User talk:For7thGen

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, For7thGen, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!  Friday (talk) 16:37, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your nice welcome, Friday. I appreciated it then and I appreciate it now that I've carried out your suggestions. I'm responding in one month, which is fast for me, it sometimes seems. I just took a look at your User page, and thank you for it too. Time to put up an article myself, today if all goes well. For7thGen 16:14, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Nope, nobody really takes turns. But, when I see a user who doesn't have a talk page yet, I usually give them a welcome message. Friday (talk) 04:40, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

• Here are four off-the-topic paragraphs which were on the Golden Rule (ethics) talk page, moved here as promised there:

I had a big problem with the (only two) footnotes. I would much prefer to have done them as on my own website, entering [1] and [2] in the text, not superscripted, and linking them to what WP calls id attributes at the start of the footnotes. But WP has decided by consensus to follow the guideline of WP:Footnotes and that is what I have tried to do. "WP:Cite sources" is also a consensus WP style guide, and not inconsistent. In the case of multiple references to the same footnote, as in this article, the autonumbering of the footnotes is pointless since numbering by hand is needed anyhow, in the templates "ref label" and "note label."

So let's change the footnote consensus guideline to include let's say "method 4," the one above involving [1] and [2] in the text, not superscripted, linked to id attributes at the start of the footnotes. This method 4 would be "allowed" only for those few articles where more than half of the footnotes are multiply referred to.

This footnote guideline change does NOT depend upon whether autonumbering works, since numbering by hand is needed anyhow. And I know it may be considered poor judgment on my part, as a novice, to suggest this change. I'm not really a novice in matters involving communication and guidelines, however; plus my judgment is that most of the WP community wants even a novice to suggest changes.)

If I knew that "wiki" should be used where I'm using "WP", I'd write wiki instead. Also wiki is easier to write. But I think WP is easier for the reader; and the big multiplier effect, 100's of potential readers for my one writing, makes me choose the harder WP. For7thGen 16:10, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

American Civil Rights Movement

The easiest way to fix vandalism is to revert the changes yourself. Or, if it's a persistant vandal, you can also leave them a note on their user page and ask them to cut it out. If they're not logged in, this is less useful, as the user page is linked to their IP address which may change. I'll put this article on my watchlist and keep an eye out for vandalism.

Also, there is Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism, a page specifically for reporting vandalism, but it's really only meant for persistant vandals who've already been warned and haven't stopped it. The instructions there will tell you more. But, if there are content issues, particularly if you're not sure whether sections were removed for a reason or whether it was simple vandalism, you can rarely go wrong by leaving a note on the talk page.

Another thing (and this is something that's not usually obvious to folks who're new here) is understanding the role of administrators. Admins are no more (or less) responsible for taking care of vandalism than anyone else. It's everybody's job to do it. (Altho, since we're all volunteers here, I hesitate to say that anything is anyone's "job".) Still, I tend to revert vandalism when I see it, and I highly encourage anyone and everyone to do the same. You can find out who the admins are by looking through WP:LA, but there are several hundred. In many cases, when people think they need help from an administrator, what they really need is help from an experienced editor. Not all experienced editors are admins, and vice versa. Admins do have the ability to protect pages from editing and block users, which is sometimes neccessary when vandalism gets out of hand.

Wow, that's long. Anyway, hope this helps. I'll look through the civil rights page and try to see what's going on with that. Friday 14:40, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)

Good work on the November 7 revert. I fixed the recent vandalism and tests, I think. -Walter Siegmund (talk) 03:01, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Good additions to revert too. Walter Siegmund (talk) 03:27, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Embedded links

Hi Frank, I noticed on the RfC against SEWilco, you expressed confusion regarding how to use embedded links. This is explained on WP:CITE. I've left an explanation here. Cheers, SlimVirgin ^(talk) 11:06, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

I've replied on Wikipedia talk:Cite sources. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:25, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi Frank, could you leave comments about articles on the article talk page, please? Cheers, SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:53, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Your note

Frank, thank you for going to all that trouble. It looks very interesting, and I'll try to get back to you within the next couple of days. Cheers, SlimVirgin ^(talk) 23:10, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Looking for articles to work on?

Hello, For7thGen. I'm SuggestBot, a Wikipedia bot that helps new members contribute to Wikipedia. You can learn more about ways you can contribute and find articles you might like to work on by going to the Community Portal. I hope you find this useful. -- SuggestBot 01:48, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Image:BernardWilliams.jpg

Hello, For7thGen. An automated process has found and removed an image or media file tagged as nonfree media, and thus is being used under fair use that was in your userspace. The image (Image:BernardWilliams.jpg) was found at the following location: User:For7thGen/subpage 2. This image or media was attempted to be removed per criterion number 9 of our non-free content policy. The image or media was replaced with Image:NonFreeImageRemoved.svg , so your formatting of your userpage should be fine. Please find a free image or media to replace it with, and or remove the image from your userspace. User:Gnome (Bot)-talk 06:05, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Image:BernardWilliams.jpg

Hello For7thGen, an automated process has found an image or media file tagged as nonfree media, such as fair use. The image (Image:BernardWilliams.jpg) was found at the following location: User:For7thGen/subpage 4. This image or media will be removed per statement number 9 of our non-free content policy. The image or media will be replaced with Image:NonFreeImageRemoved.svg , so your formatting of your userpage should be fine. The image that was replaced will not be automatically deleted, but it could be deleted at a later date. Articles using the same image should not be affected by my edits. I ask you to please not re-add the image to your userpage and could consider finding a replacement image licensed under either the Creative Commons or GFDL license or released to the public domain. Please note that it is possible that the image on your page is included vie a template or usebox. In that case, please find a free image for the template or userbox. Thanks for your attention and cooperation. User:Gnome (Bot)-talk 10:16, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Black beauty and Blinders

Hi!

I left your assertion about blinders in the article, but I removed the reference to the discussion page.

The casual reader of Wikipedia ( that is, our real target audience) should remain ignorant of the talk pages. Therfore, the actual article should never refer to any talk page. Talk pages are intended to facilitate discussion about changes to the articles: (i.e., should we put the blinkers stuff into the article? where? etc.)

Incidentally-- Thanks for adding to the article. I personally like your changes, and I feel that we need to add them appropriately. -Arch dude (talk) 03:40, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Fathers-line table

The article Fathers-line table has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Appears to be a neologistic (protologistic, actually) term devised by the article's author. In this form and in the form with possessive "father's", this gets zero Google Books, Scholar, News, and Web (other than WP) hits, so it fails WP:V.

While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{dated prod}} will stop the Proposed Deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The Speedy Deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and Articles for Deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Deor (talk) 03:56, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

First, does a shortening of "patrilineal portion of the Ahnentafel or ancestors table" to "patrilineal table" still result in a protologistic term? I've substituted patrilineal in place of my original fathers-line (you are correct, here fathers is a plural, not a possessive).

In any case, as already explained in the Talk page of this article, there is a problem to be solved: There is a DNA-real-world entity, a table of information about one's patrilineal ancestors or one's patriline, for which the administrator of my own Richards DNA project apparently refuses to use the wrong-wrong name "pedigree chart" already used by a few administrators (most do not show this entity to the public at all), and just gets by without any name for the entity. What do you suggest to do about this problem? Surely you don't think my content added in the article, genealogical DNA test (see there), should list all the contents of the DNA-world entity each of the 3 times this entity is referred to? (Ie, twice for patrilineal and once for matrilineal.) Please, can you possibly find the time to understand the problem and then to help me (and WP readers) to handle the problem?

I am not married to my original name "fathers-line table". I would be very happy to drop it and just use "patrilineal table" or whatever you can suggest instead. I really hope you can help find a solution to this problem. If it comes to that, I am not married to the content which contains the un-named entity, either, and am willing to just drop that content -- although it really should be in that article to help WP readers. I do think the readers would be better off without seeing any content than they would be seeing wrong content. I would be willing to cooperate with you in putting the matter before other DNA-knowledgeable people to help with this matter. What more can I say to be helpful to all of us?

Upon rereading the above and noticing the word entity, I had an idea: If you agree, I'll rewrite my content which uses the un-named entity to, first, list the actual contents of the DNA-world entity, then say that 'This DNA-world entity will hereafter be referred to as the "patrilineal (or matrilineal) entity", footnoted if you like but I can't think of any footnote that would help the reader. This would not be naming the entity but it would allow one to refer to the entity within the given article. I've done all that I can think of. My solution to the problem could be either "patrilineal table" or "patrilineal entity". You decide it and tell me your solution to the problem; if it is not unreasonable, I'll do it. For7thGen (talk) 06:29, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm afraid that I know nothing about genealogical DNA tests, so I don't think I can be much help to you there. I do know that we (by which I mean Wikipedia) can't use made-up terminology to discuss such things; the terminology we use must be that used in the reliable sources we draw on to write articles. I suggest that you discuss the best way of handling the matter with other editors having knowledge of the topic, either at the article's talk page or at the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Deor (talk) 17:02, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Deor, first, you did your job, and tagged an article which I myself had clearly labelled in my Edit summary, "Create this name to meet an existing need, see Talk page." As stated in my last paragraph above, your tagging my article did help give me the idea of what I should have done, namely: Refer to the entity within the article itself, without naming the entity for use outside the article.

So I'll do that soon, and of course you're free to look at the result. And then I'll void the tagged article, so someone with that capability will please delete that article and its talk page. But I'm preserving the contents of that talk page below, for my own record of exactly what I wrote:

"Creating a name and using it

"Within Y-DNA testing I needed a name for the member's information used in surname DNA projects. My own Richards DNA project's administrator formerly called this information "ancestral chart", and its current administrator (whom I respect) apparently avoids any name for it by just providing a form to enter the info into. And, some project administrators use the name "pedigree chart" for this information. But both a pedigree and a chart are 2-dimensional, a diagram showing all one's ancestors.

"In contrast Y-DNA and mtDNA are very linear, being handed down the fathers line or the mothers line. So, after literally days of research, I finally realized that both of these lines are part of the Ahnentafel or total-ancestors table, which gave me the names (fathers-line table, etc), see this article. (I tried lots of names, including fathers-line list, which somehow seems lame to me.)

