Recent modifications on a wiki page

Wed Oct 14 17:24:12 UTC 2015

Hi :)
There are 'obviously' 4 separate issues here.

1.  I deeply apologise for the rude and spiteful activity you've suffered!
:(  We used to suffer from occasional spam but this sounds like something
else.  There may be sufficient cause to justify banning the person from
doing edits.  Hopefully it was "just a bad hair day" for them so it might
be possible to resolve it more peaceably but personally i would be howling
for blood around now - not so much for the personal nature of the attacks
but more because of leaving the pages in such a mess.

I'm saying sorry as part of the community who 'let' this happen and hasn't
taken action yet, not because of having anything to do with it myself,
except to the extent that none of us noticed it happening.

2.  No one "owns" any page.  Some people have a vested interest in certain
pages either through having worked hard on it themselves, or it being an
expertise or area of interest.  That does NOT give them the right to trash
other people's work on 'their' pages!  So, again sorry about that!

3.  Reconstructing the missing edits.  I thought these could be re-done
with the click of a button?

Personally i messed-up so many time early on that i started using
copy&paste to edit wiki-pages in an external text-editor such as GEdit.
Using simple versioning (ie by adding -v1 to the end of the file-name and
then making it -v2 and so on) i was able to keep a copy of the page before
i'd messed around with it at all.  I've not done this with Ubuntu wiki but
it seems to work quite well!

In the past i've googled the page and then used the neat little drop-down
hidden by the link in order to see their cached versions of a page but this
has limited success because they only seem to keep 1 cached copy per
web-page at best.

4.  If something can be done but only with considerable effort and/or
requiring quite a high level of skill then it might be worth making a
sub-page about it.  It sounds like something "the average user" might find
tooo complicated.  So maybe start with a first line saying that it
"effectively can't be done, except with some extreme skills" and then
either give them a link to the sub-page or else just carry on with the
section.  This way average users might not be "put off" so easily and might
feel a greater sense of achievement if they DO manage to get it done.

The person who slashed your work to ribbons may have been trying to avoid
getting too complicated for "the average user" and may feel "slighted" at
your implication that they didn't know.  however there are MANY better ways
of handling such issues and "dumbing down" entirely is NOT great imo.
Sometimes understanding someone's behaviour is a good plan, but forgiving
them for it is a completely different issue.

So, again i am deeply sorry, and somewhat shocked, about the bad
behaviour!  I hope this can be resolved peaceably but i think that should
be done by someone 'higher-up' who maybe has more 'authority' and the
ability to ban them quickly.

Apols and regards from
Tom :)

On 14 October 2015 at 15:27, Andrea Lazzarotto <andrea.lazzarotto at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I am writing here following a brief consultation happened via the IRC
> channel of the Ubuntu Documentation Team.
>
> Recently I found a page dedicated to BIOSes of Samsung laptops, which
> happens to be the brand I use. In particular, the following page states:
>
> This is because for many models, Samsung does not provide via their
> website *the option to see the latest BIOS version,* the release notes
> for a given BIOS version, or allow one to *download a dedicated, OS
> vendor independent BIOS upgrade method.* Instead, they provide a Windows
> only software update program (SW Update), that is used to both check if a
> BIOS update is available
>
> This information is not exactly precise. It is actually possible to look
> up information regarding the latest available BIOS version using Ubuntu. It
> is also possible to avoid using the SW Update Windows program and directly
> fetch a BIOS upgrade executable. Such executable is in exe format, however
> it might work in a FreeDOS environment as it is routinely done with other
> vendors (e.g. DELL), although this was not tested.
>
> Given the lack of precision and no mentions of these facts, I decided to
> contribute more information in the wiki, which resulted in the following:
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SamsungBIOS?action=recall&rev=83
>
> One other user, penalvch, rapidly corrected a mistake I made in one of the
> rows of the table after writing the wrong release date of the BIOS version.
> Soon after that, I contacted him via email to apologize for the error in
> the date and mentioning the fact that I included information on how to:
>
>    - determine the latest BIOS version of any Samsung model without using
>    Windows
>    - finding out the URL to the BIOS upgrade exe which contains the ROM
>    to be flashed (even though it’s unclear how to extract it, more on this
>    later)
>
> I didn’t get any reply, however in response I started to see all of my
> contribution firstly vandalized to make the text less clear (e.g. cutting
> sentences) and then completely reverted to the old version of the page, as
> if I “dared” to touch a page “owned” by someone else.
>
> I’m no expert in the Ubuntu Documentation Team, hence I believed the rules
> were somewhat similar to those of Wikipedia, i.e. that nobody is the
> “owner” of a page and that before dropping entire sections of a page and
> starting a revert war there should be some constructive conversation.
>
> Maybe I am wrong and nothing applies here, in this case tell me and I will
> be sorry for touching somebody else’s property, plus rest assured you won’t
> see any other contribution on the wiki from my side.
>
> Regarding the material I added, I later discovered that, in accordance
> with my view that it’s possible to gather such information from Ubuntu, two
> Linux programs on Launchpad do the exact same thing:
>
>    -
>    https://github.com/damianmoore/samsung-bios-check/blob/master/samsung_bios_check.py
>    - https://github.com/YKonovalov/bios-downloader
>
> Moreover, this forum topic discusses how to extract the BIOS ROM that can
> later be flashed with the AMI Flash utility:
> http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/samsung-laptops-roll-back-bios-updates.696197/
>
> Such flashing tool has a Linux version:
> https://www.wimsbios.com/amiflasher.jsp
>
> What is the best way to deal with this issue? Can the dropped material be
> restored?
>
> Thank you.
>
> Best regards
> 
> --
> Andrea Lazzarotto
> http://andrealazzarotto.com
> http://lazza.dk
>
> --
> ubuntu-doc mailing list
> ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>
>
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