User:Hijiri88

Userboxes

enThis user is a native speaker of the English language.

ja-4この利用者は母語に近いレベルで日本語を使いこなせます。

fr-2Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau intermédiaire en français.

zh-1該用戶能以基本的中文進行交流。
该用户能以基本的中文进行交流。

ga-1Tá Gaeilge de chaighdeán bunúsach ag an úsáideoir seo.

This user has been on Wikipedia for 19 years, 5 months and 9 days.

This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than ten years.

BAThis user has a Bachelor of Arts degree.

1stThis user has a First-Class Honours degree.

這個用戶對中國歷史感興趣。
这个用户对中国历史感兴趣。
This user is interested in Chinese history.

This user is interested in the History of India.

This user is interested in Japanese history.

This user is interested in Jewish history.

This user thinks that users who insert a userbox on their page that says they "try to do the right thing" and if they "make a mistake" they would like to be "told" are being incredibly hypocritical if they also fervently insist that they have made no mistake and aggressively "defend" themselves against anyone who tries to tell them.

This user thinks that retirement and semi-retirement are serious issues facing Wikipedia and its need for better editor retention. Claims to retirement or semi-retirement should not be made lightly. This user believes that editors with more than one average edit per week over the past month should not claim to be "retired" and editors with more than one average edit per day over the past month should not claim to be "semi-retired"

Please, please don't feed the trolls.

My main editing interests at the moment include Chinese and Korean classical literature (which are at least vaguely related to what I studied in college) and biblical, Jewish and early Christian topics (which is a hobby I picked up mostly by accident in 2012/2013 while working as a translator in northern Japan).

I put pages on my watchlist as a formality. I keep pages I created on my watchlist because almost no one ever edits those pages, and when they do about half the time it's a sockpuppet of some user who got blocked for harassing me years ago, so getting an email when those pages get edited is convenient. (The other half of the time it's a bot.) I normally "watch" pages that I recently edited, and when I log on to Wikipedia I check my own contribs first to remind myself what those pages are -- I don't keep regular watch on my "official" watchlist. So when I tell you I am "watching" a certain page I mean this in a slightly different way to most other Wikipedians. Technically.

Explanation of my current username

My username is a reference to Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, the "Saint of Poetry" (歌の聖, uta no hijiri).[1]

"88" references the year of my birth, and has nothing to do with neo-fascism. The penchant of various editors such as the long-banned Til Eulenspiegel to compare me to a Nazi aside, there really is no such connection. (This was during my IP-phase in early-mid 2014; I reported the incident here. Curiously, he claimed to have been following me ever since; this is weird, because I made very few logged-in edits for like eight months. How was he following my edits?)

Rant about my old username and how it has been usurped by ... me ...

I also used to own the username Elvenscout742 until some genius decided that the Japanese/French Wikipedia editor still known by that name who hasn't edited in years must be a different person from me, and all my redirects had "en" added to them and the old ones deleted. Am I allowed to re-add those redirects? Or must all my talk page signatures from 2005 to 2013 be permanently red-linked, lest I accidentally be confused with the "other" Elvenscout742?

Unified log-in confuses me...

Response to off-wiki criticism by disturbingly racist editors

In case any overt racists like these two care about such things, by neither citizenship nor ethnicity am I Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, northern Han, Filipino, Tibetan or Mongolian. I was born in Dublin, Ireland to two Gaelic-Irish Catholic parents, and lived there until I moved to Japan in 2012 at age 24. My first language is English. My skin is pale, my eyes are blue and my hair is light brown.

As an aside, neither of these editors, whose Wikipedia IDs are obvious from their koreansentry.com IDs and the content of their very disturbing conversation, have been blocked yet. Not for what they wrote about me -- I find it more amusing than offensive -- but for their admitting to tracking down a Chinese and/or Filipino editor with whom he/she had a disagreement and posting their personal information, along with some very uncomfortable racial speculation, off-wiki.

Also of note is that on the following page one of these users actually used the phrase "Jewnited States of Murica"!

Bart Ehrman article needs revision

It's been itching at me for a while, but the "reception" section of that article is almost exclusively focused on criticism of Ehrman and his views (or views of modern scholarship in general, rightly or wrongly attributed to Ehrman who has summarized them for a popular audience). This criticism invariably comes from the right. But from what I can establish, the more noteworthy criticism of Ehrman and his views within the scholarly community is from the left. Elaine Pagels and her criticism of Ehrman's (conservative) assessment of the Gospel of Thomas as a second-century gnostic text is nowhere to be seen. This bites me every time I listen to this lecture. (15:30~16:30, especially 16:17~16:21 -- "one by a professor in a close state to here which I will not mention"; the way she says this is delightful. If you think I'm reading too much into that, she explicitly states who and what she means in a different lecture, at 15:42~15:55.) This is notable because, among the things conservative evangelicals attack Ehrman for, virtually none of them are scholarly positions Ehrman has advanced; they are the consensus positions among modern practitioners of historical criticism, that Ehrman simply summarizes in some of his popular books, and so mentioning these "criticisms of Ehrman and his views" in the article on Bart Ehrman is incredibly misleading and WP:UNDUE. The actual criticism of Ehrman's scholarly opinions that he advances in his more scholarly writings (and books aimed at a university-student audience) tend to receive the overwhelming majority of what little criticism they do receive from the left, as Ehrman is actually relatively conservative in a lot of the issues about which current scholarship is concerned.

