User talk:Donald Trung/Archive 4

Consulted methods of contact

• Sudokuone (a website maintained by Dr. R. Allen Barker)
• Cash coins of Korea (Also known as "The Asian Numismatic Museum", a website maintained by Dr. R. Allen Barker)

--Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 10:02, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Second electronic-letter to Dr. R. Allen Barker

Today I had received Dr. Barker's first reply, unfortunately because of copyright © restrictions I am not permitted to share this one here, but as I am an avid believer that anything related to Wikimedia projects should be openly available on Wikimedia projects I shall copy paste my reply here, for context I will explain Dr. Barker's response in a manner that is permitted for this project. The response by Dr. Barker was very short, it was mostly just a request to have a few links to some {W}iki{pedia} articles so I provided them to him.

"Dear Dr. Barker,
No one has “their” wiki articles as Wikipedia is a collaborative medium, but here are a few links to some cash coins related articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_cash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_mon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_mun
But images would have to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Commons is where most the images used on Wikipedia are stored, and these images can be used for educational purposes outside of Wikipedia as well, I will add these relevant links here.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia
This also means that if someone were to reuse any of the images you upload to Wikimedia Commons that they would have to credit you by name (if you so choose to upload it with that license)
And these are a few categories for cash coins:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Coins_of_the_Joseon_Dynasty
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Coins_of_Vietnam
I would also advise you to add very detailed descriptions of the histories of each individual coin and its variants because a lot of that information might be too detailed for Wikipedia but is quite useful for Wikimedia Commons. I understand that you’re busy and if you ever decide to upload images of cash coins you can e-mail me back and I shall be here to guide you.
Yours faithfully,
Donald Trung Quoc Don
Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱."

Well, because I don't want to end up in the spambox I rarely send links 🔗 in the first mail 📧 establishing contact, I explained to him that Wikipedia is a collaborative project and that no-one owns an article on Wikipedia. As Dr. Barker is very busy I do not expect him to be uploading any images here soon, and honestly I personally think of most cash coins-related articles as having been "completed" in mid-July 2017 (yes, by myself) and basically all I have been doing since is translation but images are very much needed (especially for Vietnamese/Annamese cash coins) so I will continue to browse eBay for "missing coins" but from what I can tell letting Dr. Barker share his collection would probably complete 95% of all "missing" cash coins on Wikimedia Commons. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 10:22, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

One final important link concerning Wikimedia Commons (third letter)

“Dear Dr. Barker,
I would like to share another link from Wikimedia Commons with you:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Ownership_of_pages_and_files
After uploading any photographs and/or rubbings of coins to Wikimedia Commons you can still be considered to be the copyright holder of these images and may request restrictions on their reuse to make sure that you and/or your work is always properly attributed (unless you would choose to release them into the public domain), you would still retain copyright to your images but uploading them there would allow others to use them in educational settings.
This is the UploadWizard:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard
Yours sincerely,
Donald Trung Quoc Don
Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.”

I sent this letter to make sure that Dr. R. Allen Barker knows that he wouldn't lose the copyright © to any of his images after uploading them to Wikimedia Commons, unfortunately many people don't want their images here as it would make them freely usable outside of this project.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 15:40, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

This is a test to see if the bot can recognise a full archive and automatically adjust the numbers.

The unfortunate truth. 😟

This is a collection of wonderful quotes on the user page of the amazing Slowking4 (for the version as of writing this see this), unfortunately as it with all awesome users 👥 their amazing user pages get deleted and replaced with a template in some time so to prevent the Deletionist gangs from forever purging this from the internet I am “saving” these quotes here, also I might forget that awesome user’s name and can easily find this here in my user space, + (plus) I might add some other quotes here in the future. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 11:17, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

Quotes (“stolen” from Slowking4)

"Aaron Swartz was another sacrificial lamb on the altar of network control."[1]

"Certainly the desire to make rules and enforce them is a masculine pursuit. It's just so heavy and old-fashioned. Women are the great readers. Women will sustain literature and writing. I just want to write a book and have it just be a book." [2]

"I have been rough. But we need to get real. Copyright Office: You failed. This Orphan Works Report is a Frankenstein’s Monster from 2008, emerging from a stinking time-traveling machine that is ripe with failure. Thanks, but no thanks." [3]

What we have witnessed, however, is that the Internet functions as a double–edged sword; the infrastructure does foster democracy, participation, joy, creativity and sometimes creates zones of piracy. But, at the same time, it has become evident how this same infrastructure also enables companies easily to piggyback on user generated content.[4]

Our theory is simply this: a person counts as an asshole when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy the special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people. [5]

“It’s because the newcomers don’t stick around,” Halfaker says. “Essentially, Wikipedians had traded efficiency of dealing with vandals and undesirable people coming into the wiki for actually offering a human experience to newcomers. The experience became this very robotic and negative experience.” [6]

Some people seem to think that ArbCom is so naive they don't know that the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions are engaged in institutionalized harassment using ArbCom as one of their harassment tools. They think just explaining that will open their eyes and they'll do the right thing. No, the only thing that will clear Wikipedia of this vicious coterie is a national publicity campaign to pressure the WMF into enforcing its Terms of Service, including against culpable ArbCom members. (I see several Sitush/Corbett/ cronies/minions are running for the next Arbitration Committee.) And I'm one of dozens who see it that way, we just haven't decided where to organize our efforts. Just because their tactic worked on silencing 1.2 billion Indians with their Brit imperialist drivel doesn't mean it will work on silencing 3.3 billion women. After all 1/2 the members of the Board are women. [7]

"Librarians have proven techniques for dealing with any sort of information or any sort of person: clear instructions for gathering, packaging and delivering information; clear rules and enforcement regarding disruptive behavior; and a commitment to upholding the standards of the profession and their institutions.

