Talk:Anarchopedia:Community Portal

Welcome to Anarchopedias Community Portal!

Disambiguation pages

Ive noticed a lot of disambiguation pages, epsecially ones about abbreviations, that dont actually have any articles to direct to. What is the point of this?--151.199.25.180 21:49, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

       Ive noticed that too, and ive sterted deleting them Carlostmpl

GFDL is not appropriate to a wiki. Should be replaced by GNU GPL or a Creative Common Licence (discussion on meta community portal)

I think we should make this a lot more organised. Wikipedia's articles are duplicatable; I believe we should copy those articles first, then modify them to our own standards. As of now, this looks like a sub-standard wiki; just a mess. We can add the anarchist perspective and rearrange the (already well-organised) articles as we wish. lockeownzj00 20:46, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

You are right. Anarchopedia in English doesn't have a lot of contributors and my English is not so well. Some time ago, I started to copy Wikipedia's articles about anarchism, and I'll join you :) next week. --millosh 21:13, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

What's the point of this? If you do a search on Google of a passage from a Wikipedia article for Louis XIV - "bankruptcy when Louis XIV assumed", you get 109 hits, with Wikipedia being #1. Why be hit #110? What's the point of just cloning Wikipedia?

I have copied articles from Wikipedia, usually original articles by a good author. I think copying wholesale Wikipedia articles is pointless. If you want to copy and modify articles from Wikipedia, then copy them to your hard drive, modify it and then upload it. What's the point of being just another Wikipedia clone? Lance Murdoch 01:32, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to add articles from Wikipedia I created or contributed toward, largely articles on U.S. leftist groups. DJ Silverfish 18:56, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Why is copying all of Wikipedia pointless? No, that's a bad question... let me try again:

What is the purpose of this site other than to be "not Wikipedia"? If the purpose is to be an encyclopedia, doesn't it make sense to start with an encyclopedia that you think needs work and then do that work? Any other position would seem to be based merely on territorialism. -Harmil 21:26, 30 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sorry to sound negative, but was this site started by non-anarchists to make anarchists look hopelessly disorganised? I thought that Wikipedia was a mess, but this... 81.202.195.21 14:40, 8 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Hehehe... I started it and I am an anarchist. People from German and French Anarchopedia are better organized because they were working on site organization. So, if you want to make some better organization here, you are welcome. The point is self-organization, not leadership. And we have a lot of time to try to do that. To say again here (and this is the answer to Harmil's question, too): Anarchopedia should be "an anarchist encyclopedia" and "an encyclopedia for anarchists", but also the virtual place where we can try to build anarchy. May we organize us without leaders and power; at least in the virtual world? ... as well as with people who are not explicit anarchists? Even Infoshop OpenWiki doesn't intend to be "an encyclopedia for anarchists" (just "an anarchist encyclopedia") Anarchopedia would not have a lot of sense without the goal to build a virtual anarchy. --millosh 00:09, 11 Jul 2005 (UTC)

So, this is the main reason why I am writing here only at the talk pages. People who want to write here should write here without the idea that Anarchopedia is "project which belongs to someone" and without the idea that one person can make decisions about relations between contributors or about the site content. --millosh 00:09, 11 Jul 2005 (UTC)

It is not easy to make even virtual society without hierarchy and we want to do that in reality. The good thing is that we have a lot of time to try to do that here (or anywhere else). --millosh 00:09, 11 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Consider the open politics in force ruleset: it seems to set very ambitious goals for having mutually self-reinforcing rules that people enforce on each other with minimal input from advisors.

Restored data

I restored eng: from database dump from September 8th. Between 5 ti 10 changes (from 8, 9, and 10 September) are lost. --millosh 17:49, 11 Sep 2005 (UTC)

No big deal, it should take just a few minutes to resubmit the changes (and apparently i was the only person active during the period :). e★f 20:26, 11 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Eng is on new server

millosh 14:50, 13 Sep 2005 (UTC)

User unfriendly

Want to grow the articles here? Improve the ease of submitting a new article. First, what the hell is this about having to log in to create an article? How anarchic is that? Second, typing an entry in to the search box should bring up a "create new article" dialog if the database query finds nothing, not the apocryphal MySQL space language it does now. Denni 01:38, 14 Dec 2005 (UTC)

We have a very small community here so far, and i think this (logging in first) was done to prevent bots from editing and creating crap articles... personally seeing how there was an influx of regestering bots around, i say this rule has to be deprecated, since it doesn't help anyhow. User:Beta m/sig

First of all, YOU DONT HAVE TO BE LOGGED IN TO CREATE AN ARTICLE! Second, making a new article is not terribly complicated. All you have to do is search for it, and if it doesnt come up a link will show up in red at the top of the page. Anyone that cant figure out how to do that probably shouldn't be contributing to Anarchopedia anyway. Im sick of people complaining about how you have to be logged in and how it is un-anarchistic. I have a user name, but I dont always log in with it (usually due to laziness) and it never hinders my ability to edit articles. Furthermore, if you look at the records, only one user was ever banned from this website, and that was because he added "an eggcup" onto the end of every article he could find.

