User talk:Skookum1

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	For speaking truth to power, for calling a spade a spade, and for pointing out the failure of the "information managers", who aren't here to build an encyclopedia but to whitewash it. Viriditas (talk) 08:19, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Gee thanks, aw shucks. And here, seeing the yellow 'you have new messages' alert, I was going to delete the section above with "delete harassment by troll" but you've encouraged me to leave it, to bear witness. I'll transfer your nice shiny new barnstar to my userpage now.Skookum1 (talk) 08:35, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

You've earned it. Your little friend has responded to this award by attacking me as a "political zealot" on another talk page. Keep in mind the kind of petty, vindictive personality you're dealing with here. Lay low for a bit, I don't want to see you blocked or sanctioned; don't forget, the "information managers" run this site, whether we like it or not. (See The Secret Team) It's important for you to take the higher ground. That means no edit warring and no personal attacks. Your little friend is manipulating you and counting on backing you into a corner. He can play the "new user" schtick all he wants, but it's more important for you to focus on the problem at hand and the solution you want to see implemented. Don't get distracted by the sideshows. If you're interested in exploring the deep state connections between perpetual war and RAND, you may want to let off some steam by doing it in another article. Coincidentally, I'm trying to touch upon it in Chain Reaction (sculpture), but I haven't made any real progress just yet. When I saw you struggling with the same problem, I though I would try and contact you. There's some evidence that Paul Conrad placed the sculpture directly in front of the RAND building on purpose, to protest their history of involvement in MAD and other war-related issues. See the "location and installation" section of the sculpture article for more information. The work sits exactly in front of the RAND building, which evidently took some planning on Conrad's part, since the building wasn't there when the sculpture was installed. I've found some evidence that Conrad was aware of the older RAND building down the street, and may have seen blueprints (or become aware of the plans) for the new site. Considering that the council members were aware of the future site and several were good friends with Conrad, a larger picture begins to emerge of foresight on the part of the artist. Viriditas (talk) 22:32, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

I've been WP:BAITed before more than once, including by political operatives and corporate monkeys/consultants (and also by a "rogue linguist" who shall remain nameless), and know what you're saying; I've been around since 2006, ITFL only since June of this year; that he mimicked your barnstar for me with one for LP is comical, as is what it says. It's fairly obvious that Wikipedia's UGC "anyone can edit" platform would have been moled by p.r. and partisan and security establishment/Ministry of Truth types from its very start; including rigging guidelines such as RS to block out non-mainstream media reporting as much as possible, and more. As for the involvement of the US disinformation machine in Canadian media/politics, this is a worthy read; note the second paragraph.Skookum1 (talk) 01:03, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Was it you or another editor who picked up on ye olde talking point switcheroo that led to media outlets changing the narrative of the shooter from one of mental health in the first few days to one of dyed in the wool terrorist out of the blue, simply to justify the new national security initiatives aimed at curtailing what we used to call democracy and freedom? It's an old tactic, and many writers have picked up on this from the start, predicting that when the "enemy" of communism disappeared, we would quickly find a new enemy to justify the budget of the national security state apparatus, and of course, the terrorist groups the west once funded as "freedom fighters" thanks to same right-wing players, suddenly emerged to become the new "terrorists" holding the very weapons we gave them. Funny, that. And so it goes... To see what you have to look forward to, take at look at User:Viriditas/Loss of civil liberties in the United States. The conservative right keeps telling us yanks that we have more freedom under their watch, but as the evidence shows, we have less than ever before. Beware of conservatives who tell you they will protect you. Viriditas (talk) 01:30, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

I picked up on that, and others; but worth noting that in the Canadian media since those first few days, identifying either suspect as a "terrorist" is not to be found in most coverage even in the mainstream media, and the theme of mental health vs organized terrorism is ongoing in Canadian media/blog arenas. ZB is referred to only as a "gunman", and mostly the RAND-generated terms "lone wolf terrorism" and "stray dog", with or without the invective from Jenkins' report that ITFL added (or was it LP?), are largely avoided. Other pages have similarly been edited by the "terror campaigners", as you'll see on Terrorist incidents in Canada, which I've been meaning to trim of its rank UNDUE SYNTH about the Ottawa shooting but have been....preoccupied with the assault on wiki-decency underway re the Ottawa article. Attempts to remove the comparison to Justin Bourque by an apparent Tory editor (User:Messianical not sure I spelled that right were easily thwarted by finding coverage that did make that very valid comparison/contrast between that being notcalled terrorism by the Tories and police (or US media) vs the from-the-get-go peppering of media with "terror" interpretations/allegations/imputations. There's a HuffPo article about its propagation and "where it started", also another column somewhere by the person who took the picture of ZB, which the propaganda establishment jumped on and widely publicized as being put out by ISIL, which is not the case; a caption to that effect on the Ottawa page I removed, likewise on the image page itself. You can still find RS that say that it was an ISIL photo, but that's case in point or RS being "not reliable" and/or misled/manipulated.Skookum1 (talk) 02:14, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

I closely monitored the Canadian news coverage for the first week, and I remember that the media didn't refer to them as terrorists; however, the politicians that they quoted and interviewed referred to their acts as terrorism. What caught my eye was the focus on mental health issues; in the US, the media would have tried and convicted the suspects as terrorists in the first few hours using the same, shared talking points across each news outlet, without evidence. In Canada, the focus is more on actual journalism, reporting, weighing and sifting of different POV, and news analysis. We don't get anything like that in the American mainstream media. It disappeared on September 12, 2001. The media in the US has a bad habit of disinforming its audience, not informing them. I've found Canadian news outlets to be much more information rich. Viriditas (talk) 03:17, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Color me surprised when I heard on the news this week that RAND had been consulting with Sony prior to the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack. Have you been following this?[1] Viriditas (talk) 07:57, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Pacific Scandal (Canada)

Hi, when I moved "Pacific Scandal" to "Pacific Scandal (Canada)" I was not aware of any disambiguation problems. However, because the article deals with a specifically Canadian event I wanted to indicate that in the general heading. So, if you solved a problem that I caused unaware, I appreciate your help. If you simply went back to the old heading, I do not feel that my effort to improve our encyclopedia has not been given proper consideration. Khnassmacher (talk) 15:25, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

See WP:CONCISE and WP:PRECISION and other parts of WP:TITLE and also WP:Disambiguation. Unnecessary disambiguation is contrary to guideines/policy. Note Pacific Squadron vs Pacific Station; the one term is American, the other British; no "(United States)" or "(United Kingdom)" necessary. There is nothing else named Pacific Scandal; if there was there might be some debate about WP:PRIMARYTOPIC as to which one does or doesn't need disambiguation. But there isn't. No disambiguation is ever necessary for unique names.Skookum1 (talk) 04:16, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, ( am not familiar with wiki-nese. However, I have some knowledge about a subject ("political finance") and I would like to improve an encyclopedia in my areay of expertise. Any kind of help is appreciated, any form of holier-than-you-are attitude is not (see wikiquette!!) Cheers, Khnassmacher (talk) 16:44, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Citing wikipedia guidelines on this or that is not a "holier-than-thou-attitude". You'll find plenty of that in various discussions about guidelines, but explaining to you why your name-change was not needed, and not in guidelines, was not done in a "holier than thou" fashion, it was straightforward and "the way it is". Undiscussed name changes can be and are reverted regularly....particularly when the changed name created unnecessary disambiguation (that's a very wiki-nese word you'll find yourself becoming familiar with).Skookum1 (talk) 02:13, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Personal attacks

You may have noticed a lack of responses from me to your posts on the talk pages lately. That was deliberate. I need to bring this up with you first, and I will do so now.

The resentment you feel over having a "newcomer" editing your subject area and the newcomer wanting certain types of articles needs to stop. The resentful comments re:"Asian Indian" need to stop. The personal attacks need to stop. The long, rambling, off-target replies need to stop. Stop the personal attacks and stop the resentment. I don't need to point you to any policies or guidelines as you know them.

I will continue to edit ethnicity articles, British Columbia-related articles, Vancouver-related articles, and Indo-Canadian articles. Kindly do your best to work with me.

Thank you WhisperToMe (talk) 09:04, 27 December 2014 (UTC) @Moonriddengirl: WhisperToMe (talk) 09:08, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Your long, rambling compilations of citations you haven't even read yet and your warring over a title where consensus has now spoken are why I stayed away from even the main WPCanada talkpag, and the merge discussions you deliberately kiboshed and bludgeoned. You're not a "nwecomer" to BC, you haven't even been there and you're a complete neophyte with any aspect of BC history or geography. Your self-built articles are really just masses of trivia items strung together, your writing style bald and repetitive and trite, non sequiturs without context right and left, and the article unwieldy in scope and very much POV in many cases, and near-invariably WP:OWN also. Your animosity towards me from day one about "Asian Indians" vs the correct Indo-Canadians and then your name-screwing about that and South Asians....it's endless, and prodigious, your output, and your stubbornness. You were disrespectful to me as a British Columbian about my opwn province's history and my own considerable knowledge in it, presuming to throw me to the original research board for telling you you were wrong. I point to guideiines YOU are ignoring all the time, and your own tone towards me has been NPA/AGF over and over and over again. Now you are ignoring guidelines once again by re-fielding an effort to get a title changed even though it was only at RM a month ago, there's lots of RM calls I haven't liked but normally at least 3 months, if not six, is needed to revisit them. Posturing about me making personal attacks when you've been arrogant and dismissive towards me and here once again seeking support against me belies the fact that I put off filing ANIs on YOU for various things. I spent three hours last night fixing Chinese Canadians in British Columbia because you have added so much to it sections were repeated; history and geography (both geography sections) had been pushed down below all your "Vancouver data trivia" and you have made no efforts to research the gold rush period or all the small-town Chinese history that you didn't want to know about or address. There's so many things wrong with the way that you behave, and with the types of information you dig out of your ethno-academia history and throw up like blobs of mud, and the way you have misconducted yourself with giant talkpage rants..... I'm used to having someone point at me who cannot see your own faults. @Moonriddengirl:, the "I'm innocent, Skookum1 is picking on me" game is old, and tiresome. I have knowledge of the field, a knowledge of what sources are out there, what's wrong with many sources and claims in them, knowledge of geographic reality he's shit all over, knowledge of what else is out there in the way of parallel content that he's "re-inventing" according to his stated self-mandate of making a "global serious of ethnicity by city" articles....presuming to start them, no less, without knowing anything about the subject first, or anything about the place, and being completely hostile to someone from the place who's a long-time Wikipedian who points out that t he "by city" parameter in his campaign does not apply without the full context of the province that city is inextricably part of, and within which "Vancouver" cannot be split off as a POV fork because some guy in Texas has this "thing" about "ethnicity by city" topics. The resulting articles have been "junk data" collections with a decidedly POV agenda. Making me an issue instead of addressing the issues and information I raise I've seen before; instead of working with me, he wants to accuse me, rally people against me, and accuse me of AGF/NPA when that's what he's done himself (including this attack here, which is just more wasting time/whining). One thing he won't do is listen to me, or respect my knowledge or even the wide range of sources and where to look for them I've fielded, so he's not just working with "specialist" academic papers (and all their attendant POV and bad-facts problems). I won't stop patrolling "his" little farm of ethnicity articles, I won't stop editing and patrolling BC history articles.