By contrast, the rules on Wikipedia are not clear, the enforcement on disruptive behavior is arbitrary or non-existent. Online game players, vulgarians, and sea-lioning randos who congregate here can be as disruptive and outrageous as they wish, with impunity. They don't care, because they don't have to."[8]

"This is very sad. A group of librarians attends a training session. They create nicely-crafted and illustrated articles about newspapers. They are met by notes on their talk pages telling them that their work is being discussed at ANI, and in two cases by AfD notices" [9]

"If You Can't Lose, You're a Loser"[10]

“Information doesn’t want to be free: people want to be free.” [11]

"You don't want to get into a situation where you think that the ideology is more important than people. If you see that it's not working for people you don't say: "Oh, well, those are just the people who don't get it, those are the ones who get left behind, those are the expendable ones, they don't matter." [12]

"the top 1% contributing well over 100% of the total number characters on Wikipedia (i.e. an amount of text that is larger than the current Wikipedia) and the bottom 95% of editors deleting more on average than they contributed (original plot)." [13]

"If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional contributors, their opinions aren’t heard by the current Wikipedia process. They don’t get involved in policy debates, they don’t go to meetups, and they don’t hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they’re even proposed. ... If Wikipedia continues down this path of focusing on the encyclopedia at the expense of the wiki, it might end up not being much of either." [14]

"Wikipedia has changed from 'the encyclopedia that anyone can edit' to 'the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit,'" they wrote. [15]; [16]

"Theoretical and empirical scholarship on both collective action and peer production suggests that peer production communities will resist oligarchy and embrace participatory organizational practices. Using a large sample of wikis, we present evidence to the contrary. The peer production communities we examine tend to reproduce undemocratic, non-inclusive, organizational hierarchies of leadership and participation. As wikis grow, the probability of adding new leaders drops and these entrenched leaders are increasingly active in administrative activity while using their authority to remove contributions of experienced community members. The wikis in our sample are not indicative of robustly democratic, participatory institutions. This is true despite the relative lack of formal bureaucratic structure or clearly-defined roles within many wikis. These results are consistent with Michels’ iron law of oligarchy and contradict prevailing notions regarding organizational democracy in peer production. " [17]

"We need to fundamentally mature as a movement and as an organization without losing the passion and without losing the energy and the commitment to the mission,” she said. “Organizations can be like giant icebergs, leaders are like tug boats, they will have a massive impact in steering this massive thing in the right direction, but you shouldn’t run afoul of it – and culture eats strategy."[18]

"This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware." [19]

"In a famous 1970 essay, Jo Freeman noted how feminist collectives that had opted to do away with formal hierarchy instead gave rise to a "tyranny of structurelessness" where the informal cliques that emerged were not even accountable. Similarly, a group that is supposedly open and allows a jerk (or toxic person) is not really open. It's alienating to other people."[20]

"The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous."[21]

"What ails most of our Internet debates is that we conduct them at the level of abstraction where our ideological predispositions regularly affect what we see and what we don't see—and we don't even notice this bias...I'm not even sure we can see Wikipedia for what it is, outside of this frame—but we should be trying. This, I argue applies to all sorts of other phenomena—education, politics, health—we have become prisoners to what I call “Internet-centrism.” [22]

"If what you find is that wealthy white men are the most important people in the world, then you get rewarded. No matter how far away it is from the truth." [23]

"Kapor is the legendary founder of Lotus, which more or less kicked off the personal computer revolution by making desktop computers relevant to business. He spoke about the dangers of what he called the “mirror-tocracy”: confirmation bias, insularity, and cliquish modes of thinking. He described the work of his institute to combat bias, countering the anecdotes and fantasies that pass for truth with actual research about diversity in the workplace." [24]

"The current wave of the social web doesn't just demonstrate its arrogance through its product decisions. The people involved in creating these platforms are hired from a narrow band of privileged graduates from a small number of top-tier schools, overwhelmingly male and focused narrowly on the traditional Silicon Valley geography. By contrast, the next wave of apps can harken back to many of the best of the early social startups, which often featured mixed-gender founding teams, attracted talent from geographically diverse regions (Flickr was born in Canada!) and were often created by people with liberal arts degrees or even no degree at all. Aside from being the responsible thing to do, having a diverse team generates a variety of unexpected product features and innovations that don't come from the groupthink of homogenous cultures."[25]

"Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything."[26]

"Patrolling IP edits requires care. Your vandals typically do not care about the site and will not be hurt no matter what you tell them. However, newbies do care a lot about the project and will quickly be completely alienated from the project if they are bitten. Bitten IPs can turn vandals as well."[27]