"If I could have just put the given description-of-info (see this article) into a definition of the name "fathers-line table" in Wiktionary and if the WP article would automatically default to its sister project Wiktionary for the definition, I would have been fine. But NO. So I believe I had to justify the new name in a new WP article, even though that seems to me to violate all sorts of WP policies. If someone else thinks it better to just describe the new name in genealogical DNA test where I needed to use the name, that would be fine with me, but I myself think it wiser to do one's business right out front, in a new article.

"So tell me, someone, what should I have done??

"And don't tell me to just use the 2 existing names above, beginning with "ancestral chart". I did that, to start out with, including creating it in Wiktionary, and within a day someone had changed my definition totally, to a definition I agreed with actually -- which told me how wrong any name containing "chart" would be! ...no matter how many administrators have already started using "pedigree chart", see my entry on its Talk page today. For7thGen (talk) 05:50, 2 September 2009 (UTC) "Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fathers-line_table"

So Deor, thanks for your WP work, and good luck to us all, For7thGen (talk) 19:46, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

The underlying problem here is that Wikipedia is not, nor is it intended to be, a venue for cutting-edge research or terminological innovation. We are by definition a tertiary or even quaternary source of information from secondary (and tertiary) sources that meet our standards of verifiable information taken from reliable sources: peer-reviewed journals, professionally-edited news publications, etc. We are not even remotely suitable as a place to introduce new terminology, or innovative uses of existing terminology. Thus: the inhospitability towards neologisms (especially since there is a certain type of editor who decides that if he just made up a new word and used it on his Facebook page or his Wii user forum, Wikipedia would be the perfect way to put the new word into the meme-pool. If a term is new to the literature of its subject, it shouldn't appear here or in our sister project the Wiktionary until it actually comes into widespread documentable use. --Orange Mike | Talk 16:53, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Matrilineality

[Copied here from Damuna's Talk page, and then followed by his reply]:

Damuna, you placed a non-"worldwide view" tag on the article section matrilineality#Matrilineal surnames more than two days ago, and it has been almost that long since I complied by improving the article and discussing the issue on its Talk page (see page). Now I would like to ask nicely about your plans to remove the tag?

Thanks again for your help with the wording of this section, For7thGen (talk) 18:04, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up - I didn't have the page on my watch list, and I'd yet to check it again (usually I find that it takes longer for any changes to be made). I've taken down the tag now.

If you don't mind me commenting, from your edit summary it seems like you're a bit hot under the collar about the issue, and you seem to have taken offence at my tagging - you may want to take a few steps back from things in order to avoid taking things personally. I'm not criticising you as a person, or the effort you've put into the article; I am simply appraising it and giving commentary. "Our culture" is comparative (in the sense of "our culture" and "their culture"), and as there is not a worldwide culture shared by all, it would thus make an assumption about the article's readers, potentially alienating some of them. Thank you again for reminding me, I probably would've forgotten otherwise. :) --Muna (talk) 18:41, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Genome discussion

Well, while I'm no expert, I can say a few things.

In haploid organisms, including bacteria, archaea, viruses, and mitochondria, a cell contains only a single circular or contiguous linear chain of DNA (or else RNA for retroviruses), which is likewise referred to as a genome.

First, a haploid organism like bacteria, can have more DNA than just a single circular or linear chain of DNA. There are plasmids which can be transferred from bacteria to bacteria, for example, and these are then considered part of it's genome. In eukaryotes, the genes in the DNA are called the gene-coding regions, that is, they code for some sort of amino-acid-polypeptide product (via ribosomes). In prokaryotes, the gene-coding region _is_ the genome, but in eukaryotes there are regions of non-coding DNA, but this DNA is still considered the genome, since it may not code for proteins, but it obviously has something important to do with the genetic structure of the organism, although the 'reason' for this is still being debated (c-value paradox). At any rate, the sentence you wrote sounds good, except for the words 'only a single'. Hope this helps, Rhetth (talk) 21:25, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Rhetth, thank you, it does help. But you left it for me to write, so I've studied the wording more, with the readers in mind -- and here goes:

In haploid organisms, including bacteria, archaea, viruses, and mitochondria, a cell contains genes, usually in a single circular or contiguous linear chain of DNA (or else RNA for retroviruses), which are likewise referred to as the genome.

Can you live with that? I like having "a cell contains genes, usually in ..." because that allows for other genes and/or DNA, in other unusual cases. And I prefer to help the amateur reader who needs reassurance that in this haploid case the coding DNA is also called genes...

So if you don't help further within a few days, that will be the wording I'll put in. Or, feel free to do the wording yourself, either here or in the article. (And I think it would look really lame for me to notify you on your Talk page that you have a message on my Talk page -- or would that be the normal thing to do? For7thGen (talk) 20:14, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Should I delete, in Matrilineality article?

{{helpme}} I would like advice, about the following paragraph added in the Matrilineal surnames section of the above article, by 188.81.67.154 on 16Sep09:

In Portuguese and Spanish-speaking cultures, children usually carry surnames from both the patrilineal and matrilineal lines. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, it was still common in Portugal that sons would carry the father's family name while daughters carried the matrilineal surname.

On the one hand, I think the paragraph is wrong; on the other hand, I hope it is right because I like having it in the above section. So, I need advice: Is it my responsibility, as possibly the most knowledgeable WP editor in this topic, to remove what I am at least 90% sure is wrong? If I don't remove it, soon, then what excuse do I have for not doing so?

I'll leave this whole message on that person's talk page:

188.81.67.154, can you please reply on my talk page, where did you get your information from? In other words, please try to convince me that your paragraph is correct. Please keep in mind that, by definition in the Matrilineality article, a matrilineal surname is handed down from mother to daughter together with their mtDNA (even if they themselves knew nothing about DNA). Also please keep the following information in mind:

I have worked hard, over these last 10 days, to verify your information. In the article Portuguese name, the 2nd paragraph in the section 1.1 called "General" states that Vasco da Gama's daughter took (only) her mother's surname -- which was probably the patrilineal surname that her mother carried (unless you can prove otherwise). And the daughter actually had the (patrilineal) surname da Gama as well, per the article Vasco da Gama. Also, that 2nd paragraph was added on 27Jan08 by 213.22.99.179 with no source information and not even an Edit summary, so there is no indication that its information is correct. In summary, I have sadly not been able to verify your paragraph, and I very much hope you will do so yourself. I'd really like to have more matrilineal surname examples! In any case, I join the rest of WP in welcoming you as a fellow editor. For7thGen (talk) 23:24, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

(Answering help request) In this case, I would recommend following the concept of bold, revert, discuss - ie remove it for now and discuss it. The information is not referenced to a reliable source, and therefore not verifiable.

I note that most of the article lacks footnotes, and hence most of the rest could similarly be removed by anyone; this is the problem with any unreferenced 'facts' - other Wikipedians may not be able to check that the facts are valid, and would be quite within their 'rights' to remove lots of the article. Verifiability is a core policy, as "we" (the community) have agreed that the only way to control the factual accuracy of the project is by providing sources for any facts that are either 'challenged or likely to be challenged'. It is recommended that there be a reference for at least each paragraph, and more is desirable. Featured articles cite almost every single 'fact'.  Chzz  ►  23:39, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Genealogical DNA test

JIma ad, I'm wondering why you would remove the following sentence and source reference from Genealogical DNA test on 3Dec09? :

Here is an actual example of such an information table.

It seems to me that readers need a source reference that such an information table IS in use within Surname DNA Projects. Do you agree that a source reference IS needed for the use of such information tables? If you do agree, then perhaps you thought the reference should be done differently from the way I did it... If so, please redo it yourself so I can learn how you would prefer it done. Or, otherwise please explain your removal (and what about using an Edit Summary to explain your removal?).

Please answer on my own talk page so I'll be aware of your answer.... For7thGen (talk) 03:52, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

References

A problem with the term "uterine ancestry"

Hi Saforrest, Can we go back more than 5 years to 4Sep04 to try to get to the bottom of a problem that has recently arisen concerning the WP article Matrilineality, as follows?

First, the problem is that when one enters the word uterine in the Wikipedia search box, one obtains a very erroneous result, namely the following Disambiguation page:

The word uterine can refer to different meanings:

   * relating to or near the uterus or womb
   * having the same mother, but different fathers, see matrilineality

Disambig gray.svg

In this Matrilineality article's History page, I learned that you inserted the following sentence in the article, on 4Sep04:

"The uterine ancestry of an individual is a person's pure female ancestry, i.e. a matriline leading from a female ancestor to that individual."

Your inserted sentence now appears as my sentence below:

"One's matriline is thus one's pure female ancestry, and is also sometimes called one's uterine ancestry."

You and I can agree, I assume, that the above Disambiguation page is seriously in error. Can we also agree to simply drop all mention of "uterine ancestry" from this Matrilineality article? Or can you provide some evidence to support either my sentence or your sentence? I myself have not been able to find any other use of the term "uterine ancestry" or any other support for either sentence.

If you agree, I'll remove the last half of my sentence above from this article ––(and then I should cause the erroneous Disambiguation page to be removed from WP too, right?) Please reply on my talk page, rather than on yours. Thank you very much for whatever time and trouble this costs you –– to help WP readers... For7thGen (talk) 07:21, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi again, and I'll just go ahead and remove the last half of my sentence as above, in the next day or two..... And you may remove this whole topic from your talk page as far as I'm concerned. For7thGen (talk) 03:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi For7thGen: apologies, I haven't been very good about checking my talk page in the last few weeks.

I also find the term "uterine ancestry" to be peculiar. I added it after reading something like this reference or this one. It appears that "agnatic" and "uterine" are synonyms for "patrilineal" and "matrilineal" respectively, which were historically used in the context of royal or noble pedigrees. Our shared unfamiliarity with this field may explain why we both find the term odd.

I have no objection to making uterine simply a redirect to uterus. As for mentioning "uterine ancestry" in matrilineality I'm not so invested in this that I'd kick up a big fuss if were gone, but why remove mention of "uterine" from matrilineality but not "agnatic" from patrilineality? Granted, "agnatic" gets talked about more because of agnatic primogeniture, but that's no reason by itself to avoid all mention of "uterine" in matrilineality. Notice also, interestingly, that primogeniture actually has mention of "uterine primogeniture". Thoughts? --Saforrest (talk) 18:56, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi Saforrest: It was (and is) a pleasure to receive and read your reply. From your reply I've learned more about uterine and agnatic pedigrees, and from your two sources. I've changed Matrilineality to reflect what I learned. Please feel free to redo it, you certainly have my blessing. I do feel that it is now better than it was, for the WP reader. You can see that I gave "uterine ancestry" its own short paragraph, relocated toward the bottom of the Intro.