Here's what has to stop:

• wars and campaigns to overturn a title change or to prevent a merge, and forumshopping to try to recruit support for your positionn
• Walls-of-cites in the course of discussions
• patronizing dismissals of me and what I have to say
• cite-farming: your pages are masses of links and cites.....as if the title were Historiography of Chinese in British Columbia; "link farm: doesn't even begin to describe this fetish of yours. Here's an idea, why don't you actually read a book before you start an article for it? And if you do make such a book article, try not to make it an effort to dismiss the book's contents by selectively quoting a negative review? In the Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia I'm not sure qualifies under WPBOOKS notablity guidelines, given there's only two reviews, one of them complete invective and that doesn't talk about the book's contents. You didn't even make the title of that article correctly, I had to fix it.
• complaining about me instead of listening to what I have to say.
• agressive article-spawning. How many of this series of "ethnicity by city" titles have you started in this last month or two? Too many. Work on one or two, not start multiple titles to turf-build your personal "global series on ethnicity by title". Chinatown, Toronto already existed; but you had to go make your little POV-fork Chinese in Toronto (that title, if used strictly, would mean Chinese citizens in the city of Toronto, proper. so I changed it).Skookum1 (talk) 02:34, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

I've just been asked by WhisperToMe to look at the naming and page movement for In the Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia and it would appear that it was correctly named initially (per Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(books)#Subtitles) and has been moved to an incorrect title. If it's not too much trouble, could you revert your move ? ISBN and book cover images [2] clearly show the 'The Chinese in British Columbia' portion to be a subtitle. Thanks in advance, Nick (talk) 13:34, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Skookum, whatever else is going on, edits like this one must not happen again. Battleground behavior is inappropriate anywhere on Wikipedia, but we do not insert personal attacks into articles, period, even in hidden comments. I don't need somebody else making a case for your incivility (although I did request evidence that it was ongoing); I noticed it myself when I first stumbled upon your dispute. Whether or not you can demonstrate that User:WhisperToMe is also exhibiting battleground behavior will not change that. I understand that working with others with whom you so fundamentally differ is challenging, but our policies explicitly exclude retaliation as an excuse for personal attacks, incivility or battleground behavior. Even if it is true that WhisperToMe is failing in behavioral standards towards you, you do not have license to do so to him. If you believe that his approach to developing these articles is wrong for any reason, you need to follow dispute resolution practices in the collegial manner required by our policies. If you can achieve consensus that his approach is wrong, then he will be required to stop it. If you can't, then he is free to contribute as he thinks best and efforts to thwart him in doing so - without such consensus - will be disruptive. I would strongly suggest that you seek mediation or some other method of resolving this disagreement collegially and within policy before we wind up at ANI. If I must make a case for an interaction ban, I will do so. Whether it is mutual or singular, it may still result in a situation where he is free to create articles that you will no longer be permitted to address. Given that you obviously care about the subject, I cannot imagine that this is an outcome you want. The best way to avoid it is to calm the discussion down and work towards a community resolution of the core question without muddying the waters around the issue of who is bullying whom and why. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 13:10, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Notice of No Original Research Noticeboard discussion

Hello, Skookum1. This message is being sent to inform you that a discussion is taking place at Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. This is not supposed to be focused on you, the individual, but on the beliefs and attitudes. Nevertheless I must notify you that this discussion has been started. WhisperToMe (talk) 12:01, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Decapitalization effort underway on the Civil Rights Movement pages

You may have not gotten a ping on this. There is a decapitalization vote underway on the bottom of the talk page of 'African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968)' (there was a discussion underway, and then suddenly a new section was added). This is a week many people are on vacation or won't be editing, not a good time for a full discussion but here we have it. Please have a look, and, hopefully, vote or act on this one. Thanks. Randy Kryn 19:14 28 December, 2014 (UTC)

I never seem to get a ping so don't even know whether the ones I make myself work.... the insanity of what's going on with this is typical of a certain anal and mechanistically-dealt-with approach to Wikipedia guidelines that flies in the face of reality....which is why those guidelines need changing, not the titles that they're being used to ruin. "American revolution" etc. Why "sentence case" should be used in titles when the rest of the publishing world uses title case is quite beyond me. Pullman Strike, Homestead Strike etc are the same as Winnipeg General Strike and other titles, in terms of being proper names for events; some events in Canada like the Yellowknife Mine Strike of the '80s just redirect to the parent company or location article in that case to Yellowknife, I'm not sure there's much about it on the Royal Oak Mines page; Dicklyon's campaign to change a lot of titles to use as examples to change others is as incestuous and dishonest (whether well-intended or not) much like a certain editor I'm forbidden to name doing the same with adding "people" to long-standing standalone titles for indigenous peoples; he often changed them to archaic or what are now derisive forms because his thesis was that what linguists use should prevail over actual English usage and what the peoples themselves call themselves. Before changing WP:NCL to suit himself, he'd already moved several hundred (at least) to "prove" that "FOO people" was the wiki-norm. That guideline is a mess now, relative to its lack of conformity to other guidelines and policy, because of his edit-warring over it; the same would ensue with any attempts to reform MOS, and t hat crowd is even more laager-mentality than nearly any other.Skookum1 (talk) 02:05, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

I do understand your point about "degrading" labour/civil rights movement titles as being a POV issue. Part of the problem is that the downgrading of such events is rife in so-called RS, whether in books or in media mentions, as is distortion of facts by those so-called "reliable" sources. Trying to de-capitalize these events has a POV impact; something the MOS crowd fielding this refuse to acknowledge. Which is par for the course with Wikipedia bureaucracy and those core people who man the ramparts of their guideline-fortresses.Skookum1 (talk) 02:08, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Seems to me that not so long ago the same cap/decap war was going on over Monroe Doctrine, with many of the same specious arguments and guideline-twaddle fielded there also.Skookum1 (talk) 04:31, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Someone wanted to decapitalize Monroe Doctrine (lol, or crying out loud). On the 'African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968)' talk page I see that you were listed on the ping list that Dicklyon supposedly sent. He may have forgotten yours (good faith assumed, with great wisdom comes great forgetting...or something similar). In any case, the movement pages that are, imnho, under "attack" (assuming good faith, under "a deep massage treatment") do have some defenders, and any comment or vote that you can make in the ongoing discussion there could be very helpful. It's, if nothing else, an interesting discussion, and a dance of Wikipedia policies and selective emphasis on what to focus on in the literature and what not. Please come by, and lend a hand (or, assuming good faith and human anatomy, two hands) to those who think that capitalizing Civil Rights Movement when preceded by a name such as 'African-American' or '1960s' has worked just fine for Wikipedia since its inception and is the way to go into the future as well. Thanks. Randy Kryn 13:00 29 December, 2014 (UTC)

Instruction creep on Wikipedia is a major problem of the community; people who like rules and enforcing them also busy themselves with writing and maintaining them; they're also in the habit of calling guidelines and even "wikipedia essays" as "policy", and even when citing them seem to not have fully read them....so they're trying to de-capitalize Monroe Doctrine again huh? They're relentless..... and I daresay not one of them has worked on the articles that they're wanting to rename....another bad problem in Wikipedia, name-fiddling by the obliviously uninformed who think in rulesets and nothing else.....Skookum1 (talk) 02:43, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Just noticed "Potlatch Ban" but won't draw Dicklyon's attention to it; it's fine as it is....until Wikipedians obsessed with MOS say otherwise.Skookum1 (talk) 03:58, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

This was freshly made recently Keatley Creek Archaeological Site‎ and I would not like to see that very valid title downcased to Keatley Creek archaeological site, which looks odd, especially when used and/or linked in flow of text; Keatley Creek is only a modifier of the noun of the archaeological site - as with the strikes under RM right now. De-capitalizing a noun when its modifier is capped just doesn't make any sense; but then this is Wikipedia and not the real world....and comes off odd in the flow of text. But it's titles that are under discussion, why ISN'T title-case rather than sentence case used by MOS? Some long-ago "consensus" by 15 people or less??Skookum1 (talk) 08:22, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

It's been my experience, working on prehistoric pages, that site names are often capitalized. Like you say, lower-casing on many proper names looks very strange, and on the African-American Civil Rights Movement pages I had to create several redirects with the lower-case because nobody had ever thought to do it before, showing how often people think of those pages as lower-case entities. I am now being called a zealot for attempting to protect the standard capitalized wikipedian name for those civil rights movement pages, the name that they've been called since their inception. If a zealot I be, in this case I wear the scarlet Z proudly, and with a nod towards Zorro (a favorite childhood television hero - I even had a mask and cape when I was a kid, wish I'd kept them). Until these page-name discussion (the labor pages, the civil rights movement pages) I've kept out of wikipedian politics, and didn't realize how such a small-circle of people can make major and, in these cases, seemingly detrimental, effects on many inappropriate changes here. Frightening in a way, as, in the case of the civil rights movement pages, Wikipedia has the best and most accurate CRM material on the web, and playing with the names of the pages to deemphasize them, to make them less than what they were, can be done by a handful of people, especially when the attempt is made on a week when much of the population is on holiday or has their minds on other activities. I'll take a look at the Keatley Creek page, that's one I don't remember hearing of. Oh, and the Monroe Doctrine, I didn't see a new attempt, I was just reacting to you saying that someone in the past tried to change the name! Will the next attempt focus on the 'New deal'? We can only wait and see (I must sign-off now, to continue my zealotism over on the civil rights movement page...or put the Kennedy assassination template on the Researchers pages...one of the two). Randy Kryn 12:45 30 December, 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I made the lower-case version of the archaeo site title, partly to try to keep it from being easy-moved once it's discovered. Re Monroe Doctrine I was surprised to see no RM on the talkpage as I remember a long and thorny discussion about it. Watch out about WP:POINTy actions, I'm tempted all the time but know there's wiki-gestapo out there and my open and sharp tongue has made me the bete noir against passive-aggressive soft-spoken imperiousness; and seen my blocked arbitrarily twice without warning or any ANI consensus...by people whose own behaviour is questionable. As for in-group hassles, look at the talkpage and history for WP:NCL and WP:NCET....the laager mentality of certain groups, who deny that they're groups (I'd described them as a "linguistics cabal" which got me an NPA warning and was used as an example of my wiki-wrongdoing) is compounded by those who haven't been following the scope of an issue then wade in admonishing me to curb my tone and threatening me if I so much as mention the editor responsible for so much BOLD crap and absurdity-mongering like you'll find in the discussions on the NCL talkpage....MOS, now, that's WP:HOLYWRIT and I do wonder who intransigent it is to possible change because of the MOS-moles who "live" there to protect that turf.....and wonder about how many people took part in its creation, or if it was just the same small crew that polices that turf and wields is like the Bible at a session of the Inquisition....there's endashed titles that shouldn't be endashed, but all you hear is arguments about "typography" and how Wikipedia should set standards, not follow them....Skookum1 (talk) 04:19, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

