User talk:Pestergaines

Welcome!

Hello, Pestergaines, and welcome to the Mises Wiki! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay.

Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, ask me!

DickClarkMises 01:17, 5 November 2010 (CDT)

Linking

What do you think about using red links instead of links to Wikipedia? We don't want readers who find us to go off to Wikipedia--we want them to stay here. Even now, red links are allowed on WP (see WP:RED), but when Wikipedia was younger and less developed, red links were strongly encouraged, because they helped new contributors find an article to create. For these reasons I think it makes more sense to use red links as much as possible. Sure, Wikipedia's article on Tennessee will be more developed than ours ever will, but we can at least shoot for a simple stub that gives readers the basics, with an external link at the bottom to WP's article. --Forgottenman (talk) 07:32, 9 November 2010 (CST)

Good question. My take is, that this page is in many respects more focused than Wikipedia - on specific topics, it will provide more information, and specifically biased information - on many others, it will provide less information (at least in volume) with a specific spin or focus. On a great many topics, there will be no page at all.

For an example, I see no need for an article or Tennessee - unless there is a reason for it. So in that case I would link to Wikipedia. (Or even not link at all!) I have actually linked very liberally to WP's articles and consider it a strength, not a weakness - it points to more resources and (possible) alternative viewpoints, both of which make a resource richer IMO.

I will raise this in the mailing group, since it is an interesting strategic question, and deserves to be addressed by others as well. Thanks! Pestergaines 07:55, 9 November 2010 (CST)

Book sources and other crazy WP stuff

I managed to figure out what the issue was with Special:BookSources. The pages to change are MisesWiki:Book sources and MediaWiki:Booksources-text.

All the citation stuff is in place except for that dumb cite journal template... I just can't figure out why it refuses to accept a link-free work. --Forgottenman (talk) 14:36, 16 November 2010 (CST)

See [1]. Especially: "links regarding the book according to the contents of the page "Book sources" in the project namespace." So MisesWiki:BookSources isn't doing anything. --Forgottenman (talk) 14:41, 16 November 2010 (CST)

Thanks! Pestergaines 14:42, 16 November 2010 (CST)

Anniversaries

I've been using past tense for the anniversary pages, in order to distinguish their entries from those of the "current events" box. --Forgottenman (talk) 09:33, 9 December 2010 (CST)

Right you are, thanks for fixing my first attempts! Pestergaines 10:31, 9 December 2010 (CST)

On the International Project

A bit of discussion here.  :) -- RayBirks 14:20, 8 January 2011 (CST)

Check-in

Not much to report here. --RayBirks 11:03, 24 February 2011 (CST)

Vandals

I did some research and found that our spammers are using open proxies, i.e., fake IP addresses that change constantly. Wikipedia blocks such proxies as fast as they appear, so I don't think there's any issue with blocking the IP addresses that the accounts use. --Forgottenman (talk) 07:48, 11 March 2011 (CST)

Thanks for the research - and good work keeping those bastards out! Pestergaines 03:12, 12 March 2011 (CST)

Decided to go with it

This was the idea: The Trail of interventions. -- RayBirks 05:19, 10 April 2011 (MSD)

edit summaries

What does "+res" mean? --John James 16:11, 1 June 2011 (MSD)

 :) "resource" Pestergaines 16:29, 1 June 2011 (MSD)

I would have never guessed that. Do you ever use a different abbreviation? I think that may get too easily confused with "response". I guess that may not really matter, but if we're using the summaries, it would make sense for them to be understandable/distinguishable. --John James 02:24, 2 June 2011 (MSD)

I made my way through all sorts of variations of "link added" and similar, but 'link' doesn't always seem like the best characterization of the page linked to, so I finally stuck with 'resource' and it eventually shrunk to 'res'. Seems pretty conclusive, and isn't hopefully confused for a response (which is used on a Talk page anyway). So it should be fine. Pestergaines 17:17, 6 June 2011 (MSD)

Quick notes

Technically, you're counting articles...not pages ;) --John James 05:40, 18 June 2011 (MSD)

You do have a point sir, substitution performed. (Thanks!) Pestergaines 14:24, 18 June 2011 (MSD)

