User talk:Seb az86556

DYK nomination of Griqualand East

Hello! Your submission of Griqualand East at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and there still are some issues that may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! Materialscientist (talk) 08:55, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Your opinion please

Can I get your opinion on this edit please? Ohconfucius (talk) 08:18, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the help

Thanks for the help. I made all your suggested edits and included another reference. I don't wont to push my luck but if you get a chance can you help me create a table like the following:

Nike, Inc.

I have a copy of the company's annual report that I can pull the information from and reference.

Thanks again,

Ryan —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rware296 (talk • contribs) 14:22, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

The "table" is called an "infobox" in wikispeak. I'll find the "infobox company" and paste it into the article. You'll need to provide the information line-by-line. If you can't find into for a particular line, just leave it blank. A full descrption on what the lines are for is here: Template:Infobox Company

And by the way, sign your messages with four tildes like this:

~~~~

that puts your user name and timestamp in the riht place. Seb az86556 (talk) 18:20, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Asking for your opinion

I have a question for you. As an impartial editor, what do you make of pictures like this being slapped onto the "organ harvesting" article on Wikipedia? To me, it's just more attempts at activism thru sensationalism. Colipon+(Talk) 05:29, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

I am skeptical indeed. a) I checked the source - it's non-free from organharvesting.net and definitely a partisan source. b) Showing the victim isn't the problem to me (but only *1* such photo please!)-- the juxtaposition of "before and after" makes it a bad soap-opera. If we could crop it to get rid of that smiling guy in the suit, and simply show an unknown body, that might be ok. Seb az86556 (talk) 05:41, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

If you could raise the issue on the talk page it would be good. I feel as though if I raised it I will just get a few more personal attacks hurled my way. :) Colipon+(Talk) 05:45, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

ladies and gentlemen: my first "vandalism"-warning---wtf?

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to Rebiya Kadeer, did not appear to be constructive and has been reverted. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and read the welcome page to learn more about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. Thank you.--68.5.186.148 (talk) 05:36, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

This accusation is most certainly unfounded. I have worked for a long time with Seb on these problematic Urumqi riots articles and he has been a very helpful good faith editor in all areas. Colipon+(Talk) 06:25, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Don't worry about this; it's not uncommon for people to issue "vandalism" warnings to editors they disagree with, especially when they don't understand Wikipedia. A vandalism warning from a POV-pushing useless editor like this is pretty much meaningless. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 13:31, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Editwarring

You seem to be involved in an editwar at Falun Gong please cease reverting the same edits and instead going to discuss how to best improve the article with other editors. Please observe wikipedias policies WP:EDITWAR and WP:3RR Failure to do so may get you blocked.·Maunus·ƛ· 16:18, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Falun Gong

As someone who myself was only called in about a week ago by Vassayana, I have to agree with you. The problem is, I think, that those of us who are "new arrivals" don't yet necessarily know which editors act inappropriately most often, and given the length of the talk page archives, I kinda doubt anyone is going to subject themselves to making a full review anytime soon. I do think that there is one possible enforcement request in the pipeline, and, whether that party is one of the worst offenders or not, seeing someone penalized might help keep the others from getting overexcited too often. John Carter (talk) 16:50, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Basically, four SPA's took over all the Falun Gong articles and they will not tolerate any material that is not favourable towards Falun Gong (similar to earlier disputes at Scientology). You can find out more here under the heading "Additional comments". Enjoy. Colipon+(Talk) 19:43, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

I personally don't know about filibustering, but I'm quite confident that these four users have all violated their share of policies to get their way since the June 2007 arbitration.

What's more interesting is that they are good at making the situation look as though it's a pro-FLG, anti-FLG war, confusing newcomers to these pages like yourself. In reality it's just neutral editors (like OhConfucius) fed up with their cycle of advocacy. It's somewhat analagous as to - say - if Uyghur extremists went and took over the article on the July 2009 Urumqi riots so only content that favours them can make it onto the page. :) Anyhow, balanced input from users like you or John Carter is very valuable. Colipon+(Talk) 20:08, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

@Colipon: While I agree there are far-reaching problems with the handling of FLG articles, I would caution against labeling all these users SPAs. I'm not familiar with all of them, but I know the Asdfg12345 has edited things other than this; while his edits may be 90% FLG-related, I know he's also worked on other general Chinese culture pages (not to mention he once AfD'ed Masanjia Labor Camp, which is not something you'd expect from someone who is a blind FLG follower, given that pretty much all of these RTL-related articles are anti-China).

Furthermore, all of these editors, while they might have strong opinions and might not always be easy to work with, are still human beings and can even be reasonable people if you get through to them in the right way: for example, just today, HappyInGeneral agreed that a pro-FLG peacock word in an article was not helpful, and OlafStephanos undid his own edit in that article because of the comments left at the talk page. My point is, these editors might not be your favorite people, but they are still capable of behaving maturely, and that needs to be taken into account.

Finally, it is important to recognize the difference between bad SPAs and maybe not-so-bad SPAs. A bad SPA is someone who only comes to Wikipedia to keep trying to create some article that doesn't belong, or to argue the same point over and over (i.e., ChinaHistorian), or vandalize, or make the same edit forever. On the other hand, some people might not consider themselves SPAs, but are just people with a strong interest in one topic and, since people naturally only want to edit what they're interested in, these editors stick to a certain group of articles. For example, some editors I have worked with (such as Kwamikagami, Maunus, and Angr) are linguists and spend most of their time editing linguistics or language articles; that doesn't make them bad people, it just makes them people who are contributing to the areas they are interested in and have expertise in. The Wikipedia ethos tends to give people this idea that to be a good editor someone has to be a real renaissance man and edit a wide variety of articles or do a wide variety of tasks (take me, for example—I have written articles about linguistics, street newspapers, Chinese law, and musicians...and aside from that I do speedy deletions and template coding), but that really should not be the case. While it's great if you're a renaissance man and work on a bunch of different sort of articles at once, it is by no means a requirement. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 21:28, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Filibustering

Nosy bastard, aren't I? The closest thing I can find which addresses this point is WP:NOTUNANIMITY, which is only an essay. I tend to think that to determine there is a block of partisans who will uniformly act like partisans unfortunately is harder to do, and should only even be attempted by mediators or arbitrators. However, if there are a number of neutral outsiders who find that a fairly consistent block of apparent partisans seem to be acting to stonewall things, and they outnumber the partisans, then it might be possible to either establish that the one group is partisan, or, hopefully, perhaps persuade them to end the stonewalling. John Carter (talk) 20:37, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

No problem, thanks for being nosy. It just seems peculiar to me that said group spent the past hours lamenting the injustice of the protection ("Wrong Version"), keeps hauling slight insults at people ("raging bull", "anti-FLG"), and keeps discussing that at lenghth with hardly any comment on substance. If that continues, they'll buy time until August 22 and then just go on as usual. Seb az86556 (talk) 20:43, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Worst case scenario, if it seems obvious that there are a number of individuals who appear to be engaging in disruptive editing as per WP:DE, the sanctions currently in place could be imposed on them. I have a feeling that if anyone were looking to try to get disciplinary measures imposed on a group of editors, though, the arbitration enforcement people would be looking for a solid case to be prresented to them regarding each individual included. John Carter (talk) 20:47, 8 August 2009 (UTC)