This interaction with you also stimulated me to straighten out my inaccurate use of the word Matriline, in the Matriname section of the article (my improved wording does not need Matriline). So I wish others would make more contributions in this new section of mine, not less.

Finally, you made it very easy for me to rectify the WP page Uterine. Except for your suggestion above, I would not have thought to look at the History of the page, from which I learned that I really could just edit it back to a Redirect page. Obviously I could write a message on JoannaB's Talk page but I don't think it's needed.

My heartfelt thanks to you, For7thGen (talk) 21:06, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

The wikigender.org website

Hello Hu12, I do appreciate your work on behalf of all Wikipedia (WP) readers, including me – I appreciate most of your work. According to the History of the file MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist, you added the website wikigender.org to this Spam-blacklist on 13May2008.

This wikigender website was initiated by and is supported by the OECD Development Centre (which will be referred to below as the sponsor) with the altruistic goal of helping us humans by improving our gender equality and thus, our productivity. For more information, see the WP article Wikigender and its source references; or if still more information is needed, feel free to ask me in case I can help....

It is true that external links to this wikigender website from within WP would increase this website's exposure. But that would benefit only us humans rather than the website or its staff or its sponsor above, and thus would not violate any WP guidelines. I hope you will be able to agree with this logic.

• Accordingly, I hope that you will remove wikigender.org from the above Spam-blacklist. But if, instead, you wish to reply to me, by all means do so, preferrably on my talkpage so I'll be aware of it. Gratefully, For7thGen (talk) 05:30, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Now, a day later, I want to keep the following copy of my official Proposed Removal of the website's blacklist:

I recently created the WP article Wikigender, and was shocked to find that its official website wikigender.org was blacklisted. Now I have learned a little about spamming and blacklisting and whitelisting (much more than I want to know, honestly).

How would this website's inclusion benefit Wikipedia (WP)? (Very little, in the short-term.)

• In the long-term, all of humankind will benefit from people's access to knowledge, knowledge both on WP and on Wikigender. Wikigender will be helped by increased exposure for its website, whose goal at least coincides with WP's own goal. And if Wikigender is successful then WP and Wikigender can coexist long-term in a complementary fashion.
• This Wikigender website was initiated by and is supported by the OECD Development Centre with the altruistic aim of helping us humans by improving our gender equality and thus, our productivity. Long-term, the latter will directly help both WP and the rest of humankind.
• WP's linking to wikigender.org, increasing this website's exposure, cannot possibly provide financial benefit to this website, its user/editors, its staff or its OECD sponsor above – exactly the same as links to WP cannot financially benefit WP.

If, however, in the early days after its March2008 launch some Wikigender users did make way-too-many links from WP directly to their own articles on Wikigender, then the links to articles perhaps should remain blocked. (I'm just guessing – I am totally ignorant about why this website was blacklisted by Hu12 on 13May2008.) If so, can you unblock the main website but leave all links to its articles blocked?

Do whatever is the "right thing" to do. Also please remove the message I already left on Hu12's talk page, if that is appropriate. I'll try to check back every few days, to reluctantly learn more than I wanted to know...

• Signed, For7thGen (talk) 10:00, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Wikigender

A tag has been placed on Wikigender requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable, as well as our subject-specific notability guideline for web content. You may also wish to consider using a Wizard to help you create articles - see the Article Wizard.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the page does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that they userfy the page or have a copy emailed to you. — Gavia immer (talk) 23:25, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikigender's significance

• I just posted the following text on the Wikigender article's talk page, and am duplicating it here for my own record, for my own information in the future:

I'll start by listing four WP articles, all on the subject of gender equality: Women's rights, Gender equality, CEDAW, and Equal Rights Amendment. These four, plus many other related WP articles, clearly show the importance (or significance) of this subject to some WP readers. The project Wikigender provides people with a framework, or public forum, for working together toward gender equality, as documented and described in the WP article Wikigender. The question to be decided is, How important is this Wikigender public forum? I really cannot give an answer beyond my own personal answer, that it is important enough for me to do the work of writing its WP article.

This is really a question for WP, Do we choose to meet the needs of some WP readers for information about gender equality but choose to ignore their need for information about the one existing public forum (Wikigender) on this subject?

• (Again, my own personal answer is or was to do the work of writing its WP article.) For7thGen (talk) 23:50, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Hi, For7thGen!

Unfortunately, I had to delete the article you created - Wikigender. I fully understand your comments above, but you're talking beside the point. If Wikigender.org (the website) is notable, it will meet Wikipedia's Guidelines on Notability. You might review those guidelines, then see if you can find reliable sources that talk about Wikigender.org (the website). If you can find those, feel free to recreate the article with those sources!

BTW, you might also want to stop by WP:LGBT, the LGBT Studies WikiProject.

Thanks, and happy editing! -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 01:16, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Just checking for source refs for a WP article on wikigender; still not too easy to find, and wg.org's own list of publications seemed totally useless for US editors, ie, all are European, etc. But Google books does yield 6 out of their first 20 that look good to me and which have no connection to OECD (which has several more). So someone who has time could now write the article. I think, try to follow the style of the current OECD Development Centre article. In the External links section say something like

• The official website can be accessed by entering wikigender.org in one's url box (or URL box).

Still trying to help myself by filing this info here. For7thGen (talk) 00:28, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

OECD Development Centre

I just wrote and saved the new article, OECD Development Centre, plus the following entry on its Talk page, copied here for my own records:

I'm shocked that there is no WP article, OECD Development Centre.

Evidently, this article was created, and was deleted by Hu12 on 23May08 for "blatant advertising", as I discovered after doing all the work of researching and then writing my version. Also there was a Talk page for the article, which Hu12 did not delete for whatever reason, so its Talk page lasted until 21Aug09.

The OECD webpages, in the oecd.org domain, took a little getting used to, for me. I didn't really want to learn as much as I did about how to use their system. But I trust that they do at least have reliable "permalinks", using the complicated numbering system seen in their URLs.

I hope that this article does a more-than-adequate job of being encyclopedic rather than advertising anything. And it may be too-well-source-referenced if anything, with 34 source references to 15 different sources. But my main concern has been to help the WP reader by giving useful information in reasonable depth, as readable and easily understood as possible. A couple of quotes that I used are still not clear to me but hopefully they are clear to experts in their topic, and I judged that each quote was needed. But I am not emotionally invested in this article whatsoever and won't even be aware of future changes to it. (I hope many "improvements" will be made by many others.)

So hopefully WP's red links to this "OECD Development Centre" topic will now be blue and will stay blue forever. For7thGen (talk) 01:52, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Same article, its section, Work on gender equality

Duplicated here for my own convenience:

Gavia immer, My thanks (and also, thanks from all WP readers, I'm sure) for your Edit Summary (quoted in the 1st bullet below) when you recently (5May2010) removed the section, Work on gender equality:

• "Work on gender equality: rm offtopic section that duplicates deleted content"

Correcting the "off-topic" problem:

• My thanks are for making me aware of the "off-topic" problem, so then, I could help the Wikipedia readers by clarifying the article – which I am doing.

Restoring 2 of the 3 Gender projects:

• I interpret your necessarily-brief Edit summary to mean that you (and some other WP editors, perhaps) want me to remove the paragraph about the Wikigender project. The recently-deleted (around 12Apr2010) article, Wikigender, is the only "deleted content" I'm aware of that you could possibly mean. So I am removing the paragraph about the Wikigender project, while restoring the other two Gender projects. At the same time, I am protesting here that you are (in my opinion) depriving WP readers of this information that they should have. In other words, I am courteously removing the Wikigender paragraph under protest. For7thGen (talk) 17:00, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Source references about ancient Egypt.

Hi 83d40m, ................ (Duplicated using the same title at User talk:83d40m.)

I'm sure the WP readers and viewers very much appreciate your excellent work, and I do too. But I and they now very much need your further expertise about the following quote, from the article Pharaoh:

"The royal lineage was traced through its women and a pharaoh had to be from that lineage or married to one of them if coming from without the lineage. This was the reason for all of the intermarriages in the royal families of Egypt."

This contribution of yours (16Sep07) may be too long ago for you to recall, but I and other readers do need whatever help you can give us toward a source reference for the quoted first sentence. I don't think we need to worry about the second sentence. Here at Talk:Matrilineality's section called Source references about Ancient Egypt, you can see how I got involved in this – and see other good things that can be done on WP, if a source reference for the first sentence is found and inserted in Pharaoh.

Your WP users hope that you (or your Ancient Egypt co-workers) can find and insert a source that meets WP's needs, and we all are prepared to wait quite a while for that helpful information.

Please notify me on my Talk page to alert me (if you succeed), For7thGen (talk) 19:07, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for taking so long to reply and I do not have time right now to go digging back to 2007 for my sources on this topic. The information is rather common knowledge, however, and I believe you may find this discussed in many resources. It is discussed so often that I felt no need to document the specific source at the time. The article was quite different when I last edited it, and warrants a revisit.

The first change in the article is acceptable, supplying the term you prefer. You will find this comment in Wikipedia, however, "... in feminist literature, "matriarchy" may be used synonymously with matrilineality." Even anthropologists vary regarding preference between the terms. I do prefer the discussion at the article for the former term and it covers you word of choice. I made conscious decision between the two terms.

I find no need for notation forecasting to the next portion as you have added with your next edit because it follows rather shortly, and it is not a convention used often here.

You then injected your chosen term into my sentence that you quote, which changes my intent and if I go back to it, I likely will return it to my original construction because of that, because it seems quite redundant, and because I find the adverb injected there as rather awkward.