"Attempted corrections were rebuffed successively as unsourced, inappropriately sourced to primary documents, and ultimately – after Messer-Kruse tried to appeal to a book of his on the topic published in the interim – as undue weight. In dialogue with his editing opponents in the meantime the professor incurred charges of incivility and possible vandalism, and against the barrier of "verifiability not truth" his efforts foundered. "[28]; [29]; [30]; [31]

"But one has to wonder what is going on in regions that haven’t attracted the attention of someone with the media pull necessary to land an Op-Ed in the New York Times. How many other passionate agendas are playing out in neighborhoods less traveled? "[32]

“Data needs stories, but stories also need data. Data, when its put up in front of you as a number, it gets stripped of the context of where the data came from, the biases inherent in it, and the assumptions of the models that created it.”[33]

"This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip—there is no truth in it at all." [34]

"The couple, who have one child, met at the World Economic Forum at Davos, where Mr Wales reportedly asked an aide to track down Miss Garvey, but not to get her details from Wikipedia, in case they were wrong." [35]

"Wikipedia's founding principle is that everyone has something to contribute. And in a way, the site represents both what's good (collective knowledge) and what's potentially dangerous (rampant anonymity) about the Internet." [36]

"Open source, open data, open Web — the Wikimedia Foundation is all about information on the Web being open and free to use. That's the thinking behind Wikipedia, the crowd-created online knowledge base of more than 27 million articles written in nearly 300 languages."[37]

“This is part of the way Wikipedia works,” Mr. Shields said. “Everyone can edit any article.” [38]

"its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." [39]

"Wikipedia is an educator's fantasy, all the world's knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better. All conceded that it had turned out to be much harder to get their work to "stick" on Wikipedia than it was to write a traditional term paper." [40]

"Of course, every free listing on Craigslist means one less paid listing in a local newspaper. Every visit to Wikipedia's free information hive means one less customer for a professionally researched and edited encyclopedia such as Britannica." [41]

"The basic argument in this debate is that the dominant capital accumulation model of contemporary corporate Internet platforms is based on the exploitation of users’ unpaid labour, who engage in the creation of content and the use of blogs, social networking sites, wikis, microblogs, content sharing sites for fun and in these activities create value that is at the heart of profit generation"[42]

"Loveland and Reagle criticize characterizations of Wikipedia that they believe to be ahistorical and exaggerated, laying special blame with authors who compare Wikipedia’s anonymous production to Encyclopedia Britannica’s production by named experts, and thus ignore the rich traditional of encyclopedic production through the centuries. The authors then set about characterizing the history of encyclopedic production as composed of three overlapping forms: compulsive collection, stigmergic accumulation, and corporate production." [43]

"And the effects of this -- of just having an image on the page -- cascaded to other metrics. "Out-of-copyright" players' pages saw a significant boost in traffic. Articles from the pre-'64 that were already in the top 10 percent saw their hits increase more than 70 percent. Articles from that group in the least-popular ten percent saw traffic to their articles increase by 25 percent." [44]

"Would it be a service to scholarship if digital collections identified which of the images on their sites were in the public domain? Perhaps, but most digitization projects cannot take either the time or the responsibility for this, preferring to leave it up to the researcher to determine if an image is in the public domain. Furthermore, it might also be deceptive. Dr. Graf wants to identify public domain images so that they can be freely used in other projects. Many repositories, however, still wish to use their physical ownership of the original public domain item as a basis for controlling the use of that item. Explicitly stating that an image is in the public domain might lead researchers to believe that they could use the image freely, when in reality their use is limited by other factors." [45]

"To put it simply, we cannot afford to photograph a work in our collection unless we can hope to get a return on that investment."[46]

"Enron, pornographic web sites, and the New York Times are the models that archival asset management systems of the future should emulate. The real assets in an archives are not the holdings, but the skills, talents, knowledge, and abilities of its trained archival staff. It is these archival assets that archival repositories must promote." [47]

"The treaty … creates a bad precedent by loosening copyright restrictions, instead of tightening them as every previous copyright treaty has done." [48]

"If it's out of print, we feel it's fair game. Or if something is in print, yet absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure, we'll take a chance on it. But if it's in print and available to all, we won't touch it. The last thing we'd want to do is to take the meager amount of money out of the pockets of those releasing generally poorly-selling materials of the avant-garde. UbuWeb functions as a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, transferred digitally to the web. Our scanning, say, an historical concrete poem in no way detracts from the physical value of that object in the real world; in fact, it probably enhances it. Either way, we don't care: Ebay is full of wonderful physical artifacts, most of them worth a lot of money." [49]

"The Justice Department's press release announcing Aaron's indictment suggests the true motivation for pursuing the case was that Aaron downloaded academic literature from JSTOR and planned to make it available to the public for free as a political statement about access to knowledge. According to United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away." And the CFAA's vague language and broad reach helped to give the government the means to bring a criminal prosecution, even though the situation would have been better resolved privately among Aaron, JSTOR, and MIT." [50]

"Perhaps, if you reflect, you will agree that it is not desirable to convict people, even though guilty, if to do so it is necessary to violate those rules on which the liberty of all of us depends."[51]