Right on.

can't write on eng: ?

i tryied to make a translation for "diego abad de santillan" from the french article, and put it on eng:, but it seems created, but it show nothing : see Diego Abad de Santillan. What happen ? Libre 08:51, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

something strange !? it passed now ???!! finally good :) Libre 08:52, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

It happens sometimes that you have to submit the same thing twice before it actually works. I suspect it has something to do with the timeout threshhold being too low.  ~ Beta_M (VolodyA! V Anarhist) ^Talk 09:37

licensing

I also have thought a bit about licenses. I think the bad thing about licenses like GFDL and CC are that they gibe somebody the right to go to the courts in order to enforce the rights. I think for anarchists that should be a no-go. So I suggest to develop an anarchistic anti-licenses. This should be very short, maybe one paragraph - and could also be used on other projects. The idea is to give the people the "rights" they need but make clear that these "rights" can not be enforced by any jurisdiction. I would call such a license AAL Anarchist Anti License. The "Anti" should make clear that this is not a real license. Please take a look at http://www.cypherspace.org/CPL/ for an idea - but I think this could be made much shorter. --Vinci 08:50, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I do like the idea, but think it's more silly then anything. Public domain is the way to go if we want to be anarchic. And i don't see what is wrong with GNU GPL anyhow. Taking away somebody's right to restict freedoms of others isn't a bad thing, nor is it anti-anarchist.  ~ Beta_M (VolodyA! V Anarhist) ^Talk 2006 July 02 16:47 _(UTC)

The problem with public domain is that someone takes your stuff and changes it and then claims they own the changes, even if they are just corrections, then sues you. The only way around this is a share alike license, and yes the GFDL does qualify. It gives you a lot of powers actually if you use the GFDL Secondary Sections properly - especially the GFDL Invariant Section - to make sure no one can abuse the materials. For instance you could add an Invariant Section promoting anarchy and giving all the most useful URLs to anyone who reads any derived article. So an article on gardening would only be distributed with a secondary section on how to anarchize gardening, e.g. by planting illegal plants in everyone else's garden all around.

You could write a more complex terms of use like let.sysops.be or openpolitics.ca or lp.greenparty.ca to sort out all the various possibilities. One nice idea that came from the (now defunct) livingplatform.ca was to let tense of articles and PoV of articles actually determine their copyright. So instructions were CC-by-sa but political opinions were CC-by, and compilations of many opinions were CC-by-nc-sa etc.

anarchy or not

Anarchy or not, how are people supposed to find what they want? What is the meaning of anarchy? chaos and time wasting?

They can use the search engine, or they can just learn the lingo. The language used to describe community here, like faction stuff, is 'way more sensible than Wikipedia which tries to deny there are factions and everyone Jiminy Wales hates is a "troll."

So, what is the rationale behind bans?

Yes, vandals are obviously bad, but isn't banning them un-anarchic? Could someone explain what the reasoning is?

Anarchism is about empowering people for social change, not making slaves of everyone. Every community has the right to demand that it will not be oppressed, and vandals do exactly that. Think about it: A landlord can come and instill ans rule in your house, and vandals come in and destroy our project.

Anarchism is not anomie or nihilism. There is nothing wrong with protecting your home and your life from others. We welcome everybody to come in and contribute to the project, but not to destroy it.  ~ Beta_M (VolodyA! V Anarhist) ^Talk 2006 October 28 07:35 _(UTC)

Quite, anarchism doesn't mean "no rules" it means rules are made and applied by community consensus. All anarchist communities have the right to exclude someone who breaches the rules, as long as there is a consensus for such a course of action. Indeed in anarchism exclusion from the community is considered the greatest sanction against an individual, and is usually the last resort. On the other hand any individual in the community should want to follow the rules because the community itself has decided those rules, anyone who does not want to follow the rules is quite free to move to a different community where the rules are different. Isn't this the basis of freedom? All communities have the freedom to function independently. Trolls/vandals are not interested in contributing to the community, they just want to disrupt it, so why should we put up with it? Alun 05:44, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Questions

I have a few:

• I've found that I'll type in the exact title of a page into the search bar and hit go or search, and it won't take me to it or offer me any options (I'm aware of the case-sensitive thing). What's going on and how can I fix it?
• I've read that all logged-in users have sysop rights. Is this no longer true? I'm not able to delete anything. (I'd like to delete some spammer- and vandal-created pages). If I have to petition for sysop rights, how do I do it?
• Just curious: The case sensitivity thing seems like a terrible inconvenience; what's the rationale behind it?
• Can anyone point me to existing discussion about the possibility of joining forces with other underpopulated anarchist wikis?

