a wiki leak

A moment when a reminder is needed not to follow Wikipedia as a source of reliable or useful facts.

Follow each of these links and let them speak for themselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Alexia_Death&oldid=410139534 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alexia_Death lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-September/028139.html
lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2006-October/054957.html
lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-August/026966.html
lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-July/025936.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/333346695 wikipediocracy.com/ www.wikipediasucks.co/forum
[added 6.2018 :] en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:EmmanuelTzannes&oldid=842257477

Safety of your own property

Even the Autism Services Network, whose meetings' accessibility for us in the east is affected by Citylink's practices, have not received a word of answer, been completely ignored by Citylink. Even a project working with government funding.

Folks need to be warned against travelling anywhere by Citylink, on a free bus pass, outside the main population belt, off the frequently bus served roads. It is operating an arrogant policy of seizing bus passes from passengers without their consent, either if they don't work on the scanners or if the photo is eroded. Some weeks ago I saw it happen to an old couple not even at the point of boarding, when they might have a chance to grab the pass back out of any thief's hands, but in mid journey at the hands of an inspector. They were on their outward journey of a holiday and concerned about the effect on their return journey, and the coach was in remote country at the time, where if thrown off it for not cooperating they would have no other means of travel.

Citylink when complained to called this a "policy" and made not a word of admission of folks' right to hold on to their personal proerty. They even denied it would be violence for a driver to steal a pass and refuse to give it back.

Folks known to Elas through Number 6 have had it done to them and not had their new pass arrive in time before the temporary paper pass they were given expired, which is only a week. With the onus on you to apply for as new pass, you could very easily not have time to do it in time if you are on the outward journey of a holiday.

THIS IS A DANGER TO PERSONAL PROPERTY. That it can be stopped is an absolute test of the autism strategy's efficacy. Maurice Frank

stressing me

In the news today a compensation award for stress for a teacher who suffered a ridiculous workload. Resulting in a radio Scotland phone-in this morning on teachers' work conditions and stress. I failed to get mentioned on it that the media has regularly shown interest in overstressing of teachers and none at all in overstressing of their students. Never have I heard a phone-in on that.

It's now hitting 30 years since I was overwhelmed by a ridiculous workload at school, and I never got any chance to seek a compensation award through any industrial injury type of route. Employees get that, school students don't. The system assumes their abilities can be decided for them, and they are not free to walk out of the situation if it becomes impossible as it did for me. It is a lot harder and riskier a prospect for the mishandled school student who has left school with consequently no prospects, to simply sue, and besides, crises at school bring in the teenage mental health systems, who themselves can take sharply against you if you resist getting bossed around by them just as badly as by your school. The student becomes a mental health issue, with all that means for civil status, because of their teachers' actions which are not the student's fault. Then they are not going to be supportive witnesses for you, instead their attitude that you are mental unless you change yourself to fit in with all their ideals makes any suing impossible.

The emergence of aspies has been the life miracle I needed delivering into my hands proof that aspie skills at some limited types of fact retention had been the real explanation of the personal strengths that made my teachers recklessly greedy. Never was proving this point helped by the media recognising student stress as any sort of major issue. Now, we in the aspie scene know that student stress has been a recurring aspie experience from constant misreading of us by educators. The trusting public who believe reality is everything the tabloids and BBC say it is, still have no knowledge of this at all. They still only hear of the teachers suffering.

Maurice Frank

further to the library

Sep 10: Further to my item in April, it's still current and I want folks to dig it out and remain aware of it coz this is important !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

- on the library internet system being changed for a worse system, with a built-in time cut-off that can make you lose your work if you hit any technical problems over the net running slow when you are trying to save. Which is provenly bad for us if we are trying to use the web to communicate to organise to meet up with researchers and the like.

The change is going badly. At Newington library, computer users are being told that the one they have converted to the "Netloan" system that it's not working very well, and advise against choosing to use it.

Same as nobody uses it in the downstairs room at Central, where the first conversion to it was made. This is because the new system is a bad system, so bad it's not worth introducing - and the libraries trying it out are now finding that in practice.