"Moreover, given the amount of time covered by the Subpoena—three-and-a-half months—the accumulation of all of these discrete details and data points from such a long period of time could enable the D.A. to piece together a comprehensive portrait of Harris’s expressive activities and habits, directly implicating his First Amendment rights. Cf. Jones, 132 S. Ct. at 955 (Sotomayor, J. concurring) (stating that GPS monitoring “generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations”)" [52]

"Perhaps this scholasticism is part of what I sometimes call "the whiteboard and the shelf." As a (Web) engineer, the most important thing in my office was the whiteboard on which I could happily collaborate with my peers on a solution to a technical problem. Of course, perhaps a solution already existed, but our solution would no doubt be better! This failing is the "not invented here syndrome." Conversely, when I was working on my Ph.D. I realized I was coming down with "citation paralysis" syndrome. I felt that I was not able to think and express a thought without first checking the literature. My most important asset had become the book shelf and bibliography." [53]

"Our society is defined by endemic cheating and plagiarism. And yet every time this behavior emerges explicitly we perform the “scandal” again." [54]

"That makes it easier for professors to catch. We can word-search a string of sentences on Google as well as anyone. As a result, plagiarism becomes a different art: introducing little observations that differ somewhat from the borrowed piece. Rearrange paragraphs, add details or quotes, however spurious or ad hoc. If it's done properly, no one will know." [55]

""The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. I've transformed from a writer into an information manager, adept at the skills of replicating, organizing, mirroring, archiving, hoarding, storing, reprinting, bootlegging, plundering, and transferring. I've needed to acquire a whole new skill set: I've become a master typist, an exacting cut-and-paster, and an OCR demon. There's nothing I love more than transcription; I find few things more satisfying than collation." [56]

"Clearly, not everyone agrees. Recently, after I finished giving a lecture at an Ivy League university, an elderly, well-known poet, steeped in the modernist tradition, stood up in the back of the auditorium and, wagging his finger at me, accused me of nihilism and of robbing poetry of its joy. He upbraided me for knocking the foundation out from under the most hallowed of grounds, then tore into me with a line of questioning I've heard many times before: If everything can be transcribed and then presented as literature, then what makes one work better than another? If it's a matter of simply cutting and pasting the entire Internet into a Microsoft Word document, where does it end?" [57]

"The Rhetoric of Reaction”: purveyors of “timid ignorance” rely on three types of argument: jeopardy (reforms will cost a lot and endanger previous gains); perversity (reforms will harm the people they are intended to help); and futility (problems are so huge that nothing can be done about them)." [58]

"One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection." [59]

“There are rational forces that we think drive our dishonest behavior — but don’t. And there are irrational forces that we don’t think drive our dishonest behavior — but do.” [60]

"Have you actually ever read WP:BLP? And then created this [61]? Seriously? I'm quite appalled and very surprised" [62]

"Hey AndyTheGrump I would just like to point out to you that Prof. Josephson is a Nobel prize winning physicist. His statement with regard to calorimetry was entirely correct. Do you really want your only interaction with a Nobel laureate to be adversarial? Anyhoo.. enjoying the exchange on the discussion keep up the good work!" [63]

"We owe politeness to the people who try to work with us in good faith, whether or not what they do is finally accepted. We owe more than politeness: we owe an effort to understand. Our typical way of dealing with unsatisfactory articles is very abrupt, with notices worded as if they were written by the lower levels of a particularly burocrat-ridden country. We've all encountered institutions which try to avoid being questioned--in the RW, they tend to do it with a bland imperviousness, but we use a crude bluster; it's certainly more forthright, but it probably gets most people even angrier, or at least more willing to express the ir anger. The first step is to delete every template notice we use for deletion,and require people to write personal directed explanations that show they have made an effort to understand. True , some of our people cannot adequately do this--they should leave communicating with new editors to the ones who can, or can learn. We may be a collection of anti-social nerds, and satisfied with our own primitive ways of dealing with each other, but the rest of the world isn't, and it's the rest of the world we have to deal with. (I make no claim to being much better than the average here; I think I do try harder, but there is so much promotionalism and utter trivia to deal with that I keep desperately trying to catch up with it, usually resorting to semiautomatic tools and prebuilt notices.) A policy page is exactly where to discuss it. (anyway, all complaints should be heard, telling people to make them elsewhere is the classic way of rejecting outsiders.) The goal of policy is to make an encyclopedia , and the key requisite for making an encyclopedia is to keep attracting new editors. We're not acting like teachers, we're acting like bullies--like children who get to be teacher for a day and can be as arbitrary as they please within our confines. They're usually much more arbitrary than the actual teachers. Our principle is , after all, that everyone can edit; some have limitations, and the goal is then to teach them. What they can't do well enough today they can perhaps do tomorrow." [64]

"Although system-centered definitions of error blame the user for errors, it is not useful to blame a user. In human computer interaction research, the focus is on assisting and designing for the end users of technology." [65]

"Finally, I've been socializing the notion of MP4 (H.264/AAC) video and audio transcoding output, which will allow us to serve video and audio to Macs, Windows 7/8 PCs, iOS, and other desktop and mobile platforms without additional local software installation. There are some ideological issues with even partial support of a patent-encumbered format, but we'll see how it goes – our goal is to get information out to people, after all." [66]