That was quite the write-up of the history of the decapitalization actions you posted on the CRM talk page, and I still have to re-read it a couple of times to 'wrap my head' around it. This has been going on for awhile, and I'm wondering how many page have been moved which shouldn't have been. It's good you keep watch on some and have stayed with this, thanks for your vigilance. I see you love Canada and its nature, and thanks for that too. Happiest of New Year's to you, yours, and theirs. Randy Kryn 13:08 2 January, 2015 (UTC)

BNA access

I noticed you recently added your name to my BNA list. You already did so in September after you had been approved in June, long before I took over this resource. Why? Chris Troutman (talk) 20:47, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

If I did re-do it (I don't remember doing so but if my sig is there I guess I did) must be early onset Alzheimer's if not just a brain fart. I was actually going to write User:Sadads who was your predecessor about access, as even though I'm fully signed up to access any search results there will cost me a "credit" or whatever (can't remember the wording), so I'm wondering if there's a certain way for a Wikipedia access account to sign in; so far they're treating me as one of the paying yokels.Skookum1 (talk) 03:25, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

Aha. That shouldn't be happening. You should have free access for the year. I'll contact BNA and get it straightened out. They won't be back in office until the 5th but it should be fixed shortly thereafter. If you have any other questions about BNA please feel free to ask me. Chris Troutman (talk) 04:07, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

BNA tells me your account has been set up. Feel free to let me know if you have any other problems. Chris Troutman (talk) 15:41, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

WP:MOS and other guidelines

I believe there may be a point where Wikipedia guidelines will need to undergo yearly consensus-decided changes. Only then can Wikipedia have consistent correct English grammar that isn't overrun by the statistics and beliefs of guideline-for-policy preaching Wikipedians such as DL. There was once a time when I created pages for Wang Ling's Rebellion, Guanqiu Jian and Wen Qin's Rebellion, and Zhuge Dan's Rebellion but two other Wikipedians (who I assume speak a southeast Asian language as their native language) insisted on changing it to Wang Ling's rebellion, Guanqiu Jian and Wen Qin's rebellion, and Zhuge Dan's rebellion. Not only did it end there. They then made a RM for them to be changed to Wang Ling Rebellion, Guanqiu Jian and Wen Qin Rebellion and Zhuge Dan Rebellion and I lost the consensus to it. Nearly a year later I managed to move the pages without a RM to First Rebellion in Shouchun, Second Rebellion in Shouchun, and Third Rebellion in Shouchun and it stirred to conflict but the only names given to these rebellions were the original "Name's Rebellion" as they appear in the Dynasty Warriors video games as they don't really have a name in official histories. It is for this reason I have gained passion in further encouraging people to weigh significance of words and how they are used in the English language without looking at other's ways through Wikipedia guidelines because English is the imperfect language. Statistics, I believe, cannot be used to weigh correctness in English grammar for this very reason. Eric - Contact me please. I prefer conversations started on my talk page if the subject is changed 20:11, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

A lot of the imperious intervenors, regular or otherwise, admins commonly, who lurk/patrol RM and CfD are not historians, geographers etc; if you look at their contributions and userpages are gamers, sports, film, etc whose appreciation of history and the larger reality beyond their BUBBLE is as low as their obsession with rulesets is out of control. "Consensus" unfortunately winds up including the stupid, and the uninformed, and also those with no self-reflective capacity, which is their replies are so condescending, they are engaging in AGF for sure, and quite often NPA, soft-spoken or not. "Votes" are not votes, each reason should be weighed by reason, is it valid or not? No, it's often just a pat guideline-statement and nothing else, or the WP:IDONTLIKEIT thing; on important matters I've seen WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS used to perpetuate great wrongs, and important, detailed replies to stupid questions hammered with WP:TLDR, even one CfD shut down using that in the rationale as to why the closer closed against it, i.e. she wouldn't read what I had to say in reply to "wrong votes" and shit all over me in her closing comment, deleted my talkpage appeal/comment to her with "get a life" or "I have no time for this" or whatever it was exactly; in her closes she says things indicating she has little time: she's impatient and doesn't want to take the time to read/understand, and even crowed that her lack of knowledge on a topic area made her more qualified to impartially decide i.e. to impose guidelines read only one way, and even cited guidelines that said the opposite of what she thought (she's TLDR so prob hasn't read past the first parag of each, IMO), and made NPAs in her closing comments....and ignored data results even while demanding them on other pages, and claimed the guidelines specified that only Googlebooks and Googlenews should be used, and with a certain detailed formal layout; there's nothing of hte kind in the guidelines; TLDR is not supposed to be used on talkpages/discussions boards and applies only to articles...or is supposed ; having that point out, the next time around they dug out WP:WOT which can be used on discussions, but it's used selectively; I think there should be WP:WOB (walls of bullshit). It's a game of rules, not about encyclopedic authenticity, and taken over by rule-mongers. You have to consider, coders and gamefreaks think in numbers, and often don't know much about the past or other countries etc. Often there's childish behaviour and sophomorism from the rule-thumping crowd. All Wikipedians are not equal; there are those who are driven by rules, many of whom have power, or who have gathered it around themselves.

MOS reform should be raised at a Wikipedia conference. There are no rules, per the Fifth Pillar, but that's the pillar that is most ignored, and in a place that is supposed to have no fixed rules, there is now a sea of them, often mutually conflicting, generally used in isolation from each other. MOS is different in a special way; what Wikipedia uses influences English as a whole, which is why things in it that don't "fit" with normalcy, like the endash rules vs hyphens and the use of indigenous endonyms in the proper modern form, instead of colonialist and/or pejorative names because linguistics as a profession (in particular) hasn't caught up to the reality of emergent native reality in Canada. where the endonyms are part of Canadian English for the last twenty years, and still there were people maintaining that Canadian English was not a valid parameter, despite WP:ENGVAR and WP:CSG, and that "global" sources should outweight Canadian ones on that; even when they don't, statistically.... Talk:Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District#Requested move and Talk:Poland-Lithuania#Requested move (or another P-L page) were MOSite hells, including DL as you'll see on those; there's a series of BC RMs he weighed in, on specious grounds; The Alberni-Clayoquot discussions were needless; in the end it was a government styleguide that shut them up, including a dressing-down from the government's counsel-general's office towards them which was an interesting read. Why fuck with titles that have been long-standing for no good reason other than OCD/obsessive "putting all the ducks in an exact line"? There's also the the effect of homogenizing English worldwide, and imposing homogenization based on monolithic/narrow readings of one guideline; how much wiki-time is taken up fighting off stupid RMs and stupider CfDs? Less than the time spent by those armed with guidelines and sword to fight off rationale ones, that's how much.

So yeah it's frustrating; the tyranny of the machine-heads is difficult to get around; they think in boxes and want to fit everything into the same shoe. Theirs. Very Procrustean huh?Skookum1 (talk) 00:50, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. I also believe Wikipedia may one day affect the English grammar due to these reasons and certainly it needs to be stopped. I was wondering if we should address the topic of proper nouns and the like on a much larger scale, possibly request Wikipedia as a whole discuss it so an absolute decision can be made after people who understand English can actually weigh in their knowledge rather than a stupid guideline that is misinterpreted. One of my primary concerns, for example, is how people interpret "write article titles in the case as they would be used in a sentence". This doesn't apply to things like Pullman Strike. It applies to things like "Diet of a horse", etc. and people don't realize this and it is truly a shame. Eric - Contact me please. I prefer conversations started on my talk page if the subject is changed 01:59, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Talkback from Me!

Hello, Skookum1. You have new messages at EoRdE6's talk page.
Message added 03:47, 5 January 2015 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 03:47, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

WP:PROD

I just reread your comment on my talk page and thought you may benefit from re-reading the PROD guidelines. You said on my TP "could have seen this wiped today, instead of being given some time to see how it grows." PROD's have a week for anyone, including the author, to remove the PROD no harm done. They cannot be deleted before the week has passed. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 20:29, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

How would I go about a massive naming convention request?

I think maybe we should take this flaw within our use of proper nouns on Wikipedia to a much wider scale. It should be stopped before it indirectly affects English grammar (which someday, I think it actually could if this continues). Eric - Contact me please. I prefer conversations started on my talk page if the subject is changed 01:36, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Arguments about this have already affected logic, as can be clearly seen in what we are seeing in the responses; rules over reality, in a place where there are no rules, and homogenization of English vs its inherent diversity of usage. MOS needs an overhaul, and not one conducted by those policing and bludgeoning with it as has been happening way too much. I won't get into some of the silly things (RMs mostly) that Dicklyon weighed in on BC in my area; again with having no knowledge of the places concerned, only talking guidelines without adequate context, as also with various others I could name. Machine-thinking and anality; that's the future, sad to say. And it holds sway in Wikipedia, where those who have garnered power around their own personal biases/agendas are hunkered down and fighting off anyone who dares to dispute them, and not only disregard but snot on those familiar with the topics at hand or who have been the main authors of hte articles at question; that line about "do not take part in a discussion whose topic you are not familiar with" I mentioned is not in the main RM or CfD page, I have to go look for it; and want to make a template out of it to remind both lurkers and closers that "if you don't know what you're talking about, stay out of the kitchen". Instead some of them pride themselvs on their ignorance of the subjects at hand, and their own supposed expertise on the guidelines that t hey cite but never seem to have fully read.Skookum1 (talk) 02:15, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Asfor how to go about that large-scale request, I'm not sure; they don't like bulk requests, even though Dicklyon gets away with it by his 5x5x5 posting style.Skookum1 (talk) 02:16, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Logic? Quite ignoring the inherent logic of Dicklyon's arguments. Tony (talk) 04:20, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

No they're not logical, or at best rife with fallacies and really odd opinion/claims. Wasn't aware the MOS mafia had me watchlisted, how nice.Skookum1 (talk) 04:38, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Open a WP:RFC at WT:AT. That's the article titles policy talk page, so that's obviously the proper venue for any such "massive" proposal to change our article title naming conventions.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  14:45, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

I have started a discussion there and I hope many, many people will discuss. Eric - Contact me please. I prefer conversations started on my talk page if the subject is changed 20:50, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

ANI

I have brought up my concerns with the battlefield behavior around Chinese Canadians in British Columbia at WP:ANI. The specific conversation can be found here. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:51, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