Oct 28: The system's piecemeal further extension is a total shambles, and the system's own faults are visibly why, to every annoyed library user who is struggling with it. Timers are going wrong, starting their count with 2 minutes already missing that have not passed, just like in Fife. Sometimes computers are taking 6 minutes to log in, and the solution to slowness, available under the old system, of telling the previous user not to log out, is no longer available in this system. The system for staff to set bookings is working too slowly, so that you are frantic if they are racing against the timer to set an extended booking. Mostly the staff don't know how to work the extension system, either. There are blocks in the system that are meant to force a minimum time gap between users' sessions, the staff are struggling to override these in order to do extensions. These blocks shut you out of the system half the tmem and refute the chicken-and-egg idea that you are supposed to log in to the system just to book when you are going to log in!! I mean, what the ... At central reference where it used to be you could see exactly how long the queue was, you no longer have any idea when you will get a vacancy. Unless you stare over all the users' shoulders to see their timers, which is unlikely to be allowed or popular, so you have to bother the staff more than before and with a question it takes them a long time to answer, so the new system is not saving them work at all, and the answer is supposed to be that you have made prebookings that are difficult or impossible to get a chance to make for much of the time. Staff in every library where I have observed, which is many, are frustrated and stuck and apologetic the whole time.

Everyone can see none of this should be happening. Everyone can see only the old system worked. Everyone can see this is a disability injustice that was totally preventable.

Maurice Frank

Library internet

What is the point of making known the particular needs or medical interests of a minority, unless it is to ensure those needs are never abused? Malpractice is usually reckoned the right word to describe decisions made in disregard of any group's biologically real needs, and made without even giving any committal answers to aspects of need that will be overridden. The type of politician you know to run a mile from, is the type who leaves any point about harm, that you have put to them, utterly not acknowledged by so much as a word. Your disgust is invited at the smug ruthlessness of our local politicians, who are treating in this way a problem put to them on these terms. It concerns an idiotic change being threatened to the library internet service.

It should not be down to 50-50 luck, as it is, whether each county's library internet uses a system with automated timers, that cut you off when your time is up, or not. It makes a big practical difference. Timers are unfriendly, they force you to rush to save work for fear of losing it, instead of completing it, in case your time runs out seconds before you can complete your task. As you know, in all internet work there is always the chance of making a bad connection, and being stuck fuming while you wait for the screen only slowly to show any result, which even then might be a failed connection. That can happen when your time is close to running out, and it means, however careful you are about remembering to save your work, you are always at risk of losing it. Bad connections can result in you failing to save before the timeout happens. Then, all your work and a big chunk of your time have been wasted. That possibility is an abuse.

If there is no timer, you can make sure your task is safely completed before you hand over to the next user. That way, everyone is happier and less stressed. The occasional problem of a user encroaching seriously upon the next user's time and having to be pushed out, and from experience in Edinburgh that is rare, costs you far less user time than the danger of losing all your work because of a timer, and than the way a timer deprives you of effective use at all of your slot's closing minutes because of the risks in starting any new task. Timers don't protect library staff from a difficult user, either, for they provide no physical means to make that user leave their seat and instead they can make it worse by giving the difficult user justified anger over lost work.

They obstinately persist in having timers in Fife, and the difference between their library internet and Edinburgh's, in neighbouring regions, is extraordinary. I belong to both. The line taken by Fife, and by Galloway which shares its system, towards cases of lost work, is: we sympathise but tough. Yet the problems suffered in Fife have discredited timers utterly.

The timeout often does not happen exactly when it should, it can happen up to 2 minutes early or late. You can have less time left than the clock on the screen says you have. You know what that means: work is lost or not accomplished. As for when you log in, sometimes you get connected within a half minute yet the timer appears showing only 57 minutes left. Several staff at Duloch library in Dunfermline told me some most insightful info - the timeout drifts out of sync with the clock, this problem increases over time, until periodically they have to reset the system. Where does that leave the users?!

When printing is done, it is more work for the staff to worry about not letting the timeout happen during the printing. The system does not freely let you log out and back in if the computer gets clogged up, which in Edinburgh's you can do perfectly easily. At 5 minutes and at 50 seconds before timeout, a reminder appears, that locks the screen until you acknowledge it, so further interrupting any writing you are doing and costing time and adding to the stress. Yes you can ask for extra time if it is available, but the act of going to the counter and asking for it consumes some of the time you already have, and you are panicking to get served in time as well as to save your work. Those 2 needs are in conflict.

Then, as recently as within the last year, Fife's system sprang a fault where the timer can jump to zero and cut you off, just spontanously at any moment during your whole session. They had to stick up notices, and they only bothered in some libraries, warning users to keep saving their work very frequently for fear of losing it: all through your session. Which disrupts flow of work and takes up time, and is always subject to the danger of bad connections. This is a system that does not work.

It is not practical for anyone to rely on at all, a system that can function as chaotically as this. Timers' unreliability impacts on the communication needs of those autistics who can express themselves with less difficulty by words composed on screen than by conversation or phone. Timers are easily discriminatory to our friends in the dyspraxic community, for the demands they make on dexterity both mental and physical. Mental because it takes quick thinking and a build-up of multitasking, especially if you have to panic what to do about a slow connection. Physical to get mice clicked and keys pressed quickly to beat the clock, or even worse, to beat an unreliable timer that may malfunction.

