)

Apologies for the mix up. Our first impression was that this was an orchestrated spam campaign rather than a class exercise. Your student accounts unfortunately matched the well established pattern of spammers that create dozens to hundreds of accounts which all promote the same external links on all their user pages while making no positive contributions to the encyclopedia itself. Yes, my assessment was rather rash and incorrect this time around, but don't forget that Wikipedia is one of the busiest sites in the world and the volume of spam we have to deal with means we have little time to go through every appeal with a fine tooth comb. Feel free to email us a list of your students who were blocked to unblock-en-l and we'll unblock their accounts. Thanks. --  Netsnipe  ►  04:50, 17 December 2006 (UTC)