OH good grief, but at least it wasn't him who filed yet another discussion instead of researching the materials I've pointed him at, or giving pause to think "gee, maybe this guy really knows his stuff and I should listen to it". But nope, procedure, procedure, procedure and AGF AGF AGF.Skookum1 (talk) 02:46, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

wrong venue

Hello, User:Skookum1. Because you may not see it, I want to be sure you're aware that you put your note to me referencing my "exegesis above" at WP:NOR in a conversation of which I'm not a part. If you wanted to address the WP:ANI thread, you should move it. Other participants at ANI will not see it where you placed it, and I am not going to discuss behavioral issues at NOR. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:07, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

sorry got confused as to which board was which....there's so many on this theme (including his endless multiple talkpage rants/walls of texts). As you know, this is all very stressful to deal with...which IMO is the whole agenda; to overwhelm me with more than I can handle so I'll go away etc.....I'll revise that when I get a chance in a bit, it's b'fast time here.....where I'd thought of taking the POVism he so regularly displays amidst his regular AGF/NPA towards me was the NPOV board, but the personal attack nature of his onslaught is clear as day from my end......yet who gets called to the carpet? 'I'm not the problem' but am being made to seem like I am, over and over and over again; I've consulted a well-known author about his challenges to points I'm making, he's collecting sources for me and may take part in editing the CCinBC page and other related ones; I get respect from those who actually know BCV history and geography, and nothing but spite and put-downs from WMT...soft-spoken but still attack/harassment IMO.Skookum1 (talk) 02:21, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Hook, line, and sinker

I think you let yourself get baited on ANI. Here are a few tips to help you now and in the future:

• Try to avoid ANI if you can. If you must participate, keep your comments brief and to the point, aiming for less than 40 words. If you need to explain anything in depth, use your sandbox or a subpage and then link to it. Editors get upset at having to read long comments and you don't want to upset your audience.
• You aren't required to explain yourself. This isn't a court of law. People here aren't known for their communication skills or reading comprehension. They are poor listeners, terrible readers, and have a short attention span. If you do choose to explain yourself, half of the time you will be misrepresented or misread; pick and choose your battles, otherwise they will pick and choose you.
• Whenever you are tempted to write out a comment any longer than 40 words, and it involves attacks or defensive language, do it, but then instead of clicking save, close the window and delete it. I've started doing this a lot lately and it feels great. You get to say what you want off your chest, but you don't post it!
• Some editors prefer to inhabit an alternative reality where up is down and down is up. I don't need to name names, you know who they are. It's a waste of your time to try and convince them otherwise.
• Don't get overly attached with anything, whether it's a certain view, belief, or way of doing things. Think dynamically, like fluid. As Bruce Lee famously said, be like water.
• If you find yourself reacting in a negative way to certain editors or topics, think about changing your relationship to those things. Unless there's a consensus, it's unlikely the other person or topic will change. At the end of the day, the power and control is ultimately in your hands, and it's in your reaction that it resides. It's easy to forget that if you automatically react without thinking deeply about why you react.

Think about taking a short break to get yourself back into a positive headspace. Aloha. Viriditas (talk) 06:05, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

Internet iffy-ness here aside, which is often why I don't post anywhere for hours/days (meaning other than Wikipedia also), I've been largely ignoring that ANI while working on various article research and also reaching out to other British Columbians/Pacific Northwesterners to "take back their history" from its colonization by bureaucrats more concerned with their own wielding/reading of guidelines than they are with the subject, or the quality of the content the results; the POV/COI issues I see among those who have opposed me over time are not resolvable by rational debate and real communication when unreason and not-listening; in that one certain editor's case, he could learn a lot from me, if he's genuinely interested in the subject under discussion; "a mind is like a box, if it's open, things get put into it; if not, then nothing does" as one sage friend of mine RIP had as a maxim. Walling out information by invocation and distortion of guidelines is a bureaucrat's game; attacking personality instead of discussing issues the infamously ancient tactic of propagandists. 'Nuff said; other than the bios and such linked/sourced while the witchhunt was underway (on the Chinese Canadians in BC and Indo-Canadians in BC talkpages), there are numerous important topics in need of doing in BC/Canada that are of not trivial importance that either need creating or improving:

• Red Chris Mine
• Tulsequah Chief Mine
• Ajax Mine
• Carnarvon Terms
• Salmon War
• Solidarity Crisis/Operation Solidarity
• McBride-McKenna Commission
• Powell Commission
• O'Reilly Commission
• Chinese-in-BC content on over 50 articles needs to be integrated and cogent, not POV forked on a tubthump/soapbox filter of academics-refs only; similarly with Indo-Canadian content and that of a good dozen groups of us (British Columbians, that is, I don't mean Wikipedians who are obsessed with ethnicity as a topic); to do that, someone has to know the history of the province and its geography. Not be shut out and patronized because they do.

Nor vilified and dogpiled upon by haters; who abound in boardspace, ANI is a veritable swamp of judgment and contrarian-ness and unsubstantiated allegation and conflation and IMO is an abomination with very evident cult-like practices: stoning and shunning etc; where NPAs are used to claim someone else has NPAd simply for saying someone is "ill-informed" (especially if they do happen to be...);

I did some reading last couple of days in MOS subpages; nothing there are having to use "cite web" type templates (I get pompous comments about that being 'not allowed' and 'frowned upon', even though the citeweb style templates are time-consuming, and make editing actual text cumbersome; nothing there about page-cites except under the conditions (quoted phrases) that WP:V does say....but it's clear to me for a while now that those who invoked guidelines the most loudly and severely also seem to be those who have no actually read the whole of the guidline; no wonder if a mere 40 words is threatening to them as a "behavioural problem".

and somewhere there's a passage in some guideline or other I came across last week goes something like "if you are not familiar with the topic of a discussion, please do not take part. Might as well add to that, if you don't have time to read more than seven sentences at once and are offended by that, why are you taking time to denounce someone for writing something you won't even read? about something you don't know about, don't want to know about, etc?

content and its validity are more important that guidelines-used-as-rules, and "consensus" formed by hostile and/or mal-informed folks who live for rules and like to create them and enforce them; but aren't interested in learning about the subjects they fiddle with, nor respecting the input of those who do. Contributing editors should not be treated as chattel as the bureaucracy so often does, the content is more important than the rules. And duh, "There are no rules" is the Pillar that doesn't seem to have gotten into most people's heads huh? See the maxims at the top of my talkpage about my opinion of "consensus".

Such is the way of the world; I call this the Age of the Counter-Enlightenment, and will refer you to Samuel Butler's descriptions in Erewhon of the Colleges of Unreason and The Book of the Machines. Eerie to read, eerier still to see his satires become manifest.....

Getting community participation in the writing of their own histories, and encouraging them to donate not just photos and textual input into Wikipedia, never mind donations of cash, is not easy when the bureaucratic imperiousness and stonewalling and uninformed guideline-mandated generalization/homogenization of terms/language is so rife; organizing and promoting local communities to undertake to enrich their local content is definitely an agenda of mine, as there's lots of wonderful and amazing community groups coming forward on places like Facebook of late; people are more comfortable there than they are with the rigidity and strangeness of Wikipedia, 'nuff said. But they're the ones who have the content that someone else wants to shut out and denounce me for even existing, and wants mere mention of any of them deleted if not page-cited as he demands. And he's not being dressed down for that; instead I'v been tied to the pillory and stoned again by people who don't know the material, won't read even a relatively short explanation of issues, and are just there to hate and denounce and are there for no other reason. Guidelines as invoked are just an excuse when POV/NPA is at stake, or someone's COI might be OUTed.....I'm totally "out"; my username is my blogging name and I was outed by a new editor over the Adrian Dix matter who distorted goings-on here, echoing the partisan agenda of my attackers. Needless to say, there are in two subject areas right now (Chinese history in Canada, and "terror-pushing" in general) where COI/POV are obvious in the problem "debates" underway. Nobody listens to reason or cares to learn about the issues; they only want to condemn.

Wikipedia needs serious reform; "wiki" no longer mans "quick and easy", it now conjures up associations of a complicated bureaucracy with strange terminologies and complex code-structures that are increasingly a bar to ordinary people; and which have repelled dozens and hundreds of experienced, valuable Wikipedians re List of missing Wikipedians and WP:EXR for example.

I'm staying out of that ANI for now; I've said my piece and have better things to do....like actually write articles instead of trump up reasons to stop someone from doing so (as is being done to me); the only "kill him" votes are coming from clearly hostile/hater types, not from anyone to do with teh articles in question; that it is entirely an NPA/AGF against me is true from start to finish, and applies to the board wars at OR and Talk:Indo-Canadians also, and a few dozen other places the procedural warfare has been going on it; seen it before, too many times, and the same game is played, and yeah the same players come up and go "I hate him too" because they spend, IMO, more time on discussion boards looking for people to condemn than they do actually contributing constructively to the encyclopedia.

Anyways, I hear you; the gods of the internet mercifully shut me down from time to time ... a bonus of living in a third-world country....and having to defend myself against unrelenting and unfair attack when the person(s) causing the problem go scot-free is, again, part of the way this sorry world increasingly is....with that same time there are lots of articles in need of doing/fixing that I've been trying to address (see my usercontributions) or to get at finally. Many overlap with this ethno-POV fork problem, many have to do with real world political agendas that may yet be battlegrounds for no good reason other than information manipulation and suppression as on Talk:Mount Polley mine disaster and a long list of other articles over time, but also including the Ottawa shootings article and very much so there.....

One last comment, in my opinion, if someone is not capable of thinking/reading 500 words at once, or 1000 words, or even 2000 words, about complex matters, whether about guidelines or geeez actually about content and proper wording/NPOV, then they shouldn't be involved in the writing of an encyclopedia nor should they be using bureaucratic hassling to interfere with those who actually do. Impatience is a curse of the modern time, and semi-literacy is becoming the norm in the post-literate age; and a line from E.R Burroughs' Princess of Mars comes to mind when confronted with "the insults of old age".... I never used to understand the full import of that line; sadly, now, I do. All too much.Skookum1 (talk) 13:53, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

No worries, mi amigo. I agree with much of what you've said. A lot of what you are describing is discussed in Is Google Making Us Stupid? and The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. I'm starting to see a very small, but growing backlash against technology for this reason, but it's not rooted in Neo-Luddism as many might think, but rather in rediscovering the potential of human interrelationships. You touch on this problem in your comments, and you have obviously developed a deep insight into this problem over time. Check out The Shallows up above, you may enjoy it. Be well. Viriditas (talk) 22:44, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

BC schools and French

"it sounds odd outside of Quebec, and belies the fact that nearly all school districts have French immersion programs, and also native-language and other-language programs/certifications. The term has a POV ring to it, and is part of central Canadian/Quebecois language politics. "

Ontario actually has its own Francophone systems too (and to the point where there are four public school systems operating at once in each location) so it's not unusual as it seems. Since this "dual school" system is seen throughout Canada I don't think it's a problem specifying "Anglophone public schools" even in British Columbia.