Recommended...any images you have that are free license (like barnstars), you might go ahead and upload them to the Wikimedia Commons so that others might be able to use them on their wikis as well. All images at the commons can be used on any wiki installation just as if they were uploaded locally. --John James 02:24, 18 October 2011 (MSD)

Hello

Thank you for the welcome. Would you happen to know if it's possible for me to edit my username so both words are capitalized? I submitted it as "stephanie_herman" and ended up with "Stephanie herman" on screen. Stephanie Herman 00:01, 16 September 2011 (MSD)

Hi Stephanie, that will require a bit of tinkering. I've requested the necessary functionality to be installed, hope it will be around fast. Best regards, Pestergaines 02:34, 16 September 2011 (MSD)

It's much easier to register again with the correct user name. --Forgottenman (talk) 02:52, 16 September 2011 (MSD)

That's probably right, but now it's done. You are renamed! Pestergaines 11:39, 17 September 2011 (MSD)

Awards

		Mises Wiki Motivation Award
		This Motivation Award is presented to you in recognition of your work in promoting the Mises Wiki and rallying the troops to help move the project forward. Keep up the good work. --John James 00:25, 7 October 2011 (MSD)

Thank you very much. It can be very hard to stay motivated sometimes - and this helps! I only hope we can grow our user base some more and keep people coming back. Glad to see you coming back as well! Pestergaines 02:24, 8 October 2011 (MSD)

		The Anti-Spam Barnstar
		This Anti-Spam Barnstar is presented to you in recognition of your tremendous work in keeping the Mises Wiki free of unwanted solicitations disguised as annoying stories and pretentious informationals. Keep up the great work! --John James 17:51, 18 January 2012 (MSK)

Thanks, man, these things can get boring quickly. Appreciate the award! Pestergaines 17:26, 19 January 2012 (MSK)

		The Anti-Spam Barnstar
		You deserve another one of these. I can't imagine how messy this wiki would be without your diligent efforts. They are not unnoticed, and certainly not unappreciated. --John James 01:27, 7 July 2012 (MSD)

Thank you! I'm starting to think whether we should block new users completely and only allow them to post after an additional verification (say via the mailing list or the forums). Other than that I'm not sure what else we can do to discourage the spamming. Pestergaines 10:52, 7 July 2012 (MSD)

Question regarding re-directing

I was wondering if you could help with re-directing a page; I just completed the stub for A priori proposition and was thinking that maybe also searches fom A priori knowledge should point there as I could have probably used either title. I am not sure how to re-direct a page, or whether all users can do so, so was wondering if you could help me out if you agree with my suggestion? Also thanks for the Barnstar! Matthew 00:17, 24 October 2011 (MSD)

Hi Matthew, redirects are actually quite easy and everyone should be able to create them - see help, all you need to do is put the redirect code into the page, nothing else is needed. (Check for example the code of this page.)

And no need to thank for the barnstar (though you certainly deserve it!) - it was promised as a reward for the contest, it only took me a while to put it up. :) Pestergaines 14:18, 24 October 2011 (MSD)

You are right redirects are pretty basic, thanks. Matthew 17:29, 24 October 2011 (MSD)

mises.org bio links

Why did you change the links to some of the bios? --John James 00:23, 10 February 2012 (MSK)

It was a side effect of fixes needed in this thread, there was a page with some wrong names and links. Things should be better now, but if I got something wrong, please fix it (or tell me). Pestergaines 10:08, 10 February 2012 (MSK)

helpful

Wanted to make sure you were aware of these. They make adding links a bit easier by handling the formatting autmatically:

• {{md}}
• {{mb}}

--John James 02:50, 18 February 2012 (MSK)

Hi! I know about these two, just never got around to actually learning their use (once I copy the basic data from a MD, it's easier for me to shuffle it around and create a link). Sorry, will see if it can be done more efficiently. Pestergaines 11:36, 18 February 2012 (MSK)

That's what I'm saying...those templates were created to make it more efficient. Basically they just allow you to input the data without having to mess with formatting. Just check out the parameters. You'll see. --John James 19:41, 18 February 2012 (MSK)

Since I'm too lazy to memorize those things, plus I needed a bit of coding exercise, I've made this script:

1. On a (daily) article or blog page of the Mises.org page, a "Remember Article..." or "Remember Blog..." button appears on the top right.
2. Clicking on it will let the script remember that specific page (no alert, add one if desired).
3. On a Mises Wiki page that is currently being edited, the buttons "Insert Reference..." and "Insert Link..." appear.
4. Clicking on them adds a reference to the remembered article or the corresponding link template.