"But we were counting the number of pages and it was kind of a special day when we passed 20,000 pages. And then someone said, "Gee, maybe that's about the right size. We don't want to be any bigger than 20,000 pages." And I thought that was a very interesting idea. And then some people said, "Well, it's now 20,100. Let's beat that 20,100 back to 20,000." And so I saw it as an experiment. There were plenty of tiny little pages that nobody ever read. I think I even made some tools to help people find them and they went and deleted them. And other people felt that anything that's written is worth keeping, and they were insulted by that. So then it became aggressive, and judgmental —and I'm having a little trouble remembering how it all worked. But I do think that we get a lot of value out of focusing our attention. But I think the whole notion of, to think about Wikipedia, the whole notion of encyclopedic sort of says everything, doesn't it? It means broad." [67]

"Il y a en effet beaucoup à faire dans les musées français pour éviter d’abandonner l’espace d’Internet aux musées américains, qui partagent déjà largement leurs ressources dans une approche de service public. Récemment, le Walters Art Museum de Baltimore a ainsi versé près de 20 000 photos librement réutilisables pour tous les usages (y compris commerciaux) sur Wikimedia Commons. Il en va de la survie de la culture française dans le monde numérique qui est le nôtre." [68]

"Je suis surpris de la réaction de Patrick Bloche, en général on partage pas mal d’analyses : Wikipédia, c’est pas rien ! C’est pas rien, Wikipédia, c’est une percée en terme d’élaboration de savoir en commun, de partage de savoir en commun qui est une vraie percée majeure. Alors oui, si vous voulez l’appeler « amendement Wikipédia », appelons-le « amendement Wikipédia » mais en tout cas le problème est posé." [69]

"When J. David Goldin saw the recorded interview of baseball great Babe Ruth for sale on eBay he knew something was wrong. There was only one original record of that 1937 interview of Ruth on a hunting trip, and Goldin had donated it to a government archive more than 30 years ago. Now someone was auctioning it off, the winning bid just $34.75." [70]

"Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach" [71]

"So if you have to tackle a complex problem in a pressure-cooker situation -- hide somewhere with minimal distractions, like a seldom-used conference room, or the coffee shop around the corner. Focus. Don't let other demands get in the way. And, through it all, keep sight of the importance of the mission at hand. If you're a procrastinator, maybe the most important change you can make is an attitude adjustment. You might be convinced that extreme time pressure is the only way to get brilliant work done because you've never actually tried it any other way. The fact is, when you work under the gun, creativity is usually the first casualty." [72]

"The Vent that wants no help is a Rant. The Ranter somehow believes that the endless restatement of their opinion is the solution. Perhaps they have no clue what a solution might be or how to find it or perhaps they’ve been stewing on the topic so long, they’ve lost all sight of logic. Whatever the back story, the Ranter is finding some weird mental satisfaction in the endless restatement of the problem, but they have no interest in solving the actual problem at this point. Annoying. When you’ve got a confirmed Rant on your hands, it’s ok to jump into the middle of the Vent — you’re saving everyone a pile of time and you’re teaching the Ranter that the incessant restatement of the Rant is not progress. " [73]

"When dealing with jerks and trolls both online and off, you have a choice: you can engage and try to get them to see the error of their ways, or you can avoid them, ignore them, and move on with your life. Most of us already know that ignoring jerks is the best way to deal with them, but a new study from Baruch College (CUNY) brings the point home, and explains why it's better for your health, too." [74]

"Confront: You need to be ready to call someone out. If somebody is bullshitting you, tell them. They need to hear it. Being endlessly deferential is a shortcut: instead of doing the hard work of advocating truth, you take the "easy" route of suffocating in passivity. And remember: you can train yourself to communicate better." [75]

"You are a volunteer, but that does not give you a free pass. Our Bugzilla is a community too and one where people don't like this kind of behavior. The problem might have escalated quicker because you "don't speak developer" and that is unfortunate. However you had been warned multiple times on wiki, bugzilla and apparently on mail. It's a shame it had to come to this, because you do useful work (and that has been recognized by multiple people). But just being useful is not enough." [76]

"If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate - in short, the emancipation from fear - then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service we can render." [77]

"Your characterization of me as some kind of bad guy that unilaterally turned off a crowning achievement of the WMF both angered and amused me." [78]

"That process seems to be replicable to almost every aspect of what museums do, but we have to give up control, give up the illusion of control, and substitute for honesty and integrity." [79]

"Wikipedia has been an experiment in ideology: the idea that something robust and functional could be built by a large population on a purely volunteer basis. This is the philosophy behind the Star Trek economy, in which nobody is paid but starships are built because individuals simply have a desire to better the human condition.