"Schools, including Deux Rives, should generally only be redirects to the governing school board" - If the school has no senior high school program that is true. If there is a senior high school program it is generally notable under Wikipedia:WikiProject_Schools/Article_guidelines#Notability. However if a primary/junior high school school passes GNG it can be notable too: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Pershing_Middle_School_(Houston)

The reason why I emphasized the Francophone schools over the Anglophone schools with French bilingual programs is because it's a completely different government agency operating the schools.

I was asleep when you made the first post and I didn't wake up until after you made the second. WhisperToMe (talk) 16:33, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

You completely miss the point; the term "anglophone schools" in BC has no relevance at all, it's not part of the local vernacular and is "alien" in BC; the majority of schools have French immersion K-6 of K-12 or 6-12, and many have programs for Punjabi, Chinese, German; and in BC it does have POV overtones because of the language politics of central Canada which have little bearing on life/education in BC. And the franco-colombien schools are not government agencies, nor are they school boards. I'm telling you, as a British Columbian, that it is a problem specifying "Anglophone schools" - it's misleading, given the multicultural nature of the curriculum in BC, and omnipresence of full-immersion French programs/certification. That's not "original research"...though your argument above decidedly IS.Skookum1 (talk) 05:40, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Re "Since this "dual school" system is seen throughout Canada" demonstrates once again how little you know about Canada; it is not seen throughout Canada, particularly not in BC. I don't know where you get the notion that what applies in Quebec or Ontario or NB must necessarily hold true "across Canada". That's fiction and does not bear on reality. Your are taking one notion, adding another, and generalizing a conclusion that does NOT apply as you are claiming; THAT is SYNTH, you are taking A+B and making Z.Skookum1 (talk) 05:43, 24 January 2015 (UTC)\\

CambridgeBayWeather brought up Commission scolaire francophone du Nunavut. That's another province which has separate French language schools. Are there any provinces which don't have any sort of separate French board? WhisperToMe (talk) 06:36, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

"And the franco-colombien schools are not government agencies, nor are they school boards." - A school district is a governmental unit by definition. Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique is a governmental unit. So the Francophone schools operated by Conseil scolaire francophone de la Colombie-Britannique are "special" and should be pointed out as being such. WhisperToMe (talk) 06:33, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

User:WhisperToMe, Skookum1 is correct. Anglophone for schools outside of Quebec looks very odd and is rarely used. The use of Francophone (or should that be francophone as in "Commission scolaire francophone du Nunavut") for schools outside of Quebec is acceptable. So École des Trois-Soleils or École Allain St-Cyr could be called a Francophone school. On the other hand nobody would call École St. Patrick High School an Anglo or Francophone school even though it offers English and French immersion. Sir John Franklin High School and all the schools in Yellowknife Education District No. 1 would not be called Anglophone schools, even though some of them are English only. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 06:20, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

@CambridgeBayWeather: Hmmm.. When I refer to "Francophone" school I only did so when a Francophone school district actually operates it. If there was any case where I mistakenly referred to a school operated by an English-language school district (even a "bilingual school") as "Francophone" please let me know which cases I did so.

Anyway, in regards to "Anglophone for schools outside of Quebec looks very odd and is rarely used." Yes, I can see that it's true in BC and western Canada where English is clearly dominant. The reason why I put efforts to distinguish them is because Francophone schools are quite common in Ontario and I know this from editing Ontario-related articles (Ontario itself has pockets of French-speaking minorities), so I don't think it's limited to Quebec.

• French-Language Education in Ontario: "In Ontario, four school systems are publicly funded: the French public system, the French Catholic system, the English public system and the English Catholic system." - As the page stated, the province has 425 francophone schools and 12 Francophone school boards

I Googled "Anglophone schools in Ontario" and got no results. However the Ontario provincial government does highlight the requirements for "English-language" primary and secondary schools and "French-language" primary and secondary schools in this document (see p. 29 and the index).

In addition New Brunswick is officially bilingual. In that province one must distinguish between the English-language and French-language schools.

In regards to western Canada, the English-language schools shouldn't be distinguished as "Anglophone". If I edit a Quebec article does this mean I should apply the same standards and not refer to the French-language public schools as being "Francophone"?

WhisperToMe (talk) 06:33, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

No, you should not apply the same standards to Quebec articles as to BC articles; provinces differ in many ways, and education systems and terminology especially. As for "I only did so when a Francophone school district actually operates it" as with your previous but false notion that Digital Collections is a "government site" (as if it were a branch of government, with political controls and peer-reviewing etd), the conseils de societe franco-colombien is NOT a "school board" (I'm not sure of their schools' status under BC's Education Act but a "school board" they're not).

Please stop extrapolating using bad logic and imposing your SYNTH judgments on content, and on matters like this. It's a waste of time to dispute such things when you are corrected by informed editors from the place you are writing about.

The education sections you modified with "Anglophone" (which as CBW notes is not capitalized; it's a French term and they use anglophone and francophone) would benefit by listing the other-language programs available in them, and also things like special needs programs and more. "Anglophone" in BC articles will offend many BC readers; it is a term alien to BC and the franco-anglo dichotomy is not a central part of the province's polity or society; our schools are multicultural, and English is a lingua franca; there is no official language for the province of British Columbia, by the way - and in all provinces. Your lack of familiarity with Canada is why you want to impose a "standard" based on what's on a page about one province, vs what should be used for another.

Language politics are dicey issues to assert made-up logics about in Canada, especially imposed by someone unfamiliar with the niceties and volatilities of terms and local realities; why don't you go back now and use those resources I supplied you with an improve those sections with more than anglo-franco dichotomy stuff? Well, you haven't looked at all the sources I came up with for the other articles you started, so....Skookum1 (talk) 08:33, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

User:WhisperToMe. I didn't see anything referred to as a Francophone school but I wasn't really looking, just on this page. In New Brunswick it does seem as if they use anglophone and Anglophone School Districts. Quebec, in the English language, seems to use English schools but in the French language uses anglophone.

As to the capitalisation in English. I checked the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Globe and Mail, National Post, Maclean's and CTV Television Network All seem to prefer francophone (CBC) but sometimes Francophone, Globe and Mail, National Post, Maclean's and CTV.

Thanks for the research! It does seem like the vocabulary is interchangeable if each province uses different words to mean the same thing, but I'm fine using one word or another if it's the best choice. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:27, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

By the way the Ping template does not seem to work. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 19:13, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

And just to underscore that in NB and QC those are official designations and officially "English schools" (interesting that official English in Quebec does not use anglophone, probably because it's a recognizably and particularly French term, with not a few negative connotations within quebecois society) or "Anglophone School Board" in NB. BC has no official language nor any separate school system, other than privately-run bodies like those of the conseil des franco-colombiens. Canada is not homogenous, in structure, polity, or in language-use, and any attempt to impose or interpolate some kind of standard is completely not just off-based, but no do-able. BC doesn't have Catholic School Boards or Protestant School Boards like Ontario does (did?), though there are private Catholic and Protestant schools; WhisperToMe should read up on teh Manitoba Schools Act; Antigonish County in Nova Scotia has a k-12 program in Gaelic and native schools abound for rejuvenating native languages..... all underscoring that the "deux nations" paradigms of anglo-franco is while primary in Quebec and Acadia it's not that simple in the rest of the country; and the Quebecois term "anglophone" has a decidedly unwelcome ring; we'd no more use that in BC than "allophone", which is a political classification from Quebec language politics; extending either term westward as a "standard" is a non sequitur....and politically volatile = POV.Skookum1 (talk) 01:23, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

"BC doesn't have Catholic School Boards or Protestant School Boards like Ontario does" - Ontario still has its English-language and French-language Catholic school boards. This is in addition to the English-language secular and French-language secular boards.

"BC has no official language nor any separate school system" - It does not have an official language. It absolutely does have a separate French-language school system with its own school board. That school system, however, is so small because there are so few French speakers. It's not even close to the size of Ontario's (Ontario has multiple French-language school boards).

"Anglophone" is used in many non-Canadian contexts: For instance The Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Outside of Canada it doesn't seem to have any negative connotations. Do most English-speaking Canadians dislike this word?

WhisperToMe (talk) 04:27, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

In Canada, "anglophone" and "francophone" usually refer specifically to a person's first language learned. They aren't pejorative; they just aren't synonyms for "English" and "French" in typical Canadian parlance. Schools can have English or French as the primary language of instruction, and so are generally referred to by those terms; referring to them as anglophone or francophone is confusing, as the criteria for entry isn't necessarily based on anyone's first language (in Quebec, for example, it is not). isaacl (talk) 04:53, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Not exactly "pejorative" no, other than when used in negative tones by quebecois about les maudits anglos; but not relevant, as we're trying to explain, and as you have explained, or tried to, and very much associated with language politics in Quebec; and while your legal educational status in Quebec isn't about your own native language, it is about your parents language(s); allophones are people whose parents speak a mother tongue other than French or English and they must got to "francophone schools", unless that's changed. The BC school districts that WTM was adding this "false paradigm" to quite often have full K-12 French immersion programs, and especially in the Lower Mainland, the majority of students often have other-than-English as either their own native tongue, or that of their parents; many "English Canadians" (a term which equates to "anglophone") put their kids in these programs, even though English is the lingua franca of nearly all BC communities, including Maillardville which does have a distinct French/Quebecois-origin.

As I've tried to explain, "anglophone" (w/wo caps) is an alien term in the BC context and gives a completely wrong idea about the multicultural/multiethnic nature of BC society and BC communities; finding a cite that "most English Canadians dislike this word?" is problematic as there are no polls about the word but it's decidedly from Quebec's (and Ottawa's) official lexical environment. It is not part of BC history or society, past or present; I googled and the only results about BC that use it are from quebecois sources and academics writing on linguistic politics; you won't find it in school board or provincial government citations.

The persistent SYNTH about "with its own school board" is once again incorrect; that is not a provincially run school board nor mandated by law as such and its not called a school board, either. And what is used in Germany is utterly irrelevant to Canada and to BC.

And re " It does seem like the vocabulary is interchangeable if each province uses different words to mean the same thing" is yet more SYNTH; and quite illogical; if each province uses different words to mean the same thing that does not mean that it follows that "the same thing" should be the same word used for articles on each/all provinces; as I've explained, education policy and jurisdiction is a provincial matter; the attempt to suggest a standard wiki-ism is completely off base; this is very clear to us, and you should bow and admit that you have been wasting time nit-picking on this concept; we understand it, it's time you did, too, and not seek reasons to continue waffling/arguing about it. Have you begun adding information on K-6/12 French immersion and other language programs in those same sections yet, by the way?Skookum1 (talk) 07:52, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I just googled "anglophone" within the BC Ministry of Education website and all results that come up have to do with Canada/Quebec; none are about BC schools; and most results are in French. A google for your construction "anglophone schools" on the same site turned up "NO results".Skookum1 (talk) 07:58, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

The province of BC may not directly operate the French-language schools but it certainly does have authority over them just as much as it does over the English-languages. I don't think it's disputable that a separate French-language public school system that is not a part of the English-language school boards exists in British Columbia. Whether or not the English-language boards have French immersion programs doesn't change that.