Hope it is useful for others as well! Pestergaines 11:04, 20 February 2012 (MSK)

Now also supports the Circle Bastiat blog. Pestergaines 10:45, 5 May 2012 (MSD)

mises insert script

Such a brilliant little tool. Did you code this yourself? One quick fix...the old blog articles (blog.mises.org/xxxxxx/) redirect to archive.mises.org, so you might update the script for that. It's literally just a find/replace for "blog.mises" with "archive.mises". --John James 06:43, 29 June 2012 (MSD)

Thanks! :) I've updated the script as recommended. Perhaps we should update the blog template as well? Pestergaines 14:25, 29 June 2012 (MSD)

Gold oxide?

I thought that one of the advantages of gold is that it never rusts or tarnishes. And yet here you are, polishing it anyway! Nathan Larson 05:48, 10 July 2012 (MSD)

badum-tss --John James 12:12, 10 July 2012 (MSD)

I'm trying more of a transmutation thing here - polish something enough and it might turn into a diamond. :D Pestergaines 14:12, 10 July 2012 (MSD)

ReCaptcha, cont'd

I notice that it says here, about the captcha: "Unfortunately, as of 2011, some spammers appear to have figured out a way to bypass it, either through character recognition or by using humans. For that reason, it is not necessarily recommended." Maybe a stronger anti-spam measure would be Asirra? One way or another, the spammers have obviously figured out a way to edit the site despite the current Captcha. Nathan Larson 07:03, 13 July 2012 (MSD)

They did, and we need to adapt. Thanks for the idea! Pestergaines 09:13, 13 July 2012 (MSD)

While you're at it, you may want to consider these suggestions as well, to cut down on the amount of "friendly fire," so to speak, from ConfirmEdit. Nathan Larson 09:33, 13 July 2012 (MSD)

Another recommended tweak

Changing the content of MediaWiki:Signature to [[{{ns:user}}:$1|$2]] ([[{{ns:user_talk}}:$1|talk]]) (as it is at MediaWiki.org) would give each user's signature by default a link to their talk page. Kinda like mine. Nathan Larson (talk) 09:41, 13 July 2012 (MSD)

CategoryTree broken

FYI, Special:CategoryTree is broken. I googled the error message and didn't see anything (except for that google-indexed page on our wiki). Therefore, all I can recommend is downloading and upgrading to the latest version of MediaWiki, which is currently 1.19.1 (we have 1.18.2); downloading the latest version of CategoryTree and copying it over the old files; and seeing if that fixes it. Nathan Larson (talk) 01:31, 14 July 2012 (MSD)

Good find! I've forwarded the issue to our support people. Thanks again for all your help and contributions! Pestergaines 15:00, 14 July 2012 (MSD)

You're welcome. And thank you! I'm having a lot of fun here, and seem to be making a lot of progress. Nathan Larson (talk) 18:35, 14 July 2012 (MSD)

Student assignments

Do we know any professors who have assigned their students to write for Mises Wiki (or other wikis)? Perhaps we can have someone write a guide for other professors to crafting and managing these assignments in ways that will serve useful pedagogical goals, while adding value to the wiki. It would probably be much easier than having them write for Wikipedia (which some professors do), since we're a friendlier community to writers of the Austrian school. Maybe the student could be given a choice of assignments, one of which would be to write a wiki article of a certain length.

I'm not sure what other ways we could use to draw in participants. A lot of people have gotten turned off by Wikipedia's policies and those in charge of it, but haven't discovered or gotten involved in Mises Wiki yet. We've certainly advertised the wiki on mises.org plenty of times, and the reaction is often that it's a great resource with a lot of potential. But, despite all the well-wishers, not too many people get heavily involved.

