Matt Britt

Attention: As of 2007-05-22, I have ceased editing Wikipedia indefinitely. My decision to discontinue activity here stems from broken and counterproductive prevailing interpretations and applications of well-intended policies, a lack of leadership and initiative to make tough decisions needed to keep things on track, the sheer impossibility of finding consensus in highly polarized debates, and especially the politics. If you would like to contact me, you may do so via email. You also may (or may not) be interested in my seldom-updated blog.

"Wikipedia is a poor implementation of a great idea." — Omegatron

Archives

Previous talk page archives: [1], [2], [3], [4]

Wikimania 2008/Conference of the Americas

Hello, As you may or may not know, Alexandria, Egypt was selected to host Wikimania 2008 [1]. So as to prevent the hard work of the many Wikimedians involved in the Atlanta bid from going to waste, we have decided to host a conference for the Americas. This is in no way an attempt to compete with Wikimania or make a statement against Wikimania.

As one of the people signed up to help with the Wikimania Atlanta bid, we hope you will join us at the Wikimedia Conference of the Americas. We will be having a meeting tonight in IRC tonight (Oct 15) at 9:30PM in #cota-atlanta on irc.freenode.org to discuss the conference. For more information about IRC see [2].

For more information about the Wikimedia Conference of the Americas see http://www.cota-atlanta.org and our wiki http://www.cota-atlanta.org/wiki.

If you do not wish to receive further notices about the COTA please remove your name from our notify list. --Cspurrier 18:12, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Binary prefixes

I'm surprised you're still able to deal with this sort of mess

I'm not; I quit.  :) Too much bullshit around here for it to be fun anymore.

this situation was one of the things which convinced me that Wikipedia's dispute resolution "system" is completely defunct and not worth participating in any further. The repeated arguments which invariably reduce to familiar squabble and the mass of incomprehensible rhetoric fairly effectively annihilate any hope for progress. There are obvious attempts on both sides to exploit the flawed notion of consensus in order to stagnate the discussion. It's like watching the failures of direct democracy being melodramatically played out in a nerd forum.

Yep.

However, I did find it interesting that the German Wikipedia managed to settle this issue somewhat with a big public vote. Perhaps something similar could be arranged here? It should be painfully obvious by now that no amount of dialog between the concerned parties will ever yield anything more than both sides claiming that their position is the consensus position. This will most likely continue to cause nothing more than page after page of unproductive argument. I would think that at this point it would be far better to just put the thing to rest for some predetermined period (say, a year or two) with a big vote.

Votes are never a good idea, because they polarize the issue, don't fairly represent the whole of the community (just the subset that happened to be online that day and aware of the vote), and prevent people from considering other's viewpoints and changing their minds. I was going to put the whole thing up for mediation, but didn't get around to it before leaving.

I wrote up my opinion here so that I didn't have to keep repeating it everywhere, and so people can refer to it during debates in my absence if so inclined.

Anyway, take care and stay sane. :)

I've been doing much better lately.  :) — Omegatron (talk) 22:33, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Matt you might be interested to know that the German WP vote resulted in IEC prefixes not being used (deprecated) and the terms KB, MB, GB always being used in the binary sense for data sizes and decimal for data rates [3]. If you want that to happen here then of course I agree with you. :) Fnagaton 01:12, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:Karl Süss contact aligner.jpg

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File permission problem with File:Ishihara plate rg.png

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Suspension of admin privileges due to inactivity

Following a community discussion in June 2011, consensus was reached to provisionally suspend the administrative privileges of users who have been inactive for one year, meaning administrators who have made neither any edits nor any logged actions in over one year. As a result of this discussion, your administrative privileges have been removed pending your return. If you wish to have these privileges reinstated, please post to the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard and the userright will be restored per the re-sysopping process (i.e., as long as the attending bureaucrats are reasonably satisfied that your account has not been compromised and that your inactivity did not have the effect of evading scrutiny of any actions which might have led to sanctions). This removal of access is procedural only, and not intended to reflect negatively upon you in any way. We wish you the best in future endeavors, and thank you for your past administrative efforts. RL0919 (talk) 21:58, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

File:Uberpenguin-mail.png listed for deletion

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Notice of change

Hello. You are receiving this message because of a recent change to the administrator policy that alters what you were told at the time of your desysopping. The effect of the change is that you will not longer be able to request restoration of the tools because of your prior inactivity. You have until December 30, 2012 to request restoration or else the policy will prevent you from doing so in the future; you would need to seek a new WP:RFA. Until December 30, you can file a request at WP:BN for review by the crats. Thank you. MBisanz ^talk 04:22, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

(delivered by mabdul 23:36, 3 December 2012 (UTC))

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:51, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of File:Oakland-Section map.png

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Proposed deletion of File:I486dx2-tight.png

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This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the page history of each individual file for details. Thanks, FastilyBot (talk) 01:03, 23 March 2020 (UTC)