I likely will go back because there are other changes that need to be made in the article. Recurring biases need to be kept at bay with articles on topics such as this. When I do, perhaps I will be able to pick out the exact reference you are seeking. I will give you a heads-up if that occurs. Unfortunately, I can not predict when I will have the time to return to the article. My plate is quite full at the moment. Your careful search for the original editor for the subject text is noted, I presume that your resourcefulness is applied in your endeavors with your site, good luck with it. ---- 83d40m (talk) 00:07, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Matrilineality 2

I have edited the introduction to the Matrilineality. Since you seem to have adopted this article and are its major contributor, I thought I would give you notice. The introduction was (and still is) rather messy. It defines the same terms multiple times in ambiguous language. It discusses the noun and adjective forms specifically, when this should be obvious given their suffixes. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and definitions of multiple forms of a word are not its role. Saktoth (talk) 17:37, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your good edit of Matrilineality's introduction, Saktoth, on 16Oct2010. The intro is much better now; I had gone too far – I can see now that most WP readers don't need as much help as I was giving them. Does the same apply in my section on Matrilineal surname? I hope Not. I know I have a tendency to be too brief in presentations, so I constantly have to struggle to say enough so the readers can follow. ------- And since I appreciate your giving me the above notice, I'll give you notice as well, via a copy of this Thank you note, on your talk page. With much appreciation for your editing, For7thGen (talk) 00:36, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

---

I believe a refimprove tag is still necessary. Most of the references are not correctly formatted. The following link provides a how-to guide for creating citations on Wikipedia: Wikipedia:Citing_sources#How_to_format_inline_citations.SweetNightmares (talk) 12:49, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your help – I think you and I both are willing to work to help WP readers, and I have now redone the source reference citations. Thanks again, from WP readers as well. ----------------Perhaps you can help further with the section Judaism – see above, including my 20May2010 entry. I would not be able to rewrite this section and its source refs even if I spent full-time for the next 20 years learning about it, so I think the problem should be given to the WikiProject Judaism. (But I don't know how to do that.) Can you suggest anything? For7thGen (talk) 23:57, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

---

I have removed some information on the Matrilineality article per WP:SPS and WP:PAYWALL. I have also noted that a refimprove tag could still be useful here (see the talk page for the article). I appreciate your work on Wikipedia, but I suggest you read up on its policies (particularly its content standards) before making further contributions. SweetNightmares (talk) 12:54, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'm very glad that WP policy and guidelines now have been improved to Not allow the use of self-published works, which rendered Elizabeth McCumber's essay impossible to use any longer. I would have been glad to remove my use thereof – so thank you for doing it. I'm sure you and I both want what is best for WP readers, which is the beauty of WP. For7thGen (talk) 00:32, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Request for someone to rewrite the Judaism section of an article

This request, below, I've just posted on the talk page of WikiProject Judaism:

One may determine, via careful inspection, that within the WP (Wikipedia) article Matrilineality, its section Judaism is just the Introduction of this section's "Main article" Matrilineality in Judaism, somewhat pruned. I assume that this was once appropriate in WP, but my question is now: What is the optimum approach to help both the WP readers and the Jewish community?

Who am I? (you ask). I have done much of the laboring on the Matrilineality article recently, while others have also contributed, I'm very happy to say. I've felt qualified and able to rewrite the sections on the various cultures (Lenape, newly-added Minangkabau, India, Akan, China or Mosuo, and Tuareg – by using the matrilineal content of that culture's WP article, or if needed, finding new matrilineal content from other sources as well. But the Judaism case is specialized much beyond my knowledge and capability.

Why rewrite this current Judaism section? (you ask). In my opinion, it is too complicated for most WP readers to easily read and understand. For example, it should not mention or name so many Jewish denominations; and the shortest paragraph, beginning with "The Mishnah", is too specialized or arcane for most readers of a general article such as Matrilineality (but just fine for the readers of Matrilineality in Judaism).

What should this section now accomplish? In my opinion, it should give the average reader the main part of the matrilineal information now given, but more easily understood and perhaps reduced to say half as long as now, certainly no longer that it is now. If there are not enough source references, one can conclude with something like "For further information and for more sources and documentation, see the above-mentioned main article." For someone to guide on: The section Who is a Jew? within the article Judaism is a good model, certainly well-written and very readable, not too specialized or arcane for most WP readers – and it does similarly list its own Main article.

Why can't I just write it myself? I cannot understand the information now given, well enough to even tell what its main part is, nor well enough to then present it to the average reader. Please put your eventual reply, if any, on my talk page, where I am now duplicating this entry. I'm very glad there is a Judaism section in the Matrilineality article, for the sake of completeness and curiosity and humankind. Thankfully, For7thGen (talk) 21:03, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

My original "Request for someone to rewrite the Judaism section of an article", dated 18Jun11, is now in Archive 27, and of course I hoped someone would place it where such a request should be placed. I was unable to find such a place, myself.

This followup entry (in the above-mentioned Talk page) is simply to let someone know I'll feel free to rewrite the Judaism section of the Matrilineality article myself when I can find the time to do so, no earlier than a month from now, and without any further notification to anyone else. As I stated in my original request, I am totally and hopelessly unqualified for this rewriting job. At the same time, my judgment (hopefully good enough in most matters) is that my result will at least be an improvement upon the present Judaism section for most readers of Wikipedia. Again, I'm posting this identically in my own Talk page, adding it directly with my earlier 18Jun11 entry, and would like any reply entered on my own Talk page as well. On behalf of WP readers, For7thGen (talk) 23:46, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

My souvenir "Coexistence Proposal" from Nov/Dec 2005

The Problem (written Nov/Dec 2005)

When I tried to learn from WP guidelines Wikipedia:Cite sources and Wikipedia:Footnotes, I had a rough time. This is not what the WP community should inflict on its members! See my edits of both articles, trying to help myself in the future and others as well. It seems that, along with other divisions no doubt, there is a deep division between footnote-users and inline-eLink-users, because only one side can have automatic numbering of their referrings in any given article. See 1st proposal below. Once we have automatic numbering for both sides simultaneously, I think that both sides will be able to blissfully ignore each other while doing their own thing side by side, one side using their Footnotes section, the other using their References section, each welcoming the others to use theirs too whenever they wish to, appearing together in the same article. The true Wikipedia spirit!

• Now (14Jul2011) the automatic numbering of footnotes or references works great! (And there are no more inline eLinks.) So it's nice to be reminded of how bad it was, and accordingly I'm keeping a little (above) of what I wrote in my sandbox, which I'm now emptying so I can use it for other things. Hence, this souvenir. For7thGen (talk) 09:36, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

You should come hang out with us on the internetz!

Hi! I wanted to let you know that we have created an IRC channel for "countering systemic bias one new editor at a time", aka closing the gender gap! Come hang out at #wikimedia-gendergap if that subject interests you. We hope this channel can serve as a safe haven to hang out, talk about Wiki, brainstorming, increasing women's participation in Wikimedia, article alerts and foster friendships. I hope you join us! (And if you need any IRC help, just let me know!) See you there! SarahStierch (talk) 22:23, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Intestate Succession Law, Ghana 1985

Below is simply the entry I just made on the Matrilineality article's Talk page, copied here for my own convenience:

I have tried hard to keep at least some of 41.222.232.245's two recent additions to the Akan section on 12Aug2011, but cannot in good conscience keep any. I will however change the section's wording to reflect the fact (for which I've now found a source reference, Marlene de Witte's 2001 book) that the Akan matrilineal clans are still alive and well – hopefully within the next month or two.

• The above-mentioned anonymous user's larger addition concerned Ghana's 1985 Intestate Succession Law PNDC Law 111. I think this law (and its 1991 Amendment) should have its own WP article, or at least its own section of the Ghana article. This reform law (and its aftermath) could be a very complicated subject. In the 2001 book above, which I searched via Google Books, this 1985 law is discussed on pp. 173-178 plus 3 related source references given on pp. 206-08. And simply googling turns up lots more information on this law. I expect I'll never find time to write such a section or article, but if someone else does find time, I'll hope to then write a paragraph in Matrilineality's Akan section appropriately making use of their section or article.
• The user's smaller addition concerned marriage being forbidden between members of the same 'ntoro' group, which is wrong, I'm sorry to say. See the reputable webpage http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/EthnoAtlas/Hmar/Cult_dir/Culture.7880, which is an Akan Culture summary by Robert O. Lagace. Respectfully, For7thGen (talk) 22:38, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

GenderGap and IRC

To SarahStierch on her Talk page: Thanks for your invite of 21Aug11, to join the chats on #wikimedia:GenderGap. And yes, I would like a recommendation for my IRC client or app. I usually use Firefox browser, on an iMac using O/S X Leopard, so I could use Chatzilla if I got it. But if you recommend a different one, that would be even better, by me. (I should add that I'm really short of time to do all the WP writing I'd like to do; but will at least observe the chatting a few times.) Good luck to us all, For7thGen (talk) 04:10, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi there. I use Colloquy for a chat server. Hopefully this will help, once you log in we can help you out from there if needed :) SarahStierch (talk) 13:57, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikimedia-gendergap should work -- hope that helps! Sumanah (talk) 10:55, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of OECD Development Centre

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate your contributions to the article OECD Development Centre, but for legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material, and as a consequence, your addition was deleted under section G12 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. This part is crucial: say it in your own words.

If the external website belongs to you, and you want to allow Wikipedia to use the text—which means allowing other people to modify it—then you must include on the external site the statement "I, (name), am the author of this article, (article name), and I release its content under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 and later, and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License." You may also e-mail or mail the Foundation to release the content. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials for more.

While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with our copyright policy. Wikipedia takes copyright concerns very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing.

You might want to look at Wikipedia's policies and guidelines for more details, or ask a question here. You can also leave a message on my talk page. JamesBWatson (talk) 13:17, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

• Hello JamesBWatson, I have read your User page and I like it, it's informative and I thank you for it. My own User page also tries to be informative, and I think I'm ahead of you by about a year.

As your Talk page suggests, I am leaving you a Talkback notification on your Talk page.

I do not appreciate your speedy and erroneous deletion of the article OECD Development Centre.

Fortunately for me, the OECD people apparently keep track of my OECD article themselves and quickly let you know on your Talk page that "You claim copyright infringement, but the links are freely and publicly available..." I hope that you can agree with me that they (the OECD people) know whether or not their own webpages are copyrighted. I further hope that you will now agree that you made a human error in deleting the article, and will equally speedily undelete it.