Last summer, some of us took part in an AS research project by an Edinburgh University student, but done through NHS Fife and so with sessions held in Fife. I suffered disruption to organising my participation, when a bad internet connection was overtaken by a timeout on a Dunfermline library computer and resulted in loss of a message. For this, I got the fact recorded in the project, that the computer system with timers had disrupted medical research by frustrating participation in it, thus working against our interests as a minoirty group, and has added unnecessary coping stress to the whole process, for the participant to deal with. This would not have happened in a system without timers, like Edinburgh's, hence it proved the timer system is both medically harmful and an obstruction of science. This was recorded as a real fact experienced in practice.

This should be a basis for me to get timers abolished and banned everywhere, as discriminatory and a medical abuse of us. Discriminatory also upon all the populations of counties with them, compared to without them. Edinburgh's present system stands proved the ideal model for introducing everywhere. Our friends in Fife need the case proved for this change. Edinburgh owes them that. Imagine then the inconceivable looking-glass horror, of instead catching early word of a plan for the head-on opposite to happen, for Edinburgh to change to using timers too? In the face of the harmful mess they have made in Fife?

This is what I was lobbying my 3 local councillors for help to prevent, on grounds that it would be knowingly a medical abuse and intrusion upon our needs. My council ward is called "Almond" because there is a river called that. Its 3 councillors all belong to different parties, you would expect them to be keen to score against each other's ethical failings. I put that to them all at once. Norman Work, SNP, Kate Mackenzie, Conservative, and of particular interest because he is actually the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, George Grubb, Lib-Dem. These councillors are public figures, elected to keep all the health needs in their community remembered by the planners, right? There is a pressing public interest in revealing them falling short of that.

At first the only response to me came from the first named. He said he had gone to speak to the staff of 2 of the outlying and less busy libraries, not saying if he had mentioned my point about the medical research record. Nor the point about timers being bad for library staff's safety. He wrote not a word about that to me either, made no acknowledgement of its existence at all, as he wrote: "As the staff I spoke to were in favour of a timing system I am not going to go against their wishes". He then argued ridiculously that the time extension system, problems of already discussed, should be a reassurance!

The second named has never said a word. The third named declares these councillors all work together and answer on each other's behalf - and remember he is Lib-Dem, the party with the longest history of keenness for the electoral reform that gave us multi-member seats. "Thank you for drawing this to my attention. The 3 Almond Ward councillors are working together on most community issues." That is not the choice that multi-member council seats were created for. They all belong to different parties, yet the voter struggling to stop medical abuses is presented with a single line of brush-off from them all jointly, that is not even an answer to the problem. On what basis is there any party contest?

So you can put to them a point of medical harm and they are capable of completely ignoring it without mention, as one gives you the wrong answer and the others back him. Where does this leave you if you are a parent fighting a more serious issue over children's illnesses? Looks what it shows: that they don't have the first shred of an ethic to hold their answers accountable to whether they knowingly approve medical harm whose nature is on scientific record. Whose health is ever safe in hands like these?

"If he had acted supposedly for all 3 councillors and not just for himself", I asked, then the only way for the other 2 councillors not to be seen by name to choose culpably in favour of doing medical harm and hurting vulnerable groups, was "if they are committal not noncommittal in disagreeing with" his line. That is logical. Answer: "I have been following your emails about the libraries situation and I will ask Head of Libraries for an update on the situation". This resulted only in getting a copy of a report on the plan.

No position taken against the plan, by any of them. NO ANSWER, from any of them, to the medical harm point, or on the needs of groups affected adversely by the change. Does that sound at all committal to you?

Any answer directly from libraries management, to justify the change, is still awaited, since Feb 3. So in conclusion: Here is the state of democracy and of disability rights, going on all around you. Councillors across party are allowing a disability wrong to be done without taking any position against it, and he is ignoring how local scientific research already records that the proposed change will abuse us. The Lord Provost of our capital is going along with this and not a word of committality on it can be extracted from his office. If you are a visitor here in the Year of Homecoming, these are the standards you are homecoming to.

Maurice Frank

PS - added Jul 28. The library has now taken its first step, introduced the timer system in one department of Central library, the "Learning Centre" where the computers were already unstaffed. The result? Nobody uses them! Previously this section of computers was always full, now it is often empty and you never see more than the occasional user. The library users have voted with their feet, between the merits of the 2 systems. They have all totally chosen the old system without timers, as easier and friendlier to use. Observing this, the library now has no other honest choice than to find that the timers system is a total failiure, to cancel all further extension of it, and to share this practical test result with the rest of the country to force banning of the timers system wherever it is used.