How often have I been called a troll and never been blocked for trolling?

This list is not exhaustive. To be such, it would need to include the entire archives of the external blog the banned user JoshuSasori set up for the sole purpose of calling me a troll despite no longer being able to do so on-wiki. Google "trollvenlout" -- some of the pages are still visible despite the blog itself having been abandoned when JoshuSasori apparently decided he had better things to do with his life.

• [2] Go away, you said, bitter troll.
• [3] [Hijiri88's talk page posts are] trolling
• [4] trolling from [Hijiri88], a user who evidently has too much free time on his hands.
• [5] [Hijiri88's talk page posts are] troll droppings

My thoughts on BLP and GNG

If enough sources do not exist to cover a subject objectively and in-depth, then that subject does not merit a Wikipedia article. If a YouTube personality is popular, but he shamelessly spoils new movies in the middle of videos on unrelated topics, then a Wikipedia article on him should be able to discuss criticism of him for that; if enough sources do not exist to do so, then the article should be deleted. If an actor in a long-running children's television show is primarily notable apart from the other dozens of actors who have appeared in said show because he stole an auction item whose sale proceeds were supposed to feed sick children, then we should have sufficient reliable third-party sources to describe that incident and not violate BLP: if we don't, then the subject is not worth a stand-alone Wiki article.

Subpages

• Alternate accounts
• Antisemitism in early Christian literature
• Ariwara no Narihira redraft
• Articles I created or significantly contributed to

Random observations

• It's nice when various members of the Wikipedia community with different points of view can come together and send a message that fascist propaganda is not welcome on the project; it's not nice when the same anti-fascist Wikipedians immediately break down into squabbling over bullshit as soon as the moment has passed.
• My sentences are too long. I'll occasionally start with "The fact that..." followed by a subordinate clause, and then forget to add a verb to the main clause at the end.
• Editing from an iPad and no desk while holding the iPad makes hitting letters in the middle of the screen difficult. I once misspelled "ignored" as "inored" twice in one post, twelve words apart. And then there's this monstrosity.
• When one has a serious issue that needs dealing with and takes it to ANI, providing any amount of detail in one's explanation is almost certain to backfire. Actively contributing to every other thread on the page in the hopes that someone will return the favour is generally fruitless.
• Templates are the Devil. Avoid them.
  • This applies to both the article space and user talk pages.
    • It especially applies to template shortcuts, most of which look like they work when you search for them and then suddenly don't when you transclude them.
• Reverting someone's edit because they made a misprint in one word or because they mistranscluded a template (see immediately above) should be explicitly mentioned in WP:DICK if it isn't already.
• Wikipedia hates Samaritans. Not the northern Israelite ethno-religious group. The modern metaphorical Samaritans who try to do good deeds for strangers. If you try to weigh in on a dispute on any of the noticeboards, look carefully at all sides of the argument, closely analyze all the evidence presented, do your own independent research, and present a reasonable solution to solve the problem, the best you can hope for is that your solution will be accepted, you will get at most one or two "thank you"s on your talk page, and everyone will immediately forgot your contribution. More often than not, though, your solution will either be steamrolled or quietly accepted and enforced, and you will make enemies of one or both sides of the dispute and you'll wind up being the next person to open a noticeboard thread on it. Lather, rince, repeat.

Pet peeves

• Saying "it meets GNG" on AFD regardless of what the basis for AFD is (the page is a POVFORK, it's a COPYVIO, etc.).
• Users who close discussions as "no consensus" (in favour of the status quo) because a proposal was made by one user and not seconded but also not opposed by anyone. This is especially annoying in AFDs, RMs and the like where the closer is a non-admin whose lack of access to admin tools mean they are technically incapable of performing a proper close.
• Arguing that a block proposal is punitive when it clearly isn't.
• Bludgeoning talk page discussions so that everyone on the other side gets so frustrated they leave in order to go do something constructive (like they are supposed to), then claiming that you "won" the discussion. Or, worse, opening an ANI thread about how the other parties are "refusing to discuss on the talk page".
• Users who edit-war/tag-team to insert unsourced material or material that wasn't there before into articles, then open ANEW reports as soon as the one who isn't tag-teaming hits 3RR.