In other news, I see this week's Time had a big article about the growing acceptance of polygamy. I feel ahead of my time for writing about it here before I saw it anywhere in the mainstream press. Who knows, maybe we'll all think of ourselves as ahead of our time for being Austrian economists before it became the trendy ideology of the future. Right now, we're more like hipsters. (Bow ties are so ironic!) Nathan Larson (talk) 07:56, 29 July 2012 (MSD)

Damn! Sometimes things really need a set of new eyes. The idea of having students write their assignments for the wiki comes from Jeffrey Tucker who seemed to eagerly advertise it before his departure from the Institute. I thought "Cool!" and happily continued working on the content. I thought with the Mises Academy it was only a question of time until the teachers start using it. And then, of course... nothing happened.

So we could complain about that, OR we could actually write a guide for teachers on how to use this resource. Why didn't we think of this before? :) Let's see what we can whip up... Pestergaines (talk) 12:09, 29 July 2012 (MSD)

What about Mises University? Wouldn't that be a logical place to start? I sent pat@mises.org this message:

Hi Pat,

Over at the Mises Wiki, we have been trying to figure out ways to encourage more participation in writing articles. One possibility we are working on is inviting students to help:

http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/MisesWiki:How_can_teachers_and_students_use_it%3F

http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/MisesWiki:Handout_for_students

We are still hashing out exactly what should go in both of those pages, by the way. But in the meantime, I was wondering, what ways, if any, there might be to get information about Mises Wiki to students, especially those who express interest in getting involved in helping further the Austrian School's goals. For instance, might there be an opportunity to give the Mises University students a handout on the subject, or for someone to deliver a quick speech explaining what the wiki is about, and how they can get involved?

If we could get about 5 or 10 regular contributors, we might be able to double the number of articles within a year. It really does not take very many dedicated editors to greatly enhance a wiki's coverage and quality. But it's often hard to find them. Nathan Larson (talk) 12:12, 30 July 2012 (MSD)

For what it is worth, we previously discussed getting Mises Academy students to write articles as assignments. We got a few contributions but the idea didn't pick up steam with the professors. The help page describing this is at MisesWiki:Academy. Forgottenman (talk) 20:33, 31 July 2012 (MSD)

Ah, dammit. :/ Do you see any real chance of pitching this anew? Pestergaines (talk) 20:59, 31 July 2012 (MSD)

Economies of scale

Sometimes it seems that economics of scale crush the smaller wikis. There are a lot of advantages of editing at Wikipedia, rather than at a smaller wiki. For one thing, one can more thoroughly wikify articles. I can, for instance, put double brackets around Columbia Law Review in hopes that the article will someday exist. Maybe some subjects won't ever exist here, or if they do (as in the case of countries or U.S. states), it's difficult to make the coverage as comprehensive as Wikipedia's.

From the editor's perspective, perhaps even more important than the outgoing wikilinks from articles one creates are the incoming wikilinks. One can go to related articles all over Wikipedia and add wikilinks to the Wikipedia article one created. It drives traffic to the content one created. Therefore, those trying to get as much exposure as possible for the subject they're interested in have logical reasons to go to Wikipedia rather than Mises Wiki.

Then of course there is categorization, page existence detection, and so on, which haven't yet been integrated cross-wiki as the template and file transclusions have. Wikipedia is sort of like the Wal-Mart that drives most of the mom-and-pop companies out of business. The question always arises, What the heck do we offer that Wikipedia doesn't?

E.g., does Wikipedia really crush the Austrian point of the view to the point that Austrian writers have to find sanctuary here? Not really. Anarcho-capitalism was (and is) a featured article on Wikipedia, and there is a lot of coverage of Austrian School subjects, such as Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and their books. Which is probably one of the reasons why even some of the editors who were enthusiastic about this wiki spend most of their wikitime over there.

Yeah, there were some skirmishes, e.g. over the Stephan Kinsella article, but it ultimately survived. I have never had a topic on libertarianism deleted for lack of notability, except when it was about, say, a minor libertarian candidate, and we have competition from LPedia for the hosting of that sort of content. LPedia is the official wiki of the LP, so it would naturally tend to draw that sort of content there.

