jump to navigation

Peter Young, Asia, chocolate cake, & candles 30 January 2006

Posted by Zach in activism, direct action, non-food veganness, recipes, regional.
2 comments

We have some new users in the past few days: Jan, who’s been adding some pages on eating veg*n in several Asian countries (I’ve made an Asian category and put I think all of the pages in there); Ampolla has been adding some nice recipies (including Chocolate cake); and NTK, who’s been around a little longer than those two, has added some interesting info on candles and what they are made of. Glad ya’ll are here (:

I just spent a good while today making a page about Animal Liberation Front activist and prisoner Peter Young. Peter was involved in a bunch of successful mink liberations back in the 1990’s, got arrested, fled, and successfully evaded the cops for seven years, until getting arrested in late March of last year. He got sentenced to two years in federal prison.

I used a couple images from the Support Peter MySpace profile, and messaged them if that was OK. I imagine it’ll be OK.

Peter on liberating mink:

It’s just too easy. Two people can liberate 1,000 mink every 15 minutes. I believe if most people knew the simplicity of these actions, they would spend a little less time on instant messenger and a little more time tearing down fences. (from interview in No Compromise 28)

Spam blacklisting & bots 30 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta, spam.
5 comments

Gabriel emailed me back and said the SpamBlacklist extension works “quite well”, and that he can activate it on our wiki if we like. I’m assuming we like. I think he’s going to have it use the Wikimedia blacklist, which is a tiny bummer (wanting to be independent of Wikimedia and all), but it’s not a huge deal I don’t think, and I’d rather not hassle him about it. I’ll post here when he says it’s up and running.

I had also asked him about whether it’s helpful to tell indexing bots (e.g. search engines) not to index history pages or the Recent changes page. I got this idea from chongqed.org. The reason for doing this is that even if you eliminate wikispam from all current pages, it still is there in the pages histories and in the Recent changes log, and so if robots are indexing those, there’s still an incentive to spam even if it gets removed quickly. Gabriel
made some changes to our robots.txt file which should remove that incentive.

The only thing now is to make sure spammers know this – perhaps we could put a little notice on the front page if we start getting spammers again. (They seem to have dropped off the past couple days.)

Communication among wikivegans 30 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta.
3 comments

I’ve been thinking about the various lines of communication among the people working on or using the wiki (aka wikivegans), and here’s how it seems to me:

  • Discussion of policy, etc., should probably mostly happen in the community portal, or on a mailing list.
  • Right now it seems like the community portal is adequate, but sooner or later we’ll probably want to have a mailing list, like most wikis I know of do.
  • This blog should probably keep mainly to reporting news about the wiki, rather than being a forum for discussion, so discussions don’t happen in multiple places and get confused, and I should post in a way that reflects that.

Does that sound good?

A little drama on the high seas 22 January 2006

Posted by Zach in activism, blogs, direct action, the ocean.
1 comment so far

The Sea Shepherd blog has a story about the Sea Shepherd fleet trying to stop some Japanese pirate whaling ships off the coast of Australia. The main ship, the Farley Mowat, was approaching the main whale processing ship, the Nisshin Maru. I am guessing they intended to ram it, as captain Paul Watson has heroically done before, but the Maru can outrun the Farley Mowat, so they needed to slow it down somehow.

They dispatched two smaller ships called zodiacs ahead of them, equipped with devices (buoys attatched with cables) for fouling its propellers. After many attempts they still weren’t successful in doing so, and the Maru got away. In crewmember Joel Capolongo’s words,

While we may have failed to damage their ship and slow them down, we did chase them away from the area in which they had been stationed to collect the carcasses of the whales that the killing ships would bring it. We sent them a clear message: your lawless activities will not go unnoticed and will certainly not go unchallenged.

Issues on the future of the wiki 22 January 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, meta, spam.
add a comment

Existence: I just saw some questions on the future security of the wiki that TheChin! asked back in November on the Community portal page. Basically he was wondering if the wiki was going to keep existing and if the founder was still interested.

It most definitely is, and I most definitely am – which was a big part of the point of starting this blog.

So that answers the gist of his questions I think, but I wrote a more detailed response (financial, hosting, why I was gone), which you can read there.

Blog: This blog should be moved onto wikiveg.org soon, but where should it go? I lean towards having it on the front page. Discussion here. (Note: We’re definitely customizing the skin; I would customize this one but wordpress.com doesn’t give you that option.)