"What does the actual implementation of Wikipedia teach us about Star Trek-style economics? It teaches us that the Enterprise would never be built, because five million people would volunteer to design the layout of the bridge, and nobody would volunteer to build the toilets." [80]

"In almost every culture, there is a story or a myth of a young man who is sent by his family to infiltrate and destroy an enemy of some kind. A tyrannical king, a fearsome dragon, whatever. But when the son arrives, the king greets the warrior with wine and women, or the dragon lulls him to sleep with alluring songs. He enjoys himself so much, that over time, he forgets who he is, what his mission is, and the family he is supposed to be defending. I am not comparing the publishing industry to a tyrannical king, or okay, maybe I am. Because everyone who gets into a business like publishing -- by which I mean a business that is not going to make you rich or more attractive to people you want to get into bed with or make your parents think you are making rational decisions and are a fully functional adult -- is doing it in this idealistic, totally from the heart kind of way. But they're often times lulled to sleep. Not by wine and women, god knows." [81]

"My idea of the end of the world would be the hive, the hive mind. Sven Birkerts has a wonderful description of how the horizontal, linked world is gradually evolving in that direction, to where nobody is ever really alone. Nobody is able to just sink deep into his or her own imagination or feelings. Where just the constant pressure of the horizontal connections keeps you from descending below a certain depth. If he’s right about that, it’s the end of individuality as I’ve known it and come to admire and treasure it. And it may be that people who haven’t had the formative experiences I’ve had will find it perfectly satisfying, and that I don’t have the imaginative resources to either pity or envy them. Things may fall beyond my comprehension." [82]

"There’s a catch, though. The enormous gains for consumers in the digital age often come at the expense of workers. Wikipedia is great for readers. It’s awful for the people who make encyclopedias. Although the digital economy creates new ways to make money, digitization doesn’t require a lot of workers: you can come up with an idea, write a piece of software, and distribute it to hundreds of millions of people with ease. That’s fundamentally different from physical products, which require much more labor to produce and distribute. And while digitization has already transformed the media and entertainment businesses, it’s not going to stop there. “There are very few industries that are going to be unaffected,” Brynjolfsson told me. The value that the digital economy is creating is real. But so is the havoc." [83]

"The company had needed to figure out whether to spend its limited budget on beef jerky to keep around the office or 401k plans for the staff. “We put it to a vote: ‘Do you want a 401k or jerky?’ ” he explained. “The vote was unanimously for jerky. The thought was that well-fed developers could create value better than the stock market.” " [84]

"This is partly a side effect of our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them...Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge. I now contribute to some of the most prestigious online publications in the English-speaking world, for which I am paid the same amount as, if not less than, I was paid by my local alternative weekly when I sold my first piece of writing for print in 1989." [85] "I think we try to produce an encyclopedia accessible to to those of different abilities. From this, we want images wheneever they would be informative, rather than just decorative or redundant, because some readers will need them." [86]

"However, they separately examined the case of Betacommandbot, who had sent "more than half of the messages categorized as aversive leadership" in the sample, warning users who had uploaded a non-free image without a valid fair use rationale. Because these messages had been sent to editors regardless of whether their contributions were in violation of policy at the time they were made, "the Betacommandbot warning was a natural experiment, like a change in speeding laws, that was not induced by recipients’ behavior". The effect of this warning was to decrease the recipients' edits by more than 10%." [87]

"I never knew that Spanish Wikipeida was the first to forbid the use of non-free images. I always thought it was German Wikipedia's idea, since they're the project that this one is most often compared to. All I can say is "Kudos, Spanish Wikipedia, you made the right choice and one day I hope that all Wikipedias find the courage and wisdom to follow your lead."." [88]

"In fact, when this whole policy was adopted seven years ago, the term "non-free" was not used in the debate. It wasn't even introduced after the Foundation resolution. Know why it was introduced? I had a conversation at a meetup with someone I'd argued with frequently here who was a pretty strong advocate of the policy at first, but grew disillusioned when some of his comrades admitted to him, over one issue, that the goal was to effectively discourage the use of any fair-use media by making it impractical and difficult to justify doing so even where the file in question easily met the criteria (so yeah, my ability to AGF here is a little hampered). He told me that "non-free" was coined simply in response to people, usually new editors, who didn't understand the whole "free as in speech vs. free as in beer" thing. That's all."[89]

"I believe the rule that NFC use of images is not permissible for living persons on the grounds that a free photo could in theory be created is patent nonsense and should be abolished. ...Allowing more liberal fair use would not in any way harm the free-content mission of Wikipedia, as any such use could be documented in a central Todo-list to allow other Wikipedia contributors (who may live in the area of the subject of interest) to replace the non-free material with a free alternative. On the other hand, restricting fair use unnecessarily does harm Wikipedia's mission of creating a high-quality free encyclopedia. Assuming laziness of the authors or suspecting blanket abuse of any less restrictive formulation is against the assumption of good will that is fundamental to Wikipedia, and processes exist to deal with any such problems.... We are clearly in the right to use non-frees like this well within US fair use law provisions - a single non-free of each notable individual at low resolution, barring use of press images like Gettys or AP, would barely tickle any legal issues with that. But the Foundation, and thus ourselves, set a bar much stricter for non-free inclusion than fair use allows for to encourage the growth of a free content work. Thus to say "but these meet fair use", while true, falls on deaf ears because that's implicit in NFC policy....This raises a good point that given the free content mission and the stricter requirement than fair use, writing for WP is an intellectual challenge of how to construct articles around minimization of non-free. In some fields, this remains the status quo for how they would write in the real world (eg for things like sciences, history, and humanities), but for contemporary topics, we must revisit how one writes such articles. What happens here is that some do not want to consider this challenge and instead write like in the real world. If you don't think you like that challenge, then wikipedia isn't the place to be editing, and that's why again, trying to convince the Foundation to change their ways - when they likely know full well they would be introducing this challenge to all its projects - isn't going to happen. It is very much by design." [90]