Sometimes I edit Libertapedia just because my ownership of it means that I can be a scofflaw and post a lot of copyrighted content (images and such) without worrying about it getting deleted. That site isn't affiliated with an organization like the LP or LvMI that has to worry about its reputation and about getting sued. I'm pretty much judgment-proof. And I don't allow BetacommandBot to operate on my wiki. Also, I liberally strew interwiki wikilinks to Wikipedia all over my articles (we have mw:Extension:RPED installed over there); that practice is frowned on at almost every other wiki I've ever been to.

Well, I'm rambling a bit, but basically the main question that comes to my mind is, What really sets us apart? We can compete on either cost or quality. Maybe in some ways, it's less costly to edit here, because users don't have to worry about the ArbCom and a host of other meddlers. On the other hand, it's more costly to duplicate work that's already been done on Wikipedia. As for quality, our scope is narrower than Wikipedia's, so it'll never be the same kind of one-stop information source for almost everything one could want to look up. The best-selling encyclopedias tend to be the more comprehensive ones.

I came up with a proposed solution to all these issues, which was my Inclupedia proposal for complete interwiki integration with Wikipedia. Now it's just a matter of coding it. I like editing these smaller wikis, but I've just never seen any of them be particularly viable. Even the Mises Wiki main page provides information that, for the most part, could be just as easily provided by a Wikipedia portal on Austrian economics. Ironically, if Wikipedia were not such a good wiki, Mises Wiki would probably have more activity. Nathan Larson (talk) 06:56, 1 August 2012 (MSD)

Economies of scale are a killer. The smaller shops have to compete with the big guys and offer something they don't have (location, different focus etc.) or they might go out of business eventually (although hey - Walmart doesn't drive everybody out, many shops do survive and thrive - so there is hope out there :) ). For wikis, yeah, it is mostly about focus and quality.

For MisesWiki, there are (hopefully) several factors in its favor: Since we do have a different focus, we can go into more detail that just wouldn't fly on Wikipedia (I've got personally burned on the Malinvestment article by a deletionist faction - so it is there but it's a far cry from ours). Wikipedia will have much of the same Austrian-focused articles we have, but they may just have less content and sometimes rather derogatory remarks about the relevance of the school. That is one thing I knew from the start - some things won't get through on Wikipedia, whether due to bias or the non-mainstream nature of the Austrian school (that part is understandable for a general encyclopedia - and offers space for alternatives). Also note our work on crises or IP - you can't really do this sort of thing on Wikipedia due to the bias.

The next major factor is quality. (Don't confuse it with quantity!) There is a large number of highly in-depth articles that offer a lot of information WP articles don't. It turns out that it's not hard to beat Wikipedia in length and quality, particularly if it comes to obscure topics. (This is also a reason why I'm so focused on quality and try to avoid editorializing.)

The focus and quality is what makes these pages ideal for linking in debates - many debates spend a lot of time on definitorial issues. Austrians use many terms with a different emphasis than the mainstream (inflation, capital, etc) - and here the terms are just a click away, so you can always refer the opponent further. One goal for the wiki is to make it the ideal background material for most debates (an 'argumentation chain' where all the basics are covered as well), for which a wiki is the perfect format. Perhaps one day we'll get there. (As for the 'ragged edge', I totally get that, although I want to make MW more of a semi-official platform of the Austrian school. Hope my reasons are clearer by now!)

At the same time, one of the covert goals is to infiltrate Wikipedia with high-quality Austrian content, which can be easily prepared here and moved when it becomes 'ready'. :-> So, perhaps one day most of the content here will simply become part of Wikipedia anyway... we'll see.

Another point, if not as heavy, is distinction - there is a huge number of websites out there that simply repeat whatever content Wikipedia has. Most of the content here was built from scratch and can serve anyone as an alternative starting point for research (of course, pushing the Austrian line as well).

Now, quantity is where we get squeezed by Wikipedia - you can really link to anything there and expect an article to exist sooner or later. Here we have to do with what we've got and hope our focus and quality will save us.