Perhaps it would be wise to educate you a little about my motivation in writing the article to begin with. I am an ordinary but well-informed US citizen who spent two years at universities in Germany (I would have preferred the Peace Corps but it didn't exist yet then). So I am interested in the rest of the world, including the OECD which grew out of the Marshall Plan soon after I returned from Germany. I am now helping to educate the US readers of Wikipedia (WP), and have no other axe to grind, at all, absolutely. (I do try to help future humankind, of course, see my User page.) It should be mentioned that when copyright is not in question, say it in the words of the original author is sometimes better than say it in your own words. This was the case where the article explicitly stated that the biannual work programme for 2009 and 2010 "is partially reproduced here", because WP readers would need to see the original work programme wording rather than my own rewording or mis-wording thereof. If you can take the time to read the article, you will agree, I'm sure.

I do appreciate your hard and tiring work on behalf of WP readers as you have described on your user page, and I hope you and I can continue to work together to help all such readers. Wikipedia needs both of us, I'm sure.

Please speedily un-delete this important article. For7thGen (talk) 20:07, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that. It was certainly interesting to read your thoughts on the matter. However, although it may seem reasonable on the face of it to assume that employees of an organisation know the copyright status of material published by that organisation, in this case the organisation's own web site gives a very clear statement of the conditions under which the material can be reused, and those conditions are not compatible with Wikipedia's licensing terms. I have given a fuller account at User talk:VED sur seine. JamesBWatson (talk) 20:46, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your good answers, JamesBWatson. And I do apologize for erroneously writing that you had erred. I've again proved that I am mistakenly-human myself :-) (I can't imagine that OECD really wants to still have their webpages copyrighted, but I agree that they still do have. Thanks again for your good explanations. I myself probably never noticed, and now I hope I have it straight and will notice, for a while at least.)

Since I had no advance warning, and I haven't even looked at the deleted article for perhaps a year, could you help me get a look at the most recent version of the article? Naturally I'll rewrite it, without quoting copyrighted material.

Thank you in advance for your kind help in this matter, For7thGen (talk) 01:00, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Copyright issues aside, For7thGen, the ensuing question is whether an article can be written which will be supported by other sources, per WP:PRIMARY and WP:RELIABLE, rather than relying on the agency's website alone. 99.168.81.210 (talk) 01:55, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

It is entirely possible that nobody at OECD really wants the existing licensing restrictions. However, we have no right to assume that: as long as their existing licensing conditions are displayed, we have to respect them. To publicly restore the copyright infringing version would be illegal. I thought of emailing you a copy for you to edit. However, when I thought about it, I saw problems with that. There have been dozens of edits since your initial version. Any content which you posted back which was based on other users' contributions without proper attribution would constitute copyright infringement, and sorting out proper copyright attribution for all of them would be a nightmare. Just giving you, as you suggest, the most recent version, without the history, would not work. It seems to me that, unfortunately, the article will have to be rewritten from scratch. JamesBWatson (talk) 09:59, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Reply

(to my entry on Pernoctator's talk page a few hours ago, More work needed on your new source reference.) For7thGen (talk) 04:20, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

hello,i think i should have been more clear while stating this act.it looks wrong,though thats not what i intended it to be.i am removing the reference completely.it creates unnecessary confusion.firstly both aliyasantana and marumakkathayam in terms of property inheritance/succession is defunct (what is followed is the modern hindu act 1956) though vestiges of it remain in kinship system and religious rituals.Aliyasantana law (amended one) applies in case of undivided joint family properties belonging mostly to the landed Bunts (if they haven't been divided yet which is unlikely) which means a person belonging to an undivided joint family can demand his equal share in the undivided ancestral property and leave(his share can be inherited as per hindu succession).in short matrilineal succession to property (ie from maternal uncle to nephews/neices(sister's children) or mother to children which also prohibits a man passing any inherited property to his own children)is dead.in case there was no heir a person should adopt a girl or a pair of brother/sister preferrably related matrilinealy or from his own bali(endogamous septs).all these practices are dead.anyways the intro of aliyasantana page uses the past tense was.and i am extremely sorrow for causing the confusion.matrilineality as was practiced on the south west coast of india is slightly tricky to follow at first and modern indian laws make it worse.thank you.Pernoctator (talk)

Editing (writing) on WP; especially, on Helping our readers

The following is simply a copy, for my own personal reference of my entry just now on the page User talk:Ndickinson1 :

Hi Ndickinson1, I just improved your good entry in the article Gender equality. You can find more about me on my User page. I edit about anything and everything on Wikipedia (WP), but currently don't have much time to do it. Both you and Ebikeguy seem to me to be reasonable and well-motivated to help our WP readers. Keep up your good work!

You asked, "I would like to ask though: is there someone else I can talk to about the editing?" And I just happen to have recently learned a good answer to your Q. Just type WP:Teahouse into the WP search box, see what you get and go from there. I think the originator, the User:SarahStierch, had an excellent idea, and of course I like the name Teahouse.

My own quick answer to your Q is "Monkey see, monkey do." I often can learn what I need to know that way (ie, by looking at the Edit page of other articles). I don't think you'll find any other editors listing more than one book in each source reference entry, where your first two source refs in the article Peer Marriage have several books. So now your first source ref, 1, will become maybe 4 source refs, 1 2 3 and 4. And each time you reuse all of them, all 4 will appear again, and that will be just fine –– more impressive if anything. Let me add that I'm pleasantly surprised to learn there are so many books on the topic of Peer marriage, which is a new topic to me. If you look at the article Matriname, you'll see I am similarly the only author for it since I split it off from Matrilineality. One more thing I'll mention: you can go back and re-edit you own entries above (or in any talk page, I believe), apparently that's fine in WP. In particular, I would add 4 tildes (~'s) to each of your entries above –– I suppose then the date will be wrong, but you might be able to then re-edit the date.... And I should mention my surprise (and dismay) that no other editor besides Ebikeguy has answered your Q above, so that he was the only editor giving you inputs. Thus you had no way of judging whether he was just making a personal attack on you (I think he was sincere and well-motivated, and I can be certain from your reasoning that you are sincere and well-motivated.) And to help readers like me you could put in another redirect for "Peer marriage" (in addition to the redirect for "Peer Marriage"). We humans are very complicated, For7thGen (talk) 20:16, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

I made another entry on his talk page. And just now a 3rd one, a hopefully coherent statement about helping the readers:

Let me clarify, Ndickinson1, about helping WP readers. The idea is that many tens of thousands of readers will be reading your Peer Marriage article, which makes a big multiplier effect. Say that a pinpoint citation (pincite) saves each of them even just 1 minute – multiplying this by 10,000 yields a savings of more than 100 hours just due to that one item of careful work you did, multiplying your work by many times.

In addition, you apparently need to apply the golden rule to your readers, by imagining yourself in their position as they read this article in its present form, with a poor job of handling the source references (sorry to say that, I know it’s not pleasant for you to hear). For example, if you had looked at your first two references from the viewpoint of the readers, you would have concluded that your readers needed some help to tell where each source ended and another began, within each group of sources. Thus you might have numbered the sources in bold, such as:

(Imaginary) Group footnote: 1. First source. 2. Next source. 3. Next....

Also you couldn’t help noticing that readers would have trouble with the ISBN for the John Badalament book; you would then have helped the readers by looking at your editing for that source reference and would have seen that WP somehow managed to give you a message (if I recall correctly, WP said the last digit of your ISBN number did not agree with its calculated value) and you would have gone back to the book itself to check whether you had entered the correct ISBN number. So it is clear you did not work hard enough to help the readers. Being a good WP author is more than just creating a great article and then enjoying how well-written it is. Namely, it also includes putting in all the pincites the readers will need and doing everything else you can think of to make it easy-as-possible for the readers. As you can see, my standards go beyond just following the rules, such as Ebikeguy insists that you do (and I agree with him, on behalf of all WP readers). I want you to also help the readers in every way as much as you possibly can, yielding an even-more-useful article.

After all, isn’t that your goal in writing the WP article at all?

Hopefully, on behalf of WP readers, For7thGen (talk) 00:39, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

July 2012

Please do not blank pages, as you did to Double surname, whatever the reason. Somebody will come to Wikipedia, find a blank page and wonder what on earth is going on. If an article is a duplicate of another, then redirect it. If you feel the page doesn't belong on Wikipedia, then nominate it for deletion. Thank you. — Smjg (talk) 23:30, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

A paraphrasing problem on Wikipedia

I'm reproducing here, for my own possible reference, my entry with the below title from the Women's rights article's Talk page:

Providing the Qur'an "citation needed"

The 1st paragraph of the Qur'an section of Women's rights, with its tag for "citation needed", seems to be begging for someone to provide the sura (or chapter) and verse sources for the paragraph's conclusion about the wife receiving a dowry (herself) from the husband. It so happens that I can easily-enough provide those sources, from my own copy of the Qur'an (which I bought for my own edification and which is well-indexed). So I'll do that, hopefully within a few days... Trying to help all of us WP readers, For7thGen (talk) 22:25, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

• User:Obotlig raised doubts about the accuracy of my paraphrasing of the translated-and-thus-copyrighted Qur'an, by removing my "paraphrased primary source claims about a religion" on 29 June 2012, as he or she worded it in her or his Edit summary. Obviously, to help such editors judge the accuracy of my paraphrasing in the article, I need to go back to the drawing board. What can I do? That is, even placing the copyrighted Qur'an verses on a private website (for other WP editors to compare my paraphrasing to) would be illegally "reproducing" copyrighted material.