Spam: It might be too soon to tell, but it seems like the spam is dropping off a bit(?), perhaps as the spammers realize the wiki is active again…

License: Currently we are using a dual GFDL and Creative Commons “by-sa” license. My thinking was this:

  • Advantage: This allows us or other people to export content to both CC-by-sa and GFDL wikis.
  • Disadvantage: This doesn’t allow us to import any content unless it is already license as *both* CC-by-sa and GFDL.
  • Advantage: However, we have the flexibility to “switch” from the dual license to a single GFDL or CC-by-sa license, if we ever feel like the above disadvantage outweighs the above advantage.

I realize the last point seems counterintuitive, because it seems like that would be changing the license, which you can’t do according to the “share alike” (“sa”) clauses in the CC-by-sa and the GFDL. But as long we continued to make the old content available under both licenses (which we could do by just saying on the license page that “Content before [date of switch] is released under both the GFDL and the CC-by-sa”), we wouldn’t be relicensing any content; we’d just be releasing, from that point on, any new content under the one license as opposed to both.

A contributor just added a link to the licensing discussion on Embodiment Wiki (which I just added to our WikiNode), which contains the interesting idea of having different licenses for different kinds of content. That’s something we could probably do if people wanted to; for example, having an “Essay:” namespace where each page would have whatever license the author wanted. I think the basic structure of the license though (most content as dual GFDL and CC-by-sa) should stay the way it is for now. More of my feedback if you want to read it is on the Community portal.

Point of view: There’s an ongoing discussion on the Community portal about what POV the wiki should have. (E.g. Wikipedia’s policy is NPOV, neutral point of view.) The most obvious choice seems to be “vegan point of view” (VPOV). But the question is, does that mean we exclude anyone who someone thinks is not vegan enough, e.g. vegetarians, or people who think used leather is vegan?

For that reason, I suggested “tolerant vegan point of view”, i.e. VPOV but not being too iron-handed on dissenting opinions. Tim suggested multiple point of view, i.e. not specifically VPOV. Now a new contributor has said that they think it should definitely have VPOV, but allow if not encourage dissent as to what counts as VPOV.

To me this seems pretty close to my suggestion of tolerant VPOV. It seems like so far then, there’s a faint consensus to have the POV be VPOV but not overzealously so. I think we can just leave it at that until some issue comes up, and we can discuss and clarify it more then.

Banning spammer IP addresses 18 January 2006

Posted by Zach in spam.
6 comments

And what do I find, upon my return from abroad, when I check the recent changes? More linkspam! It’s been taken care of by User:TheChin! (who I just a little bit ago made a sysop, as a sort of thanks), and I’ve been banning the offending IP addresses:

62.3.32.55
62.7.244.103
66.246.218.107
67.18.98.36
200.206.132.208
209.66.124.150
210.216.178.81
211.228.29.213

I wasn’t sure how long to ban them. Permanently? (Is there a risk of a legitimate user trying to use the same IP address, or do IPs not work like that?) 24 hours? That is the default setting, but that feels too short. I ended up banning them for a week. If that doesn’t work out, we’ll try something else. One option would be to require people to be logged in to edit pages, but I think we’d all like to avoid that.
If you’re a sysop (Suse, TheChin!, Tim), and you see link spam going on, feel free to ban the IP address of the spammer by going to the page Special:Blockip and pasting it in. It’s probably a good practice to mention where the spam was in the “Reason” blank, although I admit I didn’t trouble to do that just now.

If you ever want to see the list of currently blocked IPs, go to Special:Ipblocklist.

(And if you ever want to see a nuts-and-bolts page like those, click the “special pages” link, found on the bottom left of every wikiveg page.)

From Honduras, a recipe 18 January 2006

Posted by Zach in recipes.
add a comment

I’ve been in Honduras and Florida for the past two weeks, taking a class in tropical agriculture. I just got back to school yesterday. Already four days behind (since school started last Wednesday), but things seem to be going OK.

More info about that trip is here, and I’ll be blogging about it a lot on my main blog in the coming weeks.

I was a bit of a naughty vegan, which I expected might happen. Once I was in a situation where a poor old Honduran grandma I was making a fence for made me a baleada containing an egg, and I thought it was more important to be gracious than to be vegan. (I usually don’t feel like that’s true in the States though, where people can be expected to know that lots of people don’t eat meat or other animal products. Just to be clear on that…)

What’s a baleada? It’s the national snack, that’s what. Sort of like a burrito. Well, here’s a recipe, without measurements, veganized by me. Maybe I’ll figure out some measurements later.