The direct 'cost', as you put it, is initially lower. However, the ultimate cost can be really high for most people in the end - most don't have the stomach for detailed research, adding footnotes and the like. Plus the ever-present lure or moralizing and inserting our own opinion is so hard to resist! :) That's also what works against us... it seems like you can have quality or fast growth, but not both. (Even WP seems to aim for the first now, so there you go.)

Hope I got my point across! Some minor points:

• Yeah, ideally we should create content that is already linked from other pages, and add links where suitable.
• Dick Clark wasn't here that active from the start, so it's not that surprising.
• If you want to create an article about Morris and Linda Tannehill, go for it. :) (Use e.g. this for inspiration, may need to translate it first. Can't seem to find much info on them either... maybe this is her public profile? No idea. See also some wild speculations here, it does quote some resources though.) Good luck with this one.

Good thoughts. Pestergaines (talk) 12:32, 1 August 2012 (MSD)

Mob rule?

I guess content decisions on wikis basically boil down to mob rule, when there's not some central authority dictating. For example, this edit. I suppose it basically boils down to, "Anarcho-capitalism is an important contribution to economics!" "Is not!" "Is too!" And whichever side has enough interested editors to get in more "is nots" or "is toos" wins. Or if they're about equally divided, then maybe they compromise.

I notice the RW folk don't head over to our wiki to try to put forth their views. Maybe they only like to hang out on friendly turf, where they can call the shots? Wikipedia tries to get around it by saying "If you can cite a bunch of reliable sources saying that anarcho-capitalism is important, and the other guy can't find enough reliable sources to back up his view, then you win." Of course, in that case what's "reliable" usually is what you can find in academic databases, which is distorted by the issue of who is willing to fund scholars to put forth certain views.

RW seems to want to label whomever they don't agree with as "pseudoscientists," "cranks," etc. For that same reason, I'm not a big fan of Skeptic magazine anymore. They want to label certain religions they don't agree with as cults, when it's admittedly a somewhat arbitrary distinction. The skeptical community as a whole needs to get off its high horse and admit that any of us could turn out to be "cranks," depending on what evidence disproves in the future. It is quite easy for any of us to think we have very strong evidence proving a point of view right, and be totally wrong. Nathan Larson (talk) 09:45, 4 August 2012 (MSD)

I guess it is only fortunate that this wiki is not a democracy. No mob rule around here. ;)

On the other note, perhaps Mises Wiki is still not that famous for people of opposing schools to come here and start rewriting stuff to fit their views (barring the rare vandalism). Let's see what the future will bring as MW is being used in Internet discussions... Pestergaines (talk) 14:31, 5 August 2012 (MSD)

Speaking of the devil, MW is finally being noticed by Rational Wiki. :) Pestergaines (talk) 12:20, 6 August 2012 (MSD)

Template problems

I recommend the following:

• Copy w:MediaWiki:Vector.css and paste to our MediaWiki:Vector.css
• Copy w:MediaWiki:Vector.js and paste to our MediaWiki:Vector.js

That should take care of some of our template problems. It appears that MediaWiki:Common.js and MediaWiki:Common.css are already taken care of. Oh yes, and when you go to check to see if the templates now work, hit Ctrl-F5 to reload everything in your browser. Nathan Larson (talk) 12:40, 7 August 2012 (MSD)

Nebuchadnezzar remarks

Not sure how much interest (if any) you have in what goes on at RW, but this debate had me a bit stumped as to what to say in rejoinder. Maybe if you can figure something out, that could provide some material to add to the science article here! Not to mention, I'm trying to find an excuse to restore various edits made (under my Tisane moniker) to the Austrian economics article over there (sometimes with rather colorful language in the edit comments, as you may notice). Nathan Larson (talk) 13:41, 8 August 2012 (MSD)

Not so much really, but let's see. :)

A good response to Graeber might set some things straight.

A: Perhaps the wiki page could use some improvements. ;) One should probably note that Austrians certainly do not ascribe all of a man's motivations to selfishness (at least in the narrow sense) - and there is plenty of material on voluntary association and altruism. There is the notion of psychological profit with uncounted motivations behind it. Yes, people have also other things on their mind than profit in the narrow sense... so what's the point? For Austrians, human action is ultimately taken as a given, whatever reasons and motivations lie behind it.