The exact nuances of the system of course are different (French-speaking persons aren't forced to enroll their children in the BC French school system) but these nuances don't come into play when someone makes a simple edit saying that this town has a French-language school.

WhisperToMe (talk) 15:38, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

These aren't "simple nuances" as you are once again projecting false assumptions on; they can be crucial political-cultural reality i.e. language politics and have been a major force in the country's history; and once again, your comment shows that you don't "get" that many the regular public schools have full French programs.....and are "French-language schools" too; the difference with the societe francophone schools is they have a different curriculum; and all schools in BC are governed by the Education Act, and all organizations whether it's the societe franco-colombien or the Geothe Institute (which runs a German school in Vancouver) or organizations behind Chinese-only schools are all governed by the Societies Act. They are not "school boards as you were maintaining rather persistently. And "these nuances" DO come into play when "someone" makes a "simple edit" imposing the term and the paradigm ensuant upon using "Anglophone schools" and going on to argue about it when told by editors from the country that it is a wrong usage; do you realize how frustrating this kind of quibbling instead of listening/accepting informed input is? Do you care about how much of others' time and goodwill you take up by not listening but wanting to argue about "simple issues" and rather obvious ones to a Canadian, even when told you're wrong? By a Canadian??Skookum1 (talk) 18:21, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

The language of primary instruction in Quebec is determined by whether or not a parent has been educated in Canada using English as the primary language, regardless of their first language learned. In other provinces, either first language learned or language of education of the parents are qualifying criteria. Thus using the term "anglophone" or "francophone" to describe a Canadian school is a misnomer. isaacl (talk) 16:02, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Ok! I'll describe them as "English-language" and "French-language" since that seems to be the best choice WhisperToMe (talk) 16:05, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

yes, at last it's not just "the best" choice, it's the reality of the place and the way things are; that it took this long for you to "get it" after so much laborious explanation; and not just by me, thankfully. But @Isaac1, there is no such "qualifying criteria" in British Columbia, for any other-language program full-time or otherwise; that's only restricted in Quebec and nowhere else (unless in NB, but I believe as in NS and ON it's purely choice). Things may be different within the franco-albertan and saskais and manitobaine and franco-metis communities there and in ON, and re AB/SK/NB legislation but I doubt it; in those communities it's cultural solidarity and pride that have kept their dialects/identity alive, as also in Maillardville. Not sure in the NT, CBW would know (they have something like 27 official languages including French and English)Skookum1 (talk) 18:21, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

My apologies for the imprecision; I was listing the criteria for the right to minority language education. There are other conditions (where numbers warrant) and so forth, and I don't know how every jurisdiction decides on allocating each individual's school tax funds. (In Ontario, to designate your school tax to a French-language board, you must have French language rights.) isaacl (talk) 19:06, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

The Northwest Territories has 11 languages (Chipewyan, Cree, English, French, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey, South Slavey, Tłı̨chǫ) and Nunavut has 4 (English, French, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut). There are 3 types of schools in the 2 territories. The French language schools, one each in Yellowknife, Hay River and Iqaluit (École des Trois-Soleils). There are the Catholic schools all of which are in Yellowknife, Yellowknife Catholic School Board. Everything else in the NT and NU is just a school and not defined by language. Every school Nunavut has a "language of instruction" which must be one of the 4 official languages. In practice this means that Cambridge Bay and Kugluktuk are classified as Inuinnaqtun and the rest of Nunavut as Inuktitut but are just called schools. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 16:02, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction/clarification CBW...but it's not like WTM is even listening nor ever really has been, he's busy arguing his SYNTH word-games somewhere else right now, as I know all too well, and has no intention whatsoever of any further interest in Canadian schools or education content in articles as the issues raised do not fit the paradigm he was seeking to impose/juxtapose on them......rather than go back and add information on immersion programs and Punjabi, German and aboriginal programs and whatever else to where he dropped his franco-anglo dichotomy on and walked away from, he's done no such thing and gone "on the attack" defending "his" turf elsewhere.......Skookum1 (talk) 17:06, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, but you just didn't make your point well enough!

I did read your complaint at User talk:Jimbo Wales, but it's just hard to respond to. You take a poke at twenty different issues at once, not explaining any of them well enough to be understood, though the sources you provide for a few are useful. You mix it in with sarcasm or metaphor that doesn't work well on the Internet about lizard people and Vogon fleets, which drives away the average reader. Now, few things would please me more than to watch a video feed of Harper, Cameron, etc. experiencing female genital mutilation at the hands of Boko Haram, but what do you want people on Wikipedia to do, precisely? I'm sure you have ideas but they really do get lost in there somewhere.

I would suggest...

• Try to understand the concept of epitope and antigen presentation from immunology. The goal of a dendritic cell is to take up a virus, digest it into little pieces, and sort out small, unique pieces which in and of themselves can be recognized as antigens. By taking unique pieces and calling attention to them in the right way, the cells of the body identify an entire invader in terms of a small piece that a cell can understand and fight against. The same should be true of ideas. For example, instead of going on about all the suffering of Palestinians at once, then taking blowback on everything the Palestinians ever did, it is far more effective to talk about whether it is excusable in any circumstance for Israel to target a UNRWA school with explosive shells. [3] Or to ask whether it is ever acceptable for Israeli soldiers to knowingly shoot at a civilian farmer simply for entering their "buffer zone" to work his land.

• Give us basic facts. The Canadian disputes on oil and gas drilling, like our own in Alaska, are a lot like that old story where people who have never seen the Chinese emperor try to determine the length of his nose by holding a vote and taking the median of their guesses. Most of the people arguing have no idea at all what life is like up there. For me to understand who is in the right and who is in the wrong, I need tangible data. Does the pipeline make noise? Does it stink? What are the odds it will someday leak oil in any given area? Do they put up fences and make you walk around it? Nobody tells us this kind of stuff - they make bland statements about "environmental impacts" and I honestly think it's because they have no idea. Wikipedians citing tertiary sources citing secondary sources citing primary sources in a game of telephone, with nobody understanding what they're reading. We need people on the ground, giving us the hard facts, and when they do so it doesn't matter what their POV is, because the facts will speak for themselves.

• Be careful. Whatever happened with ANI, when I've seen people coming to Jimbo's page and making general statements about bias, they have often been further mistreated because they were accusing other editors without evidence. I don't know if you mean to say that Harper devotees have been railroading you or not but be careful, because admins really hate it when you make such allegations with anything less than bulletproof evidence (and they may hate it more if you have it). If you pick a hill to die on make sure it's one worth fighting for. Wnt (talk) 14:07, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

• • Harper devotees had vandalized such articles as mentioned (Idle No More and Theresa Spence in the same terms as the rhetoric heard from trolls on news sites; identifiably Toryite (or "ReformaCon" as they're called, as with the BC Liberals being the Lieberals etc); or worse, in some cases; rabble. But in the case of the Ottawa shootings and St-Jean-sur-Richelieu articles there was overt terror-propaganda hype and ongoing "work" on the article that was blatantly POV and govt/police oriented, an attempt to remove Glenn Greewald's op-ed analysis as "fringe" (a tactic that failed as geez the guy is a Pulitzer Prize winner; and more and more and more; see 2014 Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu ramming attack and my deconstruction of the fabrication of what sources were supposed to have said but did not.

• Digging into that user's contributions I saw a pattern of topics and edit behaviour "all of a kind", same with those who were warring over the Ottawa articles twice deleted a section I'd built detailing false and misleading edit comments, some claiming to bew minor or very different than what the edit commnent said; a clear violation of guidelines, claming *I'd* violated guidelines simply by laying out the anti-guideline behaviour underway which he claimed was NPA so he had a "right" to delete it; another editor restored it after he re-deleted it the first time after I had restored it; it seems to have been redacted again after I de-watchlised that page for stress reasons as it's not in the archives and he claims it didn't happen in the ANI block-vote he launched where he also redacted and moved my comments about why the vote-call was invalid and POV-COI driven; it's in the edit history somewhere but I havean't taken/had the time....looking into his user contributions, well, I think I've said enough about all that already, it's boring to repeat it now but plain as day "who they are". They do nothing else but generate POV contents and in his case wage edit wars, so highly ironic that he should posture as a wiki-cop on a board he's shown up even more than I have.....

• • the "fringe" argument was used to purge the Vancouver Olympics article and the POV fork "concerns and controversies of all local political comment/opposition, first by saying that Canadian Dimension and various other reputable sources (there should be a difference between "reliable sources" and "reputable sources" IMO, and when a so-called reliable source has been shown to be unreliable (as with the Vancouver Sun and other media-monopoly heavyweights) they are UNreliable sources and not to be taken without a grain of salt; tons of examples about that; the other thing about the 2010 Olympics C&C article was its "keeper's" dismissal of local content/controversies as being "purely local and not of global interest".

• • similarly on Talk:Mount Polley mine disaster the IP and then the SPA that railed against the title claimed there were no cites using that term ("disaster") which they alleged was "inflammatory" and when I went and found a lot of cites that did use the term, the SPA claimed that the Vancouver Observer was "fringe" and would not recognize the cites, as I cared what they said. So along comes a guy who's all well-spoken and pretending to be NPOV but does some POV edits and wheedles to justify them; it went on, I did some digging into his edit history and talkpage and discovered he wasn't just a mining consultant, he'd used a certain link, now a 503 or 505 error or whatever, that when I went to the root domain turned out to be OSAC's site; I'll let you look at that and read what it says about an organized network of professionals, military, defence industry, students and academics and community groups organized to....well, go ahead and read what it says; same deal as the Tories having meetings to exhort the faithful to get out there on social media and "correct the message", and so on......so I challenged him about his mining industry connections as COI, he did do a disclosure saying he had no commercial/contractual connection to Imperial Metals; even though he is a member of the mining association and a consultant for them and other mining companies; digging farther into OSAC and seeing his other info-suppressions re other mines/human rights (Eritrea, other mines in Mexico and Guatemala) and knowing people have been killed and beaten and given the security-state connection via OSAC I backed away; discretion is the better part of valour...and this is a dangerous world, to be blunt.

