User talk:Ferstel

Welcome!

Hello, Ferstel, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• 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 need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome!  Mak (talk) 16:02, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your good edit on Franz Schubert - a number of the composer biographies could use a much more serious look at their music, rather than just recounting their lives. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me on my talk page. Cheers, Mak (talk) 16:07, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

RobertG!

Aw, RobertG, I'm sorry to see you've had trouble in your return :( I agree that there's a real problem with not only basic civility, but also friendliness, helpfulness, and viewing other contributors as collaborators rather than enemies who need to be vanquished. I hope we can find a way to make Wikipedia scale better in this sense, as well as others. If you have any ideas, I would be very happy to hear them, my e-mail link works if you don't feel like contributing on-wiki any more. Mak (talk) 17:46, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Dear RobertG, I saw your attempts to edit Classical Music of the United Kingdom (which I have been wrestling with the 19th century of) and thought what you were trying to say about the UK was absolutely right. Only just noticed it though and now find you have retired, regrettably. The person you clashed with on this doesn't seem to have taken your point on board but I think he will have to, as you are quite right that there is no UK as such in the days of Taverner (even though it was I who put him in there because as an account of what was going on in the British Isles it was quite inadequate). Please don't retire just on this account as the matter will have to be straightened out. Best wishes, in or out of retirement, Dr Steven Plunkett 20:57, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Dr Plunkett. My very best wishes to you. When I joined the project in April 2005 I found it a congenial place. In spite of initial doubts, I decided to settle in; I quickly felt accepted as a member of the Wikipedia community. It was not an entirely selfish decision: I am proud of my contributions (including two featured articles), and I still accept that Wikipedia's aims are somewhat laudable.

Once a decision is made, it is human nature to look for evidence that makes the decision seem more rational, and to ignore evidence to the contrary. For many months my judgement of the Wikipedia community's overall quality and congeniality persisted. Perhaps, now I have at last decided to "move out", I am instead looking for evidence to bolster my change of heart. However, it is too easy to find evidence that the quality of the community's review of edits (including the summary reversal of improvements), and the community's civility, have both collapsed.

I fancifully imagine that Wikipedia has developed its own consciousness, jealously guarding its custodians and contributors until they are of no further use, when it finds a way to discard them. I certainly now feel like an outsider, and my judgement is that my contributions no longer help the cause.

I have thought about why I continued to edit as Ferstel, and can only ascribe it to a sunk cost error on my part: because of my past intellectual investment in Wikipedia, I have been irrationally trying to continue to improve the Wiki, where I should just move on. --RobertG ♬ talk 09:50, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

You are not the only one to feel like this. I still have a few illusions. The perspective you have achieved is the Graduation Scroll from Wikipedia, and you, like many of its best former contributors, have 'passed out' into a fresh usefulness in the world at large. Others, like myself, have not yet shaken off the mirror of Narcissus. The Wikipedia Alumni are a distinguished and experienced company and your comments are never without point. You have made the path in which we poor saps still follow. You are now tutelary angels in the Steinerian cycle of Aquarian cyber-immaterialism which overlooks Wikipedia, for through your work the shape of the whole has emanated from The One, and what is added now takes its shape around that. Enjoy - grüsse mir Wälse und alle Helden : zu ihnen folg'ich dir nicht... jetzt. Dr Steven Plunkett 21:35, 10 June 2007 (UTC)