Thanks in advance, Delldot 03:13, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Some answers... (sorry did not see this before)

1. seems to be working for me (just tried "Wikipedia" and "labor note")
2. I am not sure about the current setting, one year ago it was changed to give admin-rights three days since the first edit. The software configuration should be published. The people currently managing the server can be contacted via the mailing list anarchopedia-dev, and occasionally via IRC [#anarchopedia@irc.indymedia.org].
3. I agree with you... I like the ability to distinguish between "moon" and "Moon" for example, but the software could be smarter and automatically redirect when just one of the two possible titles is missing, (possibly a bot could create the redirect).

~Rev 22 16:13, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Suggestions

• Merging this page with Talk:Main Page, since both do basically the same thing, so discussion is fragmented between the two (or actually creating a community portal, but that would take work).
• Not blocking open proxies. I was doing it for a while blocking spammers, but then I decided it's pointless, since a spambot will edit from a new IP most every time, while blocking an open proxy could conceivably deter a legitimate editor (e.g. someone who has to obscure their IP due to political repression...). I'm thinking of unblocking the ones I blocked, any objections? Delldot 05:05, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that IPs are blocked all the way. They are blocked from editing without registration as far as i know. I do like an idea of merging this with Talk:Main Page  ~ User:Beta_M (VolodyA! V Anarhist) ^Talk 2007 May 10 06:21 _(UTC)

I think I agree, we would have to deal a little more with spammers, but I would not want those users (or anybody) to be accidentally blocked from editing. ~Rev 22 15:38, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

With the spammer thing, I guess the question is how often are they reusing that IP? If one IP is consistently spamming/vandalizing, sure it makes sense to block. But if a spambot is using a new IP each time anyway, then I say it's a waste of time to block them and the (admittedly quite small) chance that someone legitimate would want to edit from it would make it not worth it. Therefore I propose that we look at the user's contribs before blocking them. If they only have one or two edits, consider not blocking or keeping the block short. Beta, I know that in newer versions of the software there's an option to allow editing from registerred users from an IP you're blocking, but I think it's a new feature and we'd have to update the software to get it. I think autoblocking still exists here. Delldot 04:03, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

After thinking about it i no longer block IP if it's been used only once, also i've noticed that spammers change their IPs while vandals tend to use their own ones.  ~ User:Beta_M (VolodyA! V Anarhist) ^Talk 2007 May 16 10:35 _(UTC)

Cool, then if no one objects I'll go through my block log and unblock the open proxies I blocked. I think the vandal/spammer difference is because vandals don't have a profit motive so usually aren't sophisticated enough to be using an open proxy, they're mostly just kids fucking around. Whereas spammers are running bots and doing this to a lot of different sites. Delldot 16:40, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Search question

When I put in terms for as yet uncreated articles, why does the "Sorry cannot find *whatever* have a colon in front and a question after, with quotes around?

"anarchopedia" btw should auto-redirect to Anarchopedia.

You could have been bold and did the redirect yourself. q;-)  ~ User:Beta_M (VolodyA! V Anarhist) ^Talk 2007 June 19 04:06 _(UTC)

Hi everyone, I'm new here. Hope I can be useful. However, I have something to ask; as I am a member of Italian anarchopedia too, we have a problem with an idiot who likes o cancel our pages; if you have or if you had the same problem, how are you fighting it or how did you stop it?

Case sensitivity

Why the case sensitivity and why do people create articles with lower-case letters, even the first one? --Popperipopp 20:12, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Because it is usual encyclopedic manner (to write a title as it would be written if it is in the middle of sentence). Wikipedia doesn't follow this. --Millosh 22:34, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

BTW, if you need a bot for making redirects, please let me know and I'll make one. --Millosh 22:44, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't know that. Sure, but I can't say that I have fully understood how one control those bots. --Popperipopp 23:19, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to one guy from development team of pywikipediabot Anarchopedia is compatible with it. In general, everything which is written here counts for Anarchopedia, too. You may be introduced in this bot even in Sweden :) --Millosh 01:02, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

General Strike

I have been propagandizing the General Strike for 9/11/2007 in several places, and I thought I could also comment about it here. I intended linking strike action elsewhere when I mention the strike, but I'm seeing it's still full of red links. Then I thought of proposing cleaning it up, but you would probably tell me to do it myself (at least it's what I would say). So... well, are you planning to help with the strike somehow? I see it as a step in the right direction, even if the results are small, as they will be; I feel general strikes in the USA, and moreover arising from grassroots movements as this one should be happily celebrated by anarchists.