B: Probably answered; it is perfectly valid to say that minimum wage does not have to create unemployment in each and every instance or right away; still, it needs to be asked what happens to the people on the margin in the long term...

C: See before - both Graeber and the Austrians may be right here.

D: We all do confirmation bias, brother. Amen. Now, looking solely at that article and its main graph, it would appear that the 1920s Depression did indeed have a faster recovery; although it did taper off at the end. There's also some articles out there that warn of using GNP data during the war, since the whole economy changed to a significant degree. It may have been a time of slower growth, but I don't quite see if more time was spent in recession after the 1920s one vs. the Great one... that it all culminates in possibly the worst economic situation is part of Woods' argument - that it was the evil regulators after all. Might be the confirmation bias, though.

E: Natural resources are always limited, totally agree with him. And that people are not always 'rational' in the traditional sense (is that what Behavioral economics is about?) is part and parcel of AE. Minsky appears to be somewhat compatible to AE, although AE folks might have a beef with the notion that speculative investment bubbles are endogenous to financial markets. (Sorry but I don't know his work; only skipped through the Wikipedia page.) Pestergaines (talk) 03:00, 9 August 2012 (MSD)

Asirra

Well, it looks like Dave Veksler wasn't able to fix mw:Extension:Asirra for us, despite trying the suggestions I gave. At this point, I do not know what advice to give him for fixing it, because I'm not sure how I got it to work on my three wikis; each time, I just kept playing around with configuration settings, file locations, etc. until it inexplicably worked. Well, now what?

The current situation can't continue. Our spam problem is fixed, but new users can't create accounts. We have to either get Asirra fixed or switch to a different spam solution. Unfortunately, most of the other ones have been defeated by spammers. mw:Extension:KittenAuth or mw:Extension:ConfirmEdit#QuestyCaptcha are possibilities, but would require extra labor to set up and wouldn't be that hard for a determined spammer to defeat.

Any thoughts? If you want, you can get your own MediaWiki installation and play around with it and see if you can figure out how one gets Asirra to work properly. But it sounded like you're pretty busy lately. Nathan Larson (talk) 08:00, 27 August 2012 (MSD)

Test post

Test. DavidGilmartin (talk) 15:12, 1 September 2012 (MSD)

Spammers

Either the spammers are operating manually now, or they've figured out a way to beat Asirra. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. Nathan Larson (talk) 19:24, 10 November 2012 (MSK)

You can't beat the power of the Internet... for good or for bad. Pestergaines (talk) 13:05, 14 November 2012 (MSK)

Human Rights Watch

A cursory search through mises.org and by google revealed that some libertarians had badmouthed HRW, but upon further investigation, I couldn't find much to substantiate the claims that HRW is all that anti-liberty. Going back at least as far as the 1948 promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the libertarian movement seems to have had an uneasy relationship with the movement calling itself the "human rights" movement. Often, that latter movement has sought to establish human rights commissions and the like, which libertarians tend to distrust as more bureaucracy. (Then of course there's the fact that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was chaired by some countries with pretty bad human rights records.)

I suppose it's similar to the feminist movement; what started out as something beneficial got hijacked by those who turned it to statist ends, so that certain terms came to have anti-liberty connotations. Anyway, I was pretty impressed with HRW's PLRA report, so I went ahead and joined for that reason. I guess it'll become evident pretty soon from their mailings whether they hold any objectionable views that weren't immediately apparent from their website. Nathan Larson (talk) 14:49, 27 November 2012 (MSK)

Absolutely, we should stay open to all possibilities. Especially with NGOs like this, it is often the case that they are a mixed bag - they may be against the evils of capitalism, "moneyed interest" and so forth, but at the same time can be really good when pointing out corruption and human rights abuses. Their views can differ from that of the average libertarian - so of course there will be disagreements. Let's give credit, where credit is due, and criticism where necessary. Pestergaines (talk) 15:16, 27 November 2012 (MSK)

Configuration issue

OK, it should be fixed now. Please let me know if other issues arise. Thanks, Nathan Larson (talk) 16:35, 30 November 2012 (MSK)

Seems to work now, thanks! Pestergaines (talk) 17:13, 30 November 2012 (MSK)

Blocking and protecting

Have you noticed any issues when attempting to block users or protect pages? We've been getting hit by the Mimco Facebook vandalbot (which has also been hitting other sites all over the wikisphere) and I attempted to block the IP and semi-protect the Main Page, but every time, after it said that the action had succeeded, nothing showed up in the log. Other than the upgrade, I don't think any recent configuration changes would have had an effect on that.