"I checked the museum's policy as well as with the curator who assured me that these images could be used as common shared" [91]

"The administrators of the commons have taken their role to protect against copyright violations (copyvio) completely overboard. I have submitted my own work and they deleted it because of the fear of copyvio. I have signed their paperwork multiple times--years of this. Finally the most recent contributions have not (yet) been challenged. For the wider ramifications of getting images of historical figures or just ones from other sources, the obstacles to putting up good images are almost insurmountable." [92]

"My name is John Baselmans (may 20 1954) and the first reaction I saw I answered not logged in. It looks that Veertje take action against me for a reason I do not know. This image/drawing was made by my self and gives the administrator in the Netherlands a written permit from me and the postoffice from Curacao to place it on wikipedia! He placed the image as you can see and there must be a history of that some where! Now 5 years later I see veertje want to take all the images away I give permit to place. I do not know how I place the license and wrote that Veertje but it seems nobody want to help me. If everything is a problem do what you want to do but I do not give ANY permission for my work ever to wikipedia after this! Always there are people out there who think they are God. I'm not the technician who know how to change permissions and all these codes. I'm an artist who want to participate and help where I can but can not spend my valuable time to fight with frustrated people like here! Sorry I'm mad but this goes me to far. PS For the last time I give wikipedia permission to place the images who now on Wikipedia Sincerely John H Baselmans Curacao 18 juni 2012 (my native language is dutch so that explain my bad englis sorry for that)" [93]

"I donated my photos under the condition that my attribution be correct. I had no idea that would be used maliciously upon me. I do not want to continue to expose myself to the type of public ridicule the user is subjecting me to and I simply put do not want my name associated with this site in any way, shape or form. What is more important, how my donations effect the community or how there being used to slander me and my real life work efforts? The unwanted outing started with the problem editors first edit and continues on a daily basis. I want out! Who do I e mail to get this started?" [94]

"As best I can determine, this photo was taken in 1968. Copyright is negotiated by the Associated Press. Our low resolution copy of the photo, acquired from another online encyclopedia, is the first thing to show up in google. To my knowledge, AP has never protested. Its been on Wikipedia for almost exactly 9 years, I would think the absence of a claim against due diligence would not hold water. If ever we have a case for fair use, for the place and individuals involved with this photo could be made, this would be it. I think a reasonable argument could be made to add it to Harry Edwards (sociologist), which links to the article Werieth removed the photo, as well. And this goes on to the overall look of Wikipedia. For us NOT to properly cover such material would be censorship and is borderline racist." [95]

"in their variety and frequent ambiguity these “canons” provide them with all the room needed to generate the outcome that favors Justice Scalia’s strongly felt views on such matters as abortion, homosexuality, illegal immigration, states’ rights, the death penalty, and guns."[96]

"Before now, I had never really understood how the 1930s could happen. Now I do. All one needs are fragile economies, a rigid monetary regime, intense debate over what must be done, widespread belief that suffering is good, myopic politicians, an inability to co-operate and failure to stay ahead of events." [97]

"The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in particular by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française,” " [98]

"He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." [99]

"I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country." [100]; [101]

"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice." [102]; [103]

and that the War Office or Admiralty does not; accordingly, don't write to the papers telling the Generals and Admirals what they ought to do ; but if you have an opinion that you could do it much better, keep that opinion for your own fireside, and tell it to as few people as possible.

1. Don't think that the war does not affect you individually; it touches every one of us ; it touches every man, woman and child in this country.
2. Don't be overjoyed at victory; don't be downhearted at defeat.
3. Don't be unnerved by personal or family bereavements.
4. Don't be frightened at the casualty list, so long and sometimes so distressing.
5. Don't think that you know how to wage the campaign
6. Don't get nervous because the progress of the war is slow
7. Don't believe all you read in the newspapers
8. Don't underrate the enemy.
9. Don't waste breath in attempting to ascertain what is to happen to the German Emperor in this world or the next. We will endeavour to dispose of him in this world, and we will leave his ulterior destiny to others.
10. Don't begin to divide the German Empire before you have got hold of it.
11. Don't listen to any one who cries "Halt" before we have carried out the full purpose for which we are fighting,
12. When the war is over don't throw away its lessons.[104]

• Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil
• Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am
• Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All
• Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive
• Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together [105]

The No Asshole Zone:

• No feigned surprise.
• No well-actuallys.
• No back-seat driving.
• And no sexism, racism, homophobia [106]

I know I am ready to give feedback when:

• I'm ready to sit next to you rather than across from you.
• I'm willing to put the problem in front of us rather than between us (or sliding it toward you).
• I'm ready to listen ask questions, and accept that I may not fully understand the issue.
• I want to acknowledge what you do well instead of picking apart your mistakes.
• I recognize your strengths and how you can use them to address your challenges.
• I can hold you accountable without shaming or blaming you.
• I'm willing to own my part.
• I can genuinely thank you for your efforts rather than criticize you for your failings.
• I can talk about how resolving these challenges will lead to your growth and opportunity.
• I can model the vulnerability and openness that I expect to see from you. [107]

Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking:

1 Use Your Mistakes;

2 Respect Your Opponent;

3 The “Surely” Klaxon;

4 Answer Rhetorical Questions;

5 Employ Occam’s Razor;

6 Don’t Waste Your Time on Rubbish;

7 Beware of Deepities. [108]

Albert W. Dzur:

1. How have you repaired or created spaces of proximity and collaboration in your organizations? How have you, as an innovative public administrator, for example, brought citizens into reflective contact with each other to do substantive, non-symbolic work?