• it's not just that element but "all sides" are doing this; I've seen sino-centric POV and disruptive behaviour lots though the current battlefield article's author/keeper is among the most virulent and persistent I've seen; he now says he wants to disengage which is fine by me, he postured about 'sorry to be such a burden' to that linked editor but not to me and has never once admitted he's wrong; he postured about his life being damaged, but has assaulted me with attack-style talkpage warring since (and even more) I told him in the Xmas week I was in life-crisis (I'm hanging by a thread here and have dropped maybe 10kg; I have high blood pressure - I'm 59 - and he upped the stress level since, and jacked it through the roof this last few days) and didn't have time /energy to deal with all that he was demanding of me, and then even telling me to spend money and order teh books that he demanded I rebuy in order to be able to "contribute effectively to the discussion" which he said I couldn't do without it; he's never read any of them. So much so much so much and I've stayed up late too often and can't get to sleep because of all the garbage in my mind from deconstructing his false/synth logics and claims and evasions and misdirections and, frankly, psychological warfare as well as character assassination and ongoing AGF as if I was lying about the points I brought up about what was missing and what else there was to include.

I knwo propaganda techniques when I see them, I've been on this planet a long time (and wish I could remember where the keys to my spaceship are - joke - it's time to get out of this crazy self-immolating sphere), and the amount of edits coming all at once suggests robotic tools to post/edit with; as also noted re a certain other editor who reverted things so rapidly he must have an external bot to do it with; but I suspect a team, which is why I mentioned CHECKUSER; it's after that that he's backed off and still protesting innocence with finger-in-cheek paints me as the bad guy who's "interfering" with him .... yadayadayada could go on for pages about that; now I'm just gonna work on the article and ignore anything he says, just as he did with anything I brought forward other than when taking it to discussion boards to try and get backup, or pretend that they said things approving of his position when they did not, not even close...

There's an article in the current Epoch Times about cyberwar actions by China; I paraphrase it somewhere not sure which place, and in today's Guardian there was an item about a new "pscyhological warfare" unit of the British military whose job it is to infiltrate Twitter, FB and other social media; without mentioning Wikipedia but it's a given that any social media is the field of combat.

The 'shoot the messenger so as to not admit to the issue/message' is so rife in Wikipedia, along with the TLRD/WOT bullshit where people say they won't read what you have to say because it's too long/they don't have time and do so in an uncivil and NPA manner.....tehy're entrenched, to the point that WOT is a guideline; once I pointed out that the invocation of TLDR on talkpages was not what it was for; and while WP:Wikilawyering demonstrably exists, to say someone is wikilawyering has become grounds for an ANI - ???? So, you can't criticize someone's editing activity without being threatened with a block as if that were NPA on the same par as 'asshole' or "you're stupid". You can't get into evidence of dishonesty; that's against the "new rules" that have arisen in the culture of "the community" in recent years ... reminds me or Parliament where you can't call someone a liar even when they obviously are. Absurdity combined with imperious condemnations if you speak out.

That's only some of what's out there; China has warred on Tibet and other articles for years, Russia and Ukraine articles/editors are at each other's throats; in Thailand it's dangerous, ant not just re jailtime, to engage in any political writing of any kind; and it's not the only country that's like that either...I left there because of the deteriorating situation and increasingly dangerous political milieu and a mounting sense of anti-farang attitudes/conduct and more; and keep my nose out of Cambodian politics (even though I do a news show here) for good reason.

Between corporate, country, partisan, and defence/m-i and "security state" moles, it's a multi-front problem and the integrityy o the encylopedia "anyone can edit" is inheretnly flawed, leaving it wide open to manipualtio by anyone with the skills and determination/agenda funding to spend all day, every day, warring to control and maniuplted or, as The Photographer noted, to block people who stand up to it.

• • • So what can Wikipedia do? Like it would happen - abolish ANI, stop giving adminships out t o people via a system that any person can pretend to be all nice and pleasant but start behaving like executioners once they get one.
      • CfD/AfD/RM etc should have, iron-clad, the MOS bit somewhere about "if you aren't familiar with a discussion do not take part or vote" in blazing red letters at the top of the templates/pages; and there should be a rationing/quota system so people don't hang on those boards fulltime especially if they display regularly contrarian and block-him-block-him-let's negativity.... all while not disussing thte issues at hand that cause an argument, but going afteer someone on their own allegations of what he's done or launching ANIs based in complete fabrication" as to were in the course of the last year....;
      • and rules about making unsubstantiated allegations about what cites/allegations say; and an end to impatience being of the kind of "I don't have time to read all this so am going to close this and slag the nom or whatever" etc.....if they're too busy tot take the time to respect what is said or come to terms with hte issues and whether the votes are valid or not, they shouldn't be closing; especially not when hostile-closing someone they've unilterally blocked; and though it's not provable the use of the same tactics as the "dogs of infowar" use very regularly, why they come out of the blue with rank NPA condemnations and go after someone talking sense an NPOV raises questions as to who they are; mahy have bven here from the start, and that's part of the bigger question.
      • in the cases of POV/politics etc and history and more, people who write celeb articles an movie reviews as t heir contributions who have no political acumen or knowledge of the matters at hand should butt out; rather than invoke guidelines, or lines out of guidelines, to pound down their interpretation of "whta mus be done"...which involves restrictions, personal accusations, even allegations against someonen's mental health or intelligene and more; and who are they and...if they write articles on sports or knitting or cartoons and video games, what are they doing as editorial-power mavens in teh first place.

• • • • I'd like to recruit and encourage more peopel who do know their history but being confronted with/meddled with by people who don't know that history and start tossing guidelines around as if content itself didn't matter, that's just not viable the way thintgs are now; and IMO things have gotten more and more rule-oriented an "consensus-drigven" and code 'requirement' eg web cite hae gotten unwiedly an dtime onsuming and 'picky as to be very unwelcoming to people we should be creatin a welcoming engvironent ror; see my maxims section on my userpage to see what I t hink of consensus....

• • • • That's all for now and yes, it's long ; but it's not like any of t his can be discussed in Coles Notes type "precise" terms; that oft-heard excuse for AGF and "I don't hear you" is just yet another "rule" that justifies looking away, not readin what is said, and condemning someone yhou want silenced for daring to speak in another fashoin; "behavioural problems" it's called - another case of alleging someone is crazy by way of dissmissing them and justifying blocking/punshing them... who are these peopel anyway and who are they to judge others when their own behaviour is to hypocritcally negative and AGF;/NPA right off the bat. My eyes are getting tired as is my brain; I've been gorund under the wiki-millstone for weeks now...really the whole last two years since coming back after the "Harper government" AFD/block has een one harassment of me after another;

• • • • Wikipedia needs reform and it does need a higher tier of "content editors" whose job it is to think, not judge based on guidelines, and empowered to take action and expose those abusing the open platform in the ways above; ending anonymity an requiring full disclosure of corporate/political/government/org connections should be considered seriously too...but "consensus" means tha those currently abusing and gaming it will be in the discussions to try to end it; they will never let it happen; too many vested interests are present to ever let go......and it's clear to me that many here are pros, or funded in some way without admitting t o it and are disingenous when claiming they are doing it in their 'spare time' , 12 hours a day 7 days a week.......and consider that most poorer people dn't have net access of time or money to do that; but wealthy and funded and employed-to-the-task people do.

• • • • Gnite; if you want to write me privately to respond that's probably better than in this accursed goldfish bowl with its watching piranhas.... I need sleep. thank god someone bought me a pancake this eevening so I don't go to bed on any empty stomach and wind up thinking about the assaults and barrages coming at me here again.Skookum1 (talk) 17:03, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

The pipeline questions I'll come back to later and theyh answers you'll hear involve differnt quetions than you've asked. lots is out there, but because MSM wont' cover it and necessary facts are not found in their reportage, and th e oil sector have a powerful lobby here it's going to have to be explained later... I'm tired.Skookum1 (talk) 17:07, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Your idea of having a quota for how many AfDs someone can vote in is certainly appealing, though unfortunately not easy to make happen. It would be interesting to hear more about the pipeline. I should add that I didn't find anything for Sasquatch Five in a naive web search - are there any other names I might try? Admittedly the coverage online for things from the 80s is awful, but shouldn't be this awful. If you have a book or other offline references about it you could do some welcome work there. Wnt (talk) 19:37, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Hahaha at first I thought that was a brain-fart of mine, but no, it's the only instance of Sasquatch Five on the page... not a bad band name, thanks (I'm a musician)......Squamish Five is what you're looking for. And about Squamish....therein lies a tale and half or two, about which I'll go into later; and a lot of the blood and gore around me has to do with a bad move, a bad vote, a hostile and impatient close, and my attempts to set things right ...... and how much energy has it taken to try and stop me from getting a few hundred undiscussed moves back to where they had stood for long? Too much, all messed with by people who don't know anything about the topic and shouldn't have taken part in teh discussions and who misused guidelines and and and....so in a way that's an ironic example but I'll explain it later; in fact I was going to write an essay re "The Squamish Affair" or "the Skwxwu7mesh affair" though it's not just about that pair of names..... man, that's a story and a half.....and my efforts to "get things fixed" because people from afar who knew nothing about either name weighed in....with a rain of hammers.

your inability to find much on the "Sasquatch Five" brings to mind the names Jack Cram, Grant Bristow and Erwin Singh Braich. try searching for them..... Canadian court bans (i.e. publication) and in-web suppression have hid their stories from view, or muddled them bewyond all recognition of what happened.... as also with the Oka Crisis and other events in the '80s and up to '93. the Oka Crisis article is a good example of wallpapering and postfacto revisionism in the sources. GTG but just had to chuckle/guffaw at the "Sasquatch Five" thing.Skookum1 (talk) 01:52, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Manifest destiny

Shouldn't this be uppercase? Eric - Contact me please. I prefer conversations started on my talk page if the subject is changed 20:28, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

I'd say so, and there's been discussions about it on that talkpage before. But guideline-mongers and statistics-driven thinking are what's in the way of common sense. It doesn't make any sense in sentence case i.e. "effects of manifest destiny were...." and should be upper-cased IMO. But I'm not a MOSite and they see everything differently; through the lens of their mechanistic thinking processes, rather than grappling with actual grammar and conceptual realities of such a phrase; there's lots of examples out there. Lower-caseing winds up with some earnest MOS-following editor doing things like "FOO river" instead of "Foo River" and such, too. English is being warped by Wikipedia's/MOS' influence but they're quite happy about having that influence.Skookum1 (talk) 05:27, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Phil Gaglardi and BC-highways development

Hi. I noticed you have a keen interest in numerous aspects of BC history, and that you have a specific interest in the Phil Gaglardi article, to which you've contributed quite a few times.