• Bottom line: If WP (WikiPedia) had a mechanism for officially certifying the accuracy of paraphrased text in WP articles, the problem would be solved, and I could help all WP readers as I tried to do until Obotlig stopped me. It is Wikipedia's problem (due to Obotlig), not mine. Nonetheless, I'm willing to help if anyone wants to continue this matter, either here on this talk page or by emailing me through the normal WP channel (for which my edress is officially registered). (I believe it would be legal for me to provide the desired quotes to particular editors by email.) Otherwise I'm stopping my work on this matter. (Boohoo), I'm crying on behalf of our WP readers, For7thGen (talk) 16:32, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I could bring this Wikipedia paraphrasing problem to the Teahouse (or etc.), easily enough, but the result would surely take me too much time, more than I can possibly afford now. So this is as much as I can do, for now at least, For7thGen (talk) 23:00, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

1. I now see that Obotlig has not contributed since 12Jul2012. From what I now see of her earlier contributions, I think she was sincere. Since no-one has helped WP readers by suggesting anything else, I'll try again to paraphrase the Qur'an's "primary source claims", to quote Obotlig, when I find time, maybe within a year from now. This time I'll directly quote more of the critical phrases, to reassure WP readers (and my fellow WP editors) that I am accurately paraphrasing the Qur'an. And this time my paraphrasing will be in a footnote (or endnote, or whatever you call it), as I hope it was last time too. Trying to help our WP readers, For7thGen (talk) 23:55, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
2. Out of desperation, I actually looked at the next source Reference, which many other WP editors could have done, as well. And it appears to be the source for the whole (paraphrased) first paragraph (except for the phrase about 610 to 661), as well as the beginning sentence of the next paragraph, where this source Reference was located. Whew! that saved me a lot of work, as well as allowing my Qu'ran copy to continue its resting on a bookshelf. How can we be so lucky? Still trying to help our lucky readers, For7thGen (talk) 04:49, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Patriname listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Patriname. Since you had some involvement with the Patriname redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion (if you have not already done so). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ibidto (talk • contribs) 20:15, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• For my own info: Ibidto carelessly thought I invented the word. I did help the readers of the Matriname article by providing some examples of its use (and of Matriname's use) in previous literature. And so the Redirect to Matriname was kept, partly because of my reasoning about it. For7thGen (talk) 05:04, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Shakers

This is simply a copy of my talk page entry a minute ago for the Gender Equality article:

The above one-word title for this History sub-section simply does not help the WP readers enough. My title, "Shakers, an example of gender equality", helps our readers by focussing on this important aspect of the Shakers, the sub-section's subject. User:EvergreenFir evidently feels that "the subject of the article", gender equality, should not be included in a heading, referencing bullet 1 of MOS:HEAD, which I'll cut-and-paste here to help this discussion:

• Headings should not refer redundantly to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings, unless doing so is shorter or clearer. (Early life is preferable to His early life when his refers to the subject of the article; headings can be assumed to be about the subject unless otherwise indicated.)

I am replying to this editor that the Shakers are in fact an example of "the subject of the article" but that my title is functional (by helping our readers) rather than redundant, as follows:

Yes, a careful reader with good comprehension who reads this section, with just the one-word title above it, will eventually understand that the Shakers were or are an example of gender equality. But if my title appears above this section, the reader's job is made easier and faster––just imagine you are the reader, with the alternative titles above the sub-section. So my title functionally helps the reader rather than "refer(ring) redundantly to the subject of the article".

I believe EvergreenFir is trying to help our readers, the same as I am, and I hope this editor will now agree that my title is helpful rather than being redundant. And that my title is fine with regard to the rest of MOS:HEAD, of course. Always trying to help the readers, For7thGen (talk) 06:06, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

nice to meet you!

Hi! It was nice to meet you at the edit-a-thon today. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 18:30, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

wikigender.org website is still blacklisted

Thanks, Phoebe, for the greetings above and especially for your expert help at UCR 2 days ago and in your user page. If Sally and I understood you correctly, you checked and found that the wikigender.org website is no longer blacklisted. However, when I put its url here on my talk page, the following message appeared, which I simply cut and pasted here:

Your edit was not saved because it contains a new external link to a site registered on Wikipedia's blacklist. To save your changes now, you must go back and remove the blocked link (shown below), and then save. Note that if you used a redirection link or URL shortener (like e.g. 'goo.gl', 't.co', 'youtu.be', 'bit.ly'), you may still be able to save your changes by using the direct, non-shortened link - you generally obtain the non-shortened link by following the link, and copying the contents of the address bar of your web-browser after the page has loaded. Links containing 'google.com/url?' are resulting from a copy/paste from the result page of a Google search - please follow the link on the result page, and copy/paste the contents of the address bar of your web-browser after the page has loaded. If you feel the link is needed, you can: Request that the entire website be allowed, that is, removed from the local or global spam blacklists (check both lists to see which one is affecting you). Request that just the specific page be allowed, without unblocking the whole website, by asking on the spam whitelist talk page. Blacklisting indicates past problems with the link, so any requests should clearly demonstrate how inclusion would benefit Wikipedia. The following link has triggered a protection filter: wikigender.org Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blocked.

I'm suffering a bad taste in my mouth from this whole !*! topic. I've been through the whole request thing above (which I italicized above), many years ago. Please have a look at sections 16-20 above, beginning with the section "The wikigender.org website", to get some idea of how sick I am of this whole topic. I'm here on WP to write, not to fight. (I've studied your user page enough to know that you don't like fighting either.) So I doubt that I could force myself to do more work on this topic, such as again making a request or anything else.

On the lighter side I find that the 3 intractable editors involved in this blacklisting and my mistreatment in 16-20 above are all on wikibreaks now, Immer gavia since Mar2011 and Hu12 & SatyrTN both since Nov2013. You can guess what I hope will (not) happen. So just now I checked on the indescribably great User:Friday and saw that she (or he?) was back on WP for a month this year, Feb-Mar. I hope you "know" her (or him?). Good luck to us all, For7thGen (talk) 03:26, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi Phoebe again, now 2 days later. Actually I added a lot yesterday, only 1 day later, trying to figure out what happened, why the two opposite findings?

But after all that thinking and writing yesterday (I'm throwing away the writing), last night at bedtime I did figure out that opposite findings might not be due to a miscommunication somehow–– that maybe two opposite findings could occur––due to a bug in the WP infrastructure. Namely, the blacklist enforcement software must be enforcing an older version of the WikiMedia blacklist.

So today I searched for and found the WikiMedia blacklist, and indeed it no longer lists wikigender.org.

I think this is terrible performance by Wikipedia (or WikiMedia), which has ruined my 2 days yesterday and today, and caused who knows how much other damage to other editors and readers? If this bug is due to an outside software company, I think WP should switch to a good company, which I would be glad to help with. Below I'll design the blacklist part of WP's improved software, working as a volunteer Software Engineer, my field of expertise:

Design of the blacklist software:

• Use only the current version of the blacklist, never use any older "version" of it. For example, only the current version of any WP article is normally used by readers. Older versions are archived, of course, for both blacklist and WP articles. If a beta version of the blacklist needs to appear on a trial basis, but not be enforced yet, it should also not be available yet to ordinary editors such as me. Only the current version should be enforced and be available for editors to view (or use somehow).
• The current version of the blacklist can be changed only by a certain committee (or whatever), same as now. No difference from now. Otherwise, humans are not involved, so no malfunction can occur due to human errors by other humans.

This is just the top level design, the common sense main point that is evidently missing from the current WP infrastructure malfunctioning software.

Wonderful news, truly joyful, that wikigender.org is no longer blacklisted! Finally some justice for the Wikigender project. I of course am curious about both when and/or why the blacklist was lifted. Can you suggest any way for me to learn either or both of those?

Maybe WP really is improving.... Please keep up your good work, Phoebe, I'm sure you are helping us all a great amount.

And when am I going to put up a decent version of the Wikigender article? I did add a note about its source refs in the #18 section above about "Wikigender's significance". But we two are a long way from recovering from our recent move (Feb2014).... maybe someone else will do the article, we'll see.... Still trying to help our readers, For7thGen (talk) 00:54, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

To make sure the bug is still there, now (3Nov) I'll test it again: Just click on http://wikijender.org/ to see if it is still blocked. Yes, it is still blocked, the same message appeared when I tried to save it. So now, since Phoebe still has not answered my "ping" on her own talk page, I'll report the bug myself, on bugzilla or whatever it is. First change wikigender to wikijender.org , in order to save this. For7thGen (talk) 22:26, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

My Description of the bug, on Bugzilla

Here is a cut-and-pasted copy of my report on Wikimedia:Bugzilla (or whatever), my Description of the above bug, preserved here for future reference in my normal fashion. Bug 72921. :

1. I verified that wikigender.org is no longer blacklisted, in the Wikimedia blacklist (or whatever the correct name is).

2. Just within the last hour on my Talk page (on Wikipedia), I cut-and-pasted that url (http://wikijender.org, if I'm not mistaken), from the webpage itself (changed to wikijender here in order to get it saved here).

3. I tried to save it, on my Talk page.

4. It could not be saved. Instead the erroneously-blocked message appeared. See it for yourself at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:For7thGen#wikigender.org_website_is_still_blacklisted

5. Let me just add, the top part of that Talk page entry does show the erroneous blocking, from 9 or 10 days ago. The middle of that Talk page entry can be ignored. The last paragraph of that Talk page entry is my verification within the last hour that the bug is still there. Also, if I were writing that title again, I'd write it correctly or precisely as "Wikigender.org website is still blocked", not blacklisted. Usually I word things precisely, but I did erroneously use "blacklisted" instead of "blocked".

Note, I don't understand why the blocked URL was not blocked on the Bugzilla webpage, but of course if it had been, I'd just have changed it to wikijender, as I'll have to do now anyhow, back here on my own Talk page. Precisely verdadero, it wouldn't save as wikigender. For7thGen (talk) 22:33, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Enter http://wikijender.org again now to see if will save now. No, as wikigender.org it still is blocked. 19Nov,

Can't login at Wikipedia

On Sunday, 11January2015, my 30 days of being logged in evidently ran out. When I tried to log in, WP would not accept my regular password, giving me the following message:

• Login error / Incorrect password entered. Please try again. // And when I clicked "Forgot your password?", and then entered my gmail.com edress, and clicked on Reset Password, WP gave me the following message:
• A password reset email has been sent. Return to Main Page.

But it was arriving in gmail's Social category, which we two never use and never check.

For7thGen (talk) 04:25, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Matrilineality article, on Sri Lanka

This is just for my own memory aid, a copy of my entry on Nick Levinson's Talk page just a minute ago, with the same title of course:

Hi Nick, if you don't have the article Matrilineality (and thus its Talk page) on your watchlist, then I need to ask you here if you can find time to improve that article again. A few days ago I got a surprise when I noticed your new-to-me section in that article, the section Feminism and patriarchy relationship, concerning Sri Lanka. It is entirely my own screw-up that I failed to notice it for more than a year (I rely on my watchlist, and things were chaotic for me then, and I missed it). I feel like I'm subhuman or maybe even sub-subhuman.