Baleadas

Ingredients:
· Flour tortillas
· Pinto beans
· Vegan cheese (e.g. FYH Monterey Jack or Cheddar Cheezly)
· Prepared tofu scrambler (optional)

Directions:
Mash up the beans and shred the cheese. Spread them (and the tofu scrambler if you’re using it) on the tortillas, and fold in half. Typically the beans should be closest to the fold and the eggs/scrambler closest to the edges. These are best hot, so ideally you’d make fresh tortillas, and warm up the beans and scrambler beforehand. You can also just microwave the whole thing, though it makes the tortilla less good. These can also be eaten with vegan sour cream.

This will soon be found at www.wikiveg.org/Baleadas…

Sweeping out the cobwebs 4 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta, spam, visuals.
add a comment

I haven’t done any serious editing of pages yet – the first item of business has been to clear up all the wikispam that has accumulated on the wiki while I’ve been away. Wikispam is a form a spamming that consists of putting lots of links on a wiki page to try to increase their ranking with search engines. I’ve seen wikis where this happens very blatantly; where a spammer just deletes a page and replaces it with links. This isn’t super effective since it’s really obvious to the next person who comes along that something needs to be fixed. On wikiveg though, the spammers cleverly put all the links under an HTML tag that made them *not* show up on the page unless you viewed the wikicode for the page. (Here is an example; the spam is at the bottom.)

I first noticed that this was happening a month ago I think, and I was expecting to have to spend a good hour tracking it all down and removing it. Thankfully though, another user, TheChin! had come by and eliminated pretty much all of it. He (or she?) was around as recently as December 29. I hope he or she comes back.

The next thing I’d like to do, though it’ll have to wait until I learn more CSS, is get rid of the (IMHO) godawful CSS skin/visuals I’ve got up there. I just threw together a few customizations of the standard MediaWiki skin back in May, probably between sleep-deprived essay-writing sessions. Originally I thought it would be a good thing to have a skin structurally very similar to the standard skin, for the sake of continuity with many of the well-known wikis (esp. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects), so that the learning curve would be minimal for people coming to the site. But I don’t think that’s a big issue anymore. I recently came across another MediaWiki installation using a highly customized skin, and while I’m not crazy about the skin itself, it still made me realize that the skin for wikiveg can look like whatever the hell we want. So, I’m going to try to learn some CSS in the next few months and come up with something really bold and nice-looking.

What this is about 4 January 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, meta.
1 comment so far

Around last May I started a wiki called wikiveg, for anything and everything having to do with veganism, animals, animal rights activism, and related concerns. The project stalled as I got too busy with school, and was preoccupied with other things over the summer. I’m hoping to get it going again this year.

I was partly inspired by the way Food Fight’s site has a blog on the front page… blogs are just much more interesting than a static page. Wikipedia manages to have an interesting front page by having lots of things that are constantly being updated (featured articles, news, “did you know?” bits), but you can’t really do that until you have a community of people working on the wiki. Hence this blog. I’ll largely be writing about what’s going on on the wiki and what’s gong on in the worlds of veganism and animals, which will be connected most of the time.

The guy I’m hosting with, Gabriel Wicke, said he could get a blog set up to load on the front page for me, but that probably won’t be for another couple weeks.

I’ve felt pretty sad about not working on wikiveg for the past several months. It got to the point where I knew it wasn’t growing and that I had a ton of work I had to do, which made me avoid it more, which worsed the problem. I especially felt bad about letting other contributors down, especially Tim from the German-language VeganWiki, and a man named David who wrote a completely kick-ass amazing article on kosher slaughter. I hope I can win them and contributors like them back in the coming year. I think I’m mostly through the problems that caused me to be a spotty, unreliable, AbsentLeader for the past half year; mostly I’ve just had way too much on my hands either in terms of academic work, or the emotional turmoil that comes with being a college student whose worldview gets drastically changed or reinvented every three months. (Seriously, it’s exhausting.) But I’m mostly at the end of the academic pressures, and I think finally I’m finished with having energy- and time-consuming worldview changes.

Right now I’m in Florida till Saturday and then Honduras until the 16th. I’ll probably do a little work on the wiki and another blog post or two before Honduras.