2. How has your democratic practice shifted or shared responsibility for the goals of your organization? How have you, as a democratic public health practitioner, for example, managed to incorporate non-professionals into your decision making while ensuring competence and accountability?

3. How have you released the capacities of those throughout your operational hierarchy and of those affected by your organization but not employed by it? How have you, as a democratic teacher or principal, for example, broken the traditional barriers that distance you from students in the service of institutional order?

4. Hardest of all, what have you created that will outlast your career? Have you shifted institutional habits so that the inefficiencies of lay participation are recognized as costs worth paying in order to enjoy collective or long-term benefits? Have you successfully and durably trained the next generation of democratic practitioners who will take up similar roles in your organization? [109]

"Undergraduates Megan Buonaiuto and Heather Dingwall and graduate students Maria Crossman and Sarah Stierch will also speak at the college’s ceremonies." [110]

“our whole search infrastructure existed outside of Puppet control. Our Puppet manifests for our databases were a file that just had a comment that said ‘domas is a slacker’.” [111]

"Embittered and confused, he became convinced that he was the victim of a conspiracy to steal his music and set out on a three-decade-long campaign to prove it, suing most of the major players in the popular music industry of his day. Although Arnstein never won a case, Rosen shows that the decisions rendered ultimately defined some of the basic parameters of copyright law." [112]; [113]

"Sindram, for instance, was among the first of 389 people to be barred from filing paupers’ petitions at the U.S. Supreme Court. He says he has also been barred from the campus of the University of the District of Columbia and, he says, from the since-closed grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. For three years, he was persona non grata at the main sales office of the Washington Metro system. And, he says, there was a period when he rated an escort from D.C. Protective Services whenever he entered the Wilson Building, which he does frequently." [114]

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 11:17, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

--Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 10:13, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Regarding imitations and forgeries (fourth letter)

So I had received a message from dear Dr. Barker concerning a possible venture in uploading images to Wikimedia Commons, by response is below:

“Dear Allan,
I fully agree with the fact that modern forgeries are in fact a problem and I wouldn't argue against the fact that if images of these coins were publicly available that it would make it easier for those in the business of producing fake coins to scam more easily, but this is equally true about the images from your wonderful book. Scammers can simply purchase a copy of your book (or worse, pirate a copy from an online wharez site) and use those images as the basis for their imitation, but the business of high quality fakes isn't as big as low quality forgeries and maybe it might sound naïve from my side but I would guess that if everyone would have access to images of genuine specimens that they could use them to avoid purchasing low-quality forgeries (this is especially true for novice collectors). I fully understand your reservations about releasing high quality images of these though, but the truth is that most new collectors will probably first look for information on wiki’s (this is true for myself as a decade ago my introduction to cash coins was via Wikipedia) and having an extensive library of images would show these new collectors not just the beauty of cash coins but their rich variety and history.
I personally have purchased forgeries in the past and when I upload(ed) images of those forgeries to Wikimedia Commons I had specifically noted how I could tell that they weren't genuine specimens to warn others from not making the mistakes I made. Also remember that (non-free) images are already available online that the bad guys have access to with a quick search.
My advice would be that if you were to consider uploading them that you would describe in detail how to spot the forgeries or if this would be giving the bad guys advice what to avoid I would advise only including the history of every individual coin. Well, if you ever want to share your collection on Wikimedia Commons I will be available here for you and you may ask me anything and I shall try my best to inform you appropriately, enjoy your work. ;-)
Yours faithfully,
Donald Trung Quoc Don
P.S.
You can also write essays on how to spot forgeries and what techniques the bad guys use on Wikimedia Commons to make that knowledge more openly available to others as well, it's sad that a hobby like coin-collecting is being perverted by forgers, I like holding a little piece of culture and history in my hands but the idea that it's possibly fake spoils the idea that you’re holding Ancient Vietnamese history.
Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.”

This was the reaction I wrote, I do have to admit that the possibility of forgers using Wikimedia Commons to get their models from is a possibility that I haven't considered prior. I shall be honest in that this is an issue I can't debunk because it's factual, however these images are largely already available on other websites.

Well, I can't say that Dr. Barker is my only option but as Charm.ru/Zeno.ru didn't work out as well as I had hoped (Vladimir Belyaev being mostly busy with maintaining his own website) I did find good news in that Dr. Barker saying that he’s already well-versed in Wiki’s as he said that he had his own wiki’s. I think 🤔 that the largest problem with the numismatic communities on Wikimedia projects is that many simply don’t consider donating images of their own collections to Wikimedia Commons, many articles are missing images of coins that go for less than $ 0,50 on eBay. Unfortunately Pinterest and Flickr are still better media for finding images than Wikimedia Commons.

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung (Talk 💬) ("The Chinese Coin Troll" 👿) (Articles 📚) 09:49, 7 December 2017 (UTC)