Yes, you do need to do something yourself, but i will take a look at that article and see if i can do something (at least create some worthy stubs).  ~ User:Beta_M (VolodyA! V Anarhist) ^Talk 2007 August 20 04:48 _(UTC)

Notes/questions by a new user

• Nice project
• How does one become an administrator (that is, one with blocking powers)?
• Can any logged-in user protect and delete?
• We should get cascade-protection working, it's a lot better than Template:Deletedpage
• We ought to get rid of those annoying spambots, how does Wikipedia handle them?

Koekje 18:52, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Hello Koekje... I'll try to answer again...

2) The consensus here appears to be that every contributor should have administrator status. Still I think that real anarchistic management is impossible with a client server-model such as the one used by Mediawiki. We would need a distributed database and peer-to-peer software. What is your view in the matter?

3) I think that is enabled automatically 3 days since the first edit.

4) I'm not sure about what cascade protection is. Will look into it.

Cascade protection looks like this, was implemented in January 2007 for Wikipedia and it is used there to list pages that are protected against re-creation in one page (see [1]), which is in turn 'cascade-protected' so that they cannot be re-created. If cascade-protection doesn't work, we have to use something like Template:deletedpage, and then the page does technically exist (you can find it by using Special:Random, it shows up in page creation logs, etc). Koekje 16:36, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

5) They are very annoying.., I would think most are handled by the "recent-changes patrollers". But it is also possible to tag certain urls as spam so spammers cannot post them (see meta:Spam blacklist)

Hope to continue seeing you in Anarchopedia. ~Rev 22 13:13, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

envirowiki interlinking

hey hey. I have set up all the anachopedia interlinks for each language in envirowiki. The full list is here: http://en.envirowiki.info/Envirowiki:Interwiki_links. the page also includes all the envirowiki interlinks for each of our languages, not hard to do a find+replace and change them all to eg. "en-envirowiki", etc.. If someone's up for it.--Naught101 20:51, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Important Pages Missing?

I know that I should be just be doing it myself rather than talking here, but writing is my one weak point. There are certain ideas and practices of anarchists that mainstream media has stereotyped and misrepresented. It seems an anarchist wikipedia should be one of the places that explains the alternative view on these, however, these areas are lacking or nonexistent. "Vandalism" is two sentences long. Shouldn't this page be explaining various anarchist interpretations (Buildings are vandalism of Nature, all property should be public, etc.)? "Graffiti" doesn't even have a page, and isn't even really touched on on art. Now, vanadalism and graffiti isn't what anarchy is really about, but you know that many people believe thats the definition of anarchism.

Guidelines

I know that this is an anarchist wiki, so "policies" (by which I mean "rules") should be avoided (unless something really clever like the wikipedia "ignore all rules" element is added), but shouldn't this wiki at least have a few guidelines? Something to tell people what to do, how to do it, advice on managing conflict, etc etc etc. Just a suggestion... 82.0.206.215 21:21, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

This has been discussed in the meta:Ideas_for_the_4th_General_Meeting and currently i am copiling the proposal that is accessible if you go to meta:Anarchopedia:Policies. Anarchism doesn't actually means lack of rules, it does mean lack of oppression, so there is nothing wrong with creating rules which stop the oppression of the project by some person or group, you do have a point that the policies will have to be fluid to disallow somebody from gaining an advantage on another person by using legal manoeuvring.  ~ User:Beta_M (VolodyA! V Anarhist) ^Talk 2008 February 20 15:58 _(UTC)

Creation of Anarchopedia:Inter-projects

After the discussions of the 4th general meeting, I finally created the page Inter-projects on Meta. All the projects and participating persons are invited to participate to this activity that is about developping more links between projects. - samarre

Uri Gordon

Hi can someone publish this article (everything's locked), I'm from the french encyclopedia and someone did wrote that in english.

Uri Gordon

Uri Gordon (b. 30 Aug 1976) is an Israeli activist and academic. He is the author of Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (Pluto Press). While completing his doctoral research in Oxford he organized with community initiatives and anti-capitalist networks including Dissent!, Indymedia and Anarchists Against the Wall. He has also published articles in the journals Anarchist Studies and Refractions. Gordon now teaches environmental politics and ethics at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which brings together Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian and International students. His research continues to focus on grassroots sustainability, radical peace-making and anarchist politics. He is also active as a facilitator, trainer and translator.

Thanks