Anyway, please look at what I've written in your Nov 2013 entry (the last entry) on the article's Talk page, where I've already written what 2 improvements you could do if you can afford the time. Thanks much (for at least considering it, and maybe even for your kind help in doing it). –– always trying to help our readers, For7thGen (talk) 20:52, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Removing a Ruwanpura-book quote

Just keeping this first version for my own future reference, from Talk:Matrilineality:

I'm removing the following sentence from the subsection A feminist and patriarchal relationship:

• She also wrote that, on the other hand, feminists have criticized a view of women's lives in Sri Lanka, e.g., because in accordance with "village practices and folklore ... young women raped (usually by a man) are married-off/required to cohabit with the rapists!"[24]

The quote is from the source book, Ruwanpura (2006), in Ruwanpura's note 7 on p. 76. The author Ruwanpura gives only the words "Malathi de Alwis and Kumari Jayawardena" as her source for this information, on her p. 76. In her References at the end of her book one finds this info source:

• Jayawardena, Kumari and Malathi de Alwis. 1996. "Introduction," in Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi de Alwis (eds.) Embodied Violence: Communalizing Women's Sexuality in South Asia, pp. ix-xxiv. New Delhi, Kali for Women, London and New Jersey: Zed Books.

There are no ISBN numbers given in Ruwanpura's whole book, I believe. Anyway, I obtained her source book, never mind how and at what cost, and it is ISBN-13 = 978 1856 494472. As its Preface explains, pp. vii-viii, it presents the results of a 1992 conference, and I read carefully every word of its "Introduction" on pp. ix-xxiv. Rape is mentioned several times, but there is nothing like or even remotely related to the above quote. So Wikipedia has no actual source for the quote and it must be removed.

For the sake of completeness, here is the last half (the relevant half) of Ruwanpura's note 7, exactly as in the book:

• [NOTE: Feminists have criticized Yalman's work for romanticizing the position and status of women in Sri Lanka. Malathi de Alwis and Kumari Jayawardena drew attention to this criticism, by highlighting cases of village practices and folklore that contravene the favourable picture painted by Yalman. A helpful example to press this feminist concern is where young women raped (usually by a man) are married-off/required to cohabit with the rapists! A Sri Lankan film, Baddegama, based on Leonard Woolf's book The Village in the Jungle, recounts a similar incident in a rural village, although the location is Southern Sri Lanka].

Please pay attention to the difference between rare isolated incidents and a pattern of such incidents implied by the wording "where young women raped ... usually ... are married-off/required ...". The removed quote reported that such a pattern existed in Sri Lanka, without any reliable evidence. I would have removed it more than a year ago if I had been alert then. On behalf of our readers, For7thGen (talk) 23:33, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps I should also reassure the reader that I did carefully search the rest of Ruwarpura's source book (Embodied Violence, above), and there is nothing even remotely related to the above quote. There is an interesting essay or report by Malathi de Alwis, pp. 89-112, on the topic of an archeological site, the Sigiriya frescoes, but no contribution at all from Kumari Jayawardena. There is also a report directly on the topic of rape, pp. 32-41, mostly about 18-year-old Rameeza Bee who was gang-raped by 4 policemen in 1978 and then put on trial herself, in a patriarchal region of India. Her husband was also beaten to death by the 4 rapists, leaving her a single woman. The maze of legal "considerations" in her trial "effectively justified" her rape. This report's conclusion was that "an independent single woman, by definition, has no constitutional or democratic rights in this society." For7thGen (talk) 20:16, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Removing a paragraph from Peer Marriage article

As usual, for my own convenience, I'm simply keeping a copy here of the entry I just wrote on the Peer Marriage article's Talk page:

I'm deleting the following paragraph of the subsection named above:

• Elizabeth Warren, in her book "The Two-Income Trap", appears not to have any concept that any childcare would (or should) be the responsibility of fathers; one of the examples in her book involves a father losing his job during the Recession but the family still paying for outsourced childcare for an extended period of time; she does not identify that if the father had done the childcare instead the family in her example could have prevented bankruptcy. In her book "A Fighting Chance", she states that financial instability in a family is worse when both parents work. In reviewing this book, the Economist magazine stated that there "are problems with her thinking" and this "notion. . . will sound strange to families whose eggs are all in one basket."[54]

This paragraph was added on 4 Aug 2014 by User:50.152.41.187. It appears to be too biased to remain in this Wikipedia (WP) article, as I show below, so I am hereby removing it.

I now own the book The Two-Income Trap, which receives an introduction in the WP article Elizabeth Warren, providing an overview of this book. This User refers above to Warren's "example" which clearly is the first 5 pages of her book. But the User is merely giving his/her opinion that "if the father had done the childcare instead the family in her example could have prevented bankruptcy." The book provides absolutely no support for this User's opinion, which therefore is a biased opinion which does not belong in a WP article.

The quote from above – "Elizabeth Warren, in her book 'The Two-Income Trap', appears not to have any concept that any childcare would (or should) be the responsibility of fathers" – is an opinion which has absolutely no source or support in the whole book, and is so biased that it sounds ridiculous when applied to any US citizen of normal capability, including Warren. Such extreme statements certainly do not belong on WP.

The complete Economist statement, in its article (Mass. appeal) of "Apr. 26th 2014: Washington, DC: From the print edition", was:

• Are two incomes worse than one? (new paragraph) There are problems

with Mrs. Warren's thinking. She ...

Actually, as quoted above, Warren's statement that "financial instability in a family is worse when both parents work" is a statistical fact, well documented in her book "The Two-Income Trap". It is a complicated topic, to which the above WP link luckily provides an adequate overview. I believe most WP editors would agree, the Economist's statement-of-opinion that "There are problems with Mrs. Warren's thinking" does not belong on WP.

And when I look at this subsection's title, I wonder what this User's criticism of Warren has to do with the subsection's topic? Always trying to help our WP readers, For7thGen (talk) 04:08, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:08, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:33, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, For7thGen. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Matrilineality article, again

Greetings to you, Nick,

I've finally found the time to work on the Matrilineality article again. Almost 2 years, already! Anyway, your adding your section about the relationship between matrilineality and patriarchy, is great, absolutely necessary.

I've changed your great section and left the changed version in my sandbox for you to see before I put it into the article. I also left the unchanged version in my sandbox, below my changed version, so you can easily compare them. And the references are located at the bottom of my sandbox. Here is the link, User:For7thGen/sandbox. Let me know what you think of the changed version, whenever you can find time for it.

For7thGen (talk) 22:50, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

What's in your sandbox is mainly a proposal to delete content on rape and feminism in this context and I don't think we have a basis for deleting it, given an earlier discussion (and see the essay Wikipedia:POV and OR from editors, sources, and fields). Sources can have views with which we disagree and we might choose not to add them in the first place, but once they've been added disagreement alone is not a ground for their deletion. But if you have a contrary source, go ahead and please add that with the content it supports. Nick Levinson (talk) 20:37, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your very disappointing reply, Nick.

You selected certain quotes from the Ruwanpura book to include in a new subsection within the Cultural Practices section of the article, and I have no problem with them as long as the result is clear to our readers and appropriate to the matrilineality topic of the article. The quotes I left out were simply not clear to me [except for the rape sentence], and you need to paraphrase them to make them clear to our readers.

I’ve gone to some lengths to look at your other work and you usually do good work. I suppose you did this awkward list of “she-wrote” quotes in a big hurry, for whatever reason. If you paraphrase all the rest of the unclear quotes that I omitted, that awkwardness will be remedied. But, to help our readers, please focus on clearness, remembering the multiplier effect. Your extra work (to word each item clearly) is multiplied by a great number of WP readers saving a small amount of time. My own goal is always to help the reader, and I hope that is one of your goals too.

To be helpful to you, I’ve paraphrased the long 1st sentence of your current subsection, and you can see it in my sandbox, placed third, right below your current “as is” subsection. If I did not understand the sentence well enough to paraphrase it correctly and clearly, please redo it yourself. I estimate that the rest of the paraphrasing for clarity might take you about two hours of work.

I’ll be glad to be helpful in your work as much as I possibly can, including researching as needed in the following paragraph.

Far from disagreeing with the rape quote, I agree with it wholeheartedly and think you should add it in appropriate articles in WP. For example, you (or I) could find the WP article about the 16-year-old rape victim in Morocco who was forced to marry her rapist, and then was further abused by him until she committed suicide -- surely it is in a WP article by now. You could then add the Ruwanpura quote to that article’s list of similar cases in other countries of the world, or use it to start that list yourself.

But unfortunately, you and I would both be guilty of non-neutral POV according to the POV essay that you pointed me to, if we left that rape quote in the Matrilineality article when rape has no conceivable relationship to matrilineality. Our readers expect to (or have a right to) learn about matrilineality-related topics, clearly expressed.

Please feel free to work in my sandbox, whatever is easiest for you, For7thGen (talk) 01:43, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

I'll look at your work, probably this week, and maybe edit this weekend. You raise interesting points. Thank you. Nick Levinson (talk) 19:56, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Since Ruwanpura's material on rape and relationship is about Sri Lanka, which is described in the article as matrilineal, then the content should be moved, but moved within the article to the subsection on Sri Lanka, because it amounts to a criticism and we shouldn't have a separate criticism section if its content can be put closer to what is being criticized. In essence, the article should describe both theory and practice and it appears that rape is part of the practice that shows that matrilineal practice may have a dark side and may be mixed with other types of relationships. If we had similar material on multiple cultures or a cross-cultural analysis, then that would belong in a separate section and not within one culture, but Ruwanpura's content may belong within one culture's section. In that case, the trailing paragraph that's now in the Sri Lanka section won't need to stay as it is.

By the way, to avoid a perception that the article is being owned, generally discussions like this should be on the article's talk page, although I'm glad you invited me into the discussion and a sandbox is useful. At least, a talk page link to where discussion is being held is helpful to other interested editors.

Nick Levinson (talk) 02:16, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Nick, it’s fine with me to publish our conversation on the Talk page of Matrilineality, and to continue our conversation there if needed. Great. You decide it. And ditto for where you put the Ruwanpura quotes, if you want them in the Sri Lanka subsection, that’s fine with me. You decide it.

But are you planning to help our readers by clarifying and de-awkwardizing your succession of she-wrote quotes? And what did you think of my attempt at the first 2 sentences -- especially, did I correctly guess their meaning?

