User talk:Shanen

Welcome to Meta!

Hello, Shanen. Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

John Vandenberg (talk) 11:43, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

My primary meta-topics? Money and translations and fighting spam

Well, I guess thanks to someone named John Vandenberg for creating this page, though I'm not sure why it happened. I certainly don't remember asking for it. However, I do have two meta-topics related to Wikipedia that are on my mind, so I'll go ahead and make a few notes.

The money issue is important because it seems every organization gets twisted around that topic. Overall, I do feel like Wikipedia seems to be doing a pretty good job, but my impression is that the current economic model is almost a pure charity, with a strong bias towards institutional investors and away from small investors. My main concern is that I think it seems to be pushing the system away from certain topics. I don't have any concrete censorship concerns just now, but I do favor economic models that encourage broad participation in a democratic way. I guess it seems to me that Wikipedia is being more and more controlled by people who are in the loop with the big donors and what they want...

The translation issue is actually more complicated. I'd like to see better ways for content to move between languages. I think that calls for some kind of split screen editor, with different language versions on the two sides and with corresponding material indicated with something like matching colors. I think there should be a kind of 'granularity slider' that would control the level of matching, from paragraphs to sentences and all the way down to words, though at the lower levels I think you'd need some kind of vertical rescaling, too. The idea would be to make it easy to see what is missing from one language version, and also support people who want to translate that missing material into their favored language. I'm not saying that the versions between different languages should be structurally the same, but I do feel like there should be a trend towards convergence and I think there should be editing software that makes that easier to do. (It would also be interesting to use the same sort of split screen approach within one language over time, to help visualize how articles are evolving.)

Minor meta-topic is to discourage spammers, though that's kind of related to the money issue. In particular I am offended by spammers who use Wikipedia articles as resources to grab some credibility for their scams. I have previously suggested there should be a convenient counter-response mechanism within Wikipedia that would add a temporary warning to such targeted articles.

Shanen (talk) 06:17, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

On the subject of content moving between languages, Wikidata has just begun to help solve that problem.--Jasper Deng (talk) 06:31, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip but when I looked into it I couldn't really see how they were addressing the problem I was trying to describe. I see this as a situation where a computerized tools could allow humans to solve it... Let me try with an example. There are two different articles on the same topic in two languages, created independently. They have a lot of shared content, but both are missing some content and they are arranged differently. My own languages are English and Japanese. I want to be able to put the two articles up side by side and have colors (boxes or backgrounds) that help show me which parts match and which parts are missing. Let's say there is a chunk in Japanese that is missing from the English. I'd like it to pull a rough machine translation over to the English side, and then I would polish it into better English and save that version. Shanen (talk) 07:41, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

No arguments ad personam, svp.

Hello, Shanen. I demand you to not introduce in discussions arguments ad personam, svp. like attibuting me without reason a "fear of accountability for your(= my) public behaviors". Eg. en:Wikipedia:No personal attacks --Havang(nl) (talk) 11:45, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for taking it to a relatively private place. I feel my public response was rather measured and an appropriate response to your public behavior. I made it quite clear that I could only speculate about your motivations. The funny part is that I suspect there might be a kernel of a valid problem buried somewhere deep inside your comments. However you're extremely unlikely to get any credit or recognition even if you do have a good idea because you act that way (as you continue to act here). At this time I have no intention of retracting any of my comments regarding your behavior, but I also consider it likely that you are linguistically challenged in some way. Perhaps English is your third language, but among other problems, you need to learn how to use a spelling checker. As an ad hominem attack, I would simply say "Get a spelling checker." In case you are confused again, that was an illustrative joke, NOT an ad hominem attack because I no longer regard you as worth that level of consideration as a human being. THIS is an ad hominem attack: "I regard you as a time waster and I think it is extremely unlikely I will ever reply to any of your comments again unless you go out of your way to pursue me with your next sock puppet identity." One of the virtues of an EPR system would be that such sock puppets would start out as invisible to people like me and, for people like you, they would never become visible. Shanen (talk) 19:52, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Hello Shanen, back from holiday. I have clearly said my opinion against the proposal we discussed. And my argument is fundamental don't judge people. There is no other argument from my part. My oppose stands.So, whatever will come out of it om WP, I shall try not to let myself influence by any public reputation, earned or not. So, for me, it's no, no, no. --Havang(nl) (talk) 08:21, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Then stop judging me and stop wasting my time, and it's been lovely to hear nothing from you for ANY reason at all. Since you have nothing to say, and in particular nothing constructive, then you should say nothing. You've already forced me to judge you to be some sort of unreasonable and incoherent entity. And I wanted to use a stronger and more negative term than "entity". In general, I prefer to spend less time with certain people. People who act like you. Wasn't this "discussion" terminated long ago?

In terms of MEPR-C, I sincerely doubt you would EVER have any positive contributions to be recognized for. Shanen (talk) 18:01, 25 August 2018 (UTC)