It seems more like the kind of problem that I've been noticing for awhile here, which is that sometimes when one makes a change, it doesn't seem to take effect right away. Or sometimes the edit never takes effect. I disabled caching briefly, but that didn't accomplish anything. There may be some other caching that I don't know about, although I think Dave Veksler said that he disabled CloudFlare for the wiki. Anyway, if all else fails I may be able to find some workaround to accomplish page protection or blocking, but it's not the preferred solution, because it probably won't be very elegant. Anyway, if we confirm there is a glitch, then I'll start scouring through MediaWiki.org, Bugzilla, etc. and try to figure out what might be the cause. Nathan Larson (talk) 16:11, 2 December 2012 (MSK)

The weird thing is I thought the main page was already protected; as of now I can see only the Template:New articles is protected. Maybe something went wrong during the update and the protection functionality is out of order? (I tried as well, protecting doesn't work for me either.) Pestergaines (talk) 16:19, 2 December 2012 (MSK)

To my recollection, the main page was not protected before. When I first noticed that, a few months ago, I thought it was due to some radical OpenEdit wiki way policy. Anyway, protection seems to be intermittently working, which is rather strange. I'm going to create a "twin" Mises Wiki installation and see if the problem occurs there as well. Nathan Larson (talk) 16:32, 2 December 2012 (MSK)

It's doing the same thing on my twin site. I uninstalled all the extensions and the issue didn't go away. Investigation continues... Nathan Larson (talk) 17:51, 2 December 2012 (MSK)

(2) IS better than (3)

On the Austrian preference between "bad" debt-free fiat money issuance to fund deficits and "badder" borrowing from a central bank to fund deficits, see Jo Salerno's article here. Finally I have a reference to use to establish that a credible Austrian position could be the support of pure debt free fiat money issuance. I was waiting a long time ... Karmaisking (talk) 02:43, 1 February 2013 (MSK)

Intriguing! I still have some difficulty with some of the arguments involved, but that's definitively legit. (You may want to link to this article, btw.) Please make sure to quote Salerno's assumptions, as they can have dramatic consequences on the result. I'm also not sure to what degree this would avoid the business cycle, but it's a valid speculation. Good find! Pestergaines (talk) 16:17, 1 February 2013 (MSK)

Salerno also gave a talk on the trillion dollar coin thing at the recent Mises Circle in Houston. I think it is essentially embodied in that Daily article [in fact he may have even been essentially reading it], but you might be on the lookout for that video when it gets uploaded to add as a reference. --John James (talk) 17:42, 1 February 2013 (MSK)

Austrian predictions

I noticed at least one discrepancy between the list of Austrian predictions on the general page, and the "main page" for the housing bubble. It seems to be a problem to have a comprehensive list on both articles...as if forces every addition/subtraction from the list to have to be performed twice (i.e. in two different places), and if it isn't done, you end up with different lists. I think we need to either eliminate the "main page" for specific predictions altogether, or have the actual list of predictions located there, and removed from the general page. Thoughts? --John James (talk) 00:23, 20 February 2013 (MSK)

Any thoughts? --70.114.188.172 04:22, 20 February 2013 (MSK)

Was that to me, or Pestergaines? --John James (talk) 04:38, 20 February 2013 (MSK)

Looks like the big list is a bit of a problem. What complicates things are the HTML comments on the "main page" that describe each of the resources. Both pages have their place, but if we can't keep both perfectly synchronized (which, realistically, we can't), I'd prefer to keep the short summary with a few key predictions pointing to the main page which will include all the other predictions and all details. That should shorten the predictions page as well. Pestergaines (talk) 14:28, 20 February 2013 (MSK)