About the rape quote, evidently you are not satisfied with my logical reason (off-the-topic, essentially) why the rape quote is a violation of non-neutral POV. But in addition, you misrepresented the rape quote (from Ruwanpura’s note to her text) by presenting it to our readers as a quote from the text of her book on the topic of Sri Lanka’s culture, right along with all of your other Ruwanpura quotes from her text. Our readers, reading just our text, could not tell the difference. Her readers, reading her text, knew it (the quote) was not in her text, if they even saw the note at all. Her readers are not forced to see the rape quote. That is called misrepresentation. Essentially, you rewrote her book for our readers. And you did succeed in forcing our readers to see the rape quote for about 3 years.

I’m very sorry to be disagreeing with you. But to be accurate, you are trying to force our readers to see the rape quote, which forces me to either defend our readers (as I’m doing) or else join you in forcing our readers. Do you see some other third option for me? This is a matter of logic, either the rape quote stays in the article’s text where readers are forced to see it, or does not stay there.

I would much prefer to be simply working agreeably together with you on behalf of our readers. That would be great!

For7thGen (talk) 14:59, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Robust and informed discussion, including disagreement, is fine with me.

Wikipedia reports what sources say, not only what sources' sources say. There's nothing wrong with researching to greater depths and reportng what was found, but that doesn't necessarily overthrow what was originally reported. For example, we could report Einstein's analysis of the Michelson-Morley experiment and report what Michelson and Morley said, too, even though Einstein disagreed with the conclusion reached by Michelson and Morley. We wouldn't discard one.

By citing sources, we make it easier for readers to dig down outside of Wikipedia and not only confirm our reports but discover more that we didn't report at all.

I tend to deal with controversial content, such as what we're talking about, by hewing closely to a source and quoting more than paraphrasing it. That does tend to result in more quotation marks and attributions to authors within a paragraph, and that may make it more awkward to read. But it avoids the problem of people saying "but that's not what the source says ...", a risk with paraphrases.

On your sandbox's content:

• The two sentences under "Now, third, ...." are adequate. I thought about your change of the "and/or" to, in effect, and, but I think that's likely okay in this case.
• I question the deletion of "... 'feminists have claimed that Sri Lankan women are relatively well positioned in the South Asian region'." I take that as a comment on how matrilineality affects Sri Lankan women compared to how other systems affect other South Asian women, and that seems deserving of weight in the article. It is not a statistically-based comparative analysis but it is a sourced analysis of a view about women by feminists, who study women's roles in society. Should a deeper and more scholarly comparison be available, it should be cited, but, till then, this one will serve, and is sourced to a reliable source.
• I don't think the rape quote is off-topic. Matrilineality implies, probably to most readers, that women have more power than they do under patrilineality, but that women, or at least some women, in a matrilineal culture are raped and forced to marry their rapists counters that implication, given that rape is generally the lessening of power of women, although it does not necessarily defeat the implication. If there's another source that shows that the implication is either eroded or upheld, we can add that. Likewise, if it turned out that states were more repressive of matrilineal cultures than of patrilineal ones or that neighbors from patrilineal cultures tended to invade and steal property from matrilineal cultures more than from patrilineal cultures, that, too, would be reportable in this article. In the case of this rape content, it is not saying simply that (some) women around the world are raped and forced to marry their rapists. If it were saying only that, it would belong in an article on rape or an article on women, but not this article. But this content is about a matrilineal society and that makes it relevant to this article. If you feel a bridge comment would make the whole thing clearer to readers, by easing the reader's transition from what comes before to what comes after, go ahead and write a statement that serves that purpose and insert it just before the rape/marriage content. That would be fine.
• Quoting or paraphrasing a footnote, an endnote, frontmatter, or backmatter is not necessarily wrong, misleading, or negatively cherrypicking, as long as the content cites that exact location. The force on a reader is no different than if we were citing main text. Main text tends to be more important and we should be wary of front- and backmatter written by someone other than the book author unless that source by the different author also is reasonably solid, but that's not the case here, and in this case the citation says "n. 7", which is a conventional way of citing to a source's footnote or endnote on a given point. Was there a passage that was actually from a note but where the citation doesn't say so?

Many lay readers refuse to read anything with footnotes, which is why various lay books use what I call blind endnotes (endnotes where the main text has no references to them but the endnotes tell you what page and content they support). Wikipedia does not do that, since probably most articles have notes near the bottom. And many reliable sources also have notes. We don't shy away from citing notes or providing notes.

Are you saying that even if the rape quote is on point it is too disturbing and should not be presented? It is disturbing and, in life, should be. Virtually every society outlaws rape, although they're uneven in enforcing such laws. Wikipedia explicitly presents many violently disturbing topics, and that's an accepted part of our editorial policies and guidelines.

Criticizing a cultural practice is not necessarily a violation of NPOV. NPOV is about reflecting sources with due weight, approximating the balance in the range of published sources, and we're doing that.

If you'd like to make the article easier to read, that would be good. But omitting sourced content is not the same thing and I wouldn't do that. However, go ahead and see what you can do with style or by adding new content.

Nick Levinson (talk) 05:30, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Nick, I’ve had trouble understanding why you’d write such a long reply on 8 March 2017. Now I realize I can just ignore your long reply except for the 2 topics I mention below.

1. The 1st topic is the rape quote: You are free to put it in a note to the text, just like Ruwanpura put it in a note to her book’s text. This clearly would not force our readers to see it.

2. The 2nd topic is helping our readers “by clarifying and de-awkwardizing.” On 7 March, see above, I stated this topic confusingly as “my attempt at the first 2 sentences” -- but I also did state it clearly on 28 February, see above, stating that I was paraphrasing only the long 1st sentence of your subsection (which I did break into 2 sentences). I was not deleting anything, and you misunderstood when you thought I had deleted the 2nd sentence. I liked the 2nd sentence very much (... in the South Asian region.”), in fact the best of all the 7 sentences in your subsection. Since you accepted my paraphrasing of her long 1st sentence as “adequate”, evidently you couldn’t understand Ruwanpura any better than I could. (For example, in that 1st sentence, how can one possibly interpret a matrilineal community or any other community? One doesn’t interpret a community itself, but rather aspects etc. of the community.)

In your long reply of 8 March, you told me “If you’d like to make the article easier to read, that would be good.” Are you willing to do any of this work, yourself? After all, there are 2 more sentences (the 5th and 7th of the 7 sentences) which will require further work or research to understand well enough to paraphrase-and-quote so that our readers can grasp them. As of now, our readers of those 2 sentences must feel confused and frustrated, instead. Can you afford the time to do this work? It would take too much time for me to do it, although I could instead paraphrase-and-quote the parts I can somewhat understand and leave out the parts I can’t understand.

For7thGen (talk) 04:49, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

If we're in agreement on the parts you'd rather not read, fine. I explained at length what I thought you didn't understand, but if you did understand those matters, that's even better.

It does not matter that a source puts content into a note when Wikipedia quotes or paraphrases that content. Wikipedia usually does not put content into a discursive note, but puts it into the main text, even if, as with rape, it is disturbing. Wikipedia does not omit content because it is disturbing or offensive or bury it in a hard-to-find location or into a bottom-of-the-page note and, by a guideline, does not put a trigger warning on it. No one is forced to read anything in Wikipedia.

Please tell why you find the rape material so disturbing that you believe it should be hard to find.

On the comparison to South Asian women generally, your sandbox draft did omit the sentence I had written. I read the two versions on your sandbox page and the sentence appears in the "unchanged" "current section" but does not appear in the changed text you proposed above that in the sandbox. Search the sandbox for "South Asia" and you can see that I did not misunderstand.

Acceptance of a paraphrase is not an inability to understand a source better than the paraphraser does. When anyone writes an acceptable paraphrase, that's helpful for Wikipedia.

Whether interpretation of a community is impossible or by definition constitutes interpretation of its characteristics is moot and we can work from either perspective. The source author evidently believed a community can be interpreted.

I think the 5th and 7th (last) sentences of the unchanged version in the sandbox are readable, albeit a bit on the difficult side, and I like staying close to original wording. I could rewrite them but I'd probably wind up making them a lot longer, in order to say the same thing with an easier structure. You might do a better job on that than I would. As to doing additional research and not just rewriting, I'm not prepared to do new research now. If neither of us changes it and no one else does, the article can stay as it is. It meets Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.

Although citing or linking to Google Books adds convenience, it is unusual in Wikipedia and may wind up getting deleted. It's hard to justify why it should be present for this article but not in most articles. Also, Google Books sometimes makes particular pages unavailable, so someone might see it today but not next week, or Chris might see it on one computer when Pat cannot on another. I don't know if Google does that with this book but it does it with many books.

Nick Levinson (talk) 01:37, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

I expect to work in my sandbox at making your sub-section of Sri Lanka easier to read, and of course will let you know when it is ready for you…. Also, I plan to arrange the main ethnic sections in alphabetic order (e.g., Asia after Africa, etc.) and then alphabetize the subsections within each main section -- so don’t be shocked if that does happen.

In your last entry, you asked, “Please tell me why you find the rape material so disturbing that you believe it should be hard to find.” Actually, my co-worker, it is you who has made the rape quote hard to find, by hiding it in Matrilineality where readers would never look for it, instead of placing it in the many WP articles where they would look for it (for more details see my complete proposal above, in my 28 Feb entry). I have always said that the rape topic does not belong in Matrilineality because there is no conceivable connection between these two topics. Now my wife has pointed out to me how you mislead or mis-led our readers and thus harmed or confused our readers by mistakenly connecting the two topics, a connecting which implies that WP editors think these two topics are connected. This mistaken connecting has in this way also harmed WP’s reputation among our millions of readers. Shame on me for not noticing these harms done over the last 3 years. Do I hope to convince you that your rape quote is causing these harms? No, no hope of that. But I do think that you will now give up on ever convincing me to leave your rape quote in the Matrilineality text.

Clearly, you insist on locating the rape quote (1) in the text, rather than (2) in a note, while I want to (3) totally remove it. Surely you’ll agree that we need to enable interested WP editors to vote for (1) or (2) or (3), on the Talk page of Matrilineality. We thus need to move our whole discussion from my own Talk page to the Talk page of Matrilineality, right? I would be glad to do the moving via cut-and-paste, as soon as you agree to it, but please do whatever else is needed so that interested WP editors can vote for (1) or (2) or (3).

For7thGen (talk) 22:57, 10 April 2017 (UTC)