Mr. Gaglardi's contributions to the development of the highways were a bit before the awakening of my political awareness. I haven't known who to ask about this, and possibly you know:

Did Phil Gaglardi have some responsibility for the development (or marked improvement) of the southern-route Highway 3 in the Castlegar area? and also Highway 3A from Castlegar to Nelson? Thanks in advance for any reply.Joel Russ (talk) 01:20, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes he did; I seem to recall a piece in Beautiful British Columbia magazine or maybe Westworld with him doing the ribbon-cutting. DoH should be able to fill you in further. My connection is not just BC politics in general; I went to elementary school in Silverdale, where about 90% of the community are cousins of the Donatellis.Skookum1 (talk) 01:24, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Realized you may not get that; the Gaglardis are related to the Donatellis by marriage and those are the two original families at Silverdale; there's a page on the Mission Museum or the Mission Archives site about Donatelli Road (or "Donatelli Avenue" as it's been renamed). The Gaglardi homes, two modern-ish bungalows, are on Highway 7 just east of where Donatelli Rd meets the highway; the old Turkey Gobbler if you know what that was was on their property.Skookum1 (talk) 16:15, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

"modern-ish" meaning post-WWII, 50s/early 60s; don't know what the pioneer homestead looked like, I think that was the same patch of property (in the angle of Donatelli, Malquist (where the hall is) and the Highway.~

Liberty Bell to Liberty bell

Good one (but you may have given some editors an idea...). Anyway, speaking of the Bell, want to see something cool? Awhile ago I added a template or three to the page 'United States Declaration of Independence' and, completely by accident, when I looked at the template stack I thought 'Darn if that doesn't look like the shape of the Liberty Bell'. Check it out. Randy Kryn 13:27 12 February, 2015 (UTC)

Page numbers

I am offering to give you pages of the Morton book. You can use a throwaway e-mail under whatever name you choose (an e-mail address that you don't use with anyone else or for any other purpose, and one which you can abandon after using it). I will give you the table of contents, chronology, sources other than newspapers, and index. Then you can decide what pages you want. I can send you maybe one to two chapters of the book of your choosing. WhisperToMe (talk) 18:53, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

I have a Dropbox account link ready and I would like to send it to your e-mail. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:26, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Link it here, I am not going to create a mail account simply for this; there is no reason not to put the dropbox link here unless it's a blacklisted link. Even so, "email this user" on the left of my user/talkpages will get that link to me without me having to set up a mail account; you've been around Wikipedia long enough to know that.

And please stop expanding the article until I can fix your writing, which is not encyclopedic in style nor in WP:Plain English, and move the dross UNDUE on off-topic matters to the corresponding articles or their talkpages for incorporation where they belong; eg the lengthy material on Cumberland belongs on the Cumberland page, not on a general article where it needs only to be briefly mentioned. Expanding the article when it is in serious need of revision and cleanup is not responsible behaviour. Likewise creating articles like Chinatowns in Nanaimo without integration with existing wikipedia material and other sources than your preferred ones, which leave much be desired, quite frankly. Why you continue to expand the article without looking at what's on, and what other sources have been used by other editors on e.g. History of Chinese immigration in Canada and the Head Tax article is quite beyond me, likewise History of Vancouver, Chinatown, Vancouver, the Golden Village article and many others; your articles do not exist in a bubble, nor are they a fortress either. You are reduplicating content already elsewhere, and ignoring tons of sources that other sites have used, and many others that I have repeatedly recommended and are online, never mind the many that are not which you have raised so much fuss about.Skookum1 (talk) 06:45, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

"until I can fix your writing, which is not encyclopedic in style " - I strongly disagree that my writing is uncyclopedic in either content or style. If it's about the information "appearing incomplete" leave it in and let the article form.

"Likewise creating articles like Chinatowns in Nanaimo without integration with existing wikipedia material and other sources than your preferred ones" - I've pointed out on the talk page that the existing content was poorly cited - If information is poorly cited it's unlikely that it's going to be reused. I did used the same two admissible sources that the poorly cited paragraph had anyway. It's not possible for there to be a difference in point of view as it's just basic facts.

I want you to consider whether the suggested improvements improve the article. Make sure additions reflect what the sources actually say. If not the reader will be puzzled when he/she doesn't see the expected information in the citation.

I have not seen a talk page discussion saying that "European Canadian" is preferred over White. If you think instances of "White" are inappropriate you should start an RFC on the matter.

WhisperToMe (talk) 07:12, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Geez, seems you haven't looked at Census Canada tables for what they use, have you? No, of course not, and you don't care either. Capital-W "White" is not modern {{Canadian English}} and is "out of fashion" and has a racist impact when used in POV diatribes against Caucasians such as you are so clearly focussed on assembling and SYNTHing, without respite. If you can't see the POV that you have, go find a mirror....or start noting how other sources do not have the invective tone but are written with fairness for all concerned.

As for the reader will be puzzled when he/she doesn't see the expected information in the citation." material I will remove that is UNDUE and off-topic will be moved, with your cites, either to the article space of the existing articles or to their talkpages if it needs revision and improvement for very bad grammar

And re I strongly disagree that my writing is uncyclopedic in either content or style. If it's about the information "appearing incomplete" leave it in and let the article form." you have no idea about how bad your compositional skills are, or how strange your convoluted grammar/syntax is, and how often you make incomplete sentences of baldly irrelevant statements like "Victoria Chinatown [sic] is in Victoria". You write five short sentences where one or two integrated ones in normal English are much simpler; you need writing lessons; you may have a degree, but that doesn't mean you can write natural English. Not even close. I have worked professionally as an editor of books and reports (government and NGO and also corporate, including being the head of the wordprocessing pool for a World Bank conference in Vancouver where I had 100 diffrent official style guides to coordinate 15 different editors under me) and have extensive experience fixing awkwardness and bad syntax/composition of all kinds; your writing is unencyclopedic [noting your ünclcylpedic above] and in fact comes off about a Grade 8 level in quality. Read something other than academics and your writing will improve, and pay attention to the revisions I will conduct to make your contributions more readable and coherent. "The interests of the general readership should be put before those of specialists" is apparently a policy/guideline that you haven't read...or don't care about.

And be mindful that your American sources contain numerous gaffes e.g. Victoria Island for Vancouver Island, Chinese-American instead of Chinese Canadian; you should read WP:CANSTYLE also if you are going to keep on contributing to Canadian article space on Wikipedia. You have also been piping comma-province dabs on names like Nanaimo and Lillooet that are not needed per WP:CSG#Places and should be better apprised, as commented already, on existing BC content and on Canadian English usages.

As far as my own credentials re BC history go, other than my close ties to the Lillooet and Mission communities and museums, I was Heritage Researcher for the Gastown Business Improvement Association in 1989 and spent months in the Vancouver Public Library and in the Vancouver Archives reading up and studying all sorts of things; I assembled an index for the BIA's use of all historic photos concerning Gastown in the VPL and also assembled detailed property history and notes on the early history of the city, including the context of Chinese present since its very start in 1867 on Water Street and lots more. I'm not some uneducated boob without a degree, and many who do have degrees admit by their own admission they don't know half as much as I do about various matters. Other BCers like User:Bobanny who are now writing in their own right rather than putting up with the Wikipedia milieu and its strictures on style (e.g. WP:PEACOCK) also know I know what I'm talking about; as does @TheMightyquill:.Skookum1 (talk) 07:29, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

"You write five short sentences where one or two integrated ones in normal English are much simpler; you need writing lessons; you may have a degree, but that doesn't mean you can write natural English." - Oftentimes I write short sentences because I need to indicate which information is cited exactly to which source. If you try to "integrate" all the content together it may look like ABDED<ref>a</ref><ref>b</ref><ref>c</ref><ref>d</ref> which may be difficult for the reader to pick out. I put verifiability above beauty. Now, perhaps somebody can come along and make it look prettier later, or I can look at it later and go "hmmm... maybe it looks better like this" but the No. 1. concern is verifiability, and also avoiding close paraphrasing. WhisperToMe (talk) 08:07, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

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WhisperToMe (talk) 07:42, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

I did say I offer one or maybe two chapters or the equivalent (in terms of #s of pages) but I'm wondering if two is too much. Use the pages to figure out which claims/information you need cited. As I said in the e-mail, it's best to pick information that only appears in Morton and nowhere else. WhisperToMe (talk) 07:55, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

No reason for that statement/instruction by you at all. Morton has more complete and also less disjointed information than you have been whiteboarding from your choice of sources, which leave as much to be desired as does your lack of cohesive and natural English in your style of compositions; I'm not wondering if two is too much, I'm thinking that two is not enough and if you so much want me to have Morton to use, you should copy the whole fam ding; he has detailed arrival/departure data and also much more detail about all political issues that your sources boil down to, essentially, "White people were racist towards the Chinese".

Re that, the bit you have in the article about British and Americans seeing themselves superior to the Chinese as an inferior race should be balanced about how China and the Chinese regard, and regarded, white people as being inferior and variously lazy and more; it's not like "only white people are racists", Chinese are infamously racist including within Asia and their exclusionary behaviour in modern Vancouver is a symptom of that, as is your own treatment of me as your inferior which I am most expressly NOT.Skookum1 (talk) 08:06, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

It is against the law for me to copy the "whole damn thing". WP:RX will not have entire books copied for people, so I will follow their line and say I can't copy the whole book for you.

Morton is useful, but it's not the only source that should be used. He himself stated "not a necessarily sociological history of the Chinese in the sea of sterile mountains nor, for that matter, a particularly accurate or complete one." (Morton, p. viii, which is one of the pages you have access to on Dropbox) - It is important to document how White people felt about the Chinese, and I believe that Morton's overall concept was good - but it's not the only source.

I am well aware that people of any race can be racist: Some Hispanic Catholics in Houston were discriminated against by Anglo Whites so they got their own church; they then discriminated against Louisiana Creole Blacks in that church, so the blacks then formed their own church. I found out about this when an IP editor added an uncited fact to the article about the Hispanic church. I Googled it just to check... and found verification... and then wrote about the black church and thanked the IP editor.

WhisperToMe (talk) 08:16, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

your equivocation about Morton not being a "sociological history" is just more equivocation and downplaying his very thorough content and detail; narrative history and studies such as his are just as valid as sources and I will repeat what TITLE and various guidelines re-state: "the interests of the general readership should be put before the preferences of specialists". What part of that are you pretending not to understand?

As another editor watching this discussion and the one on the Nanaimo Chinatowns talkpage commented, arguing with your is like arguing with the wind; you're relentless in your imperiousness as well as your equivocations and ongoing combativeness and seem more interested in arguing as a way to keep me from working on the article than you are about being welcoming about someone who is able and ready to contribute much to the article and other related pages; that being said, it's a beautiful day where I am and I'm going to go get my guitar repaired at last (someone sent me whack of dough so I can eat like a man and get some things fixed for a while); I'll look at the Morton pages you have sent, which I just downloaded, later on, and will try to pick probably two, not one, chapter that will have some of what I know to be in there.

You might try actually reading the whole thing yourself, and while you're at it start reading Howay & Scholefield and other generral histories of BC that are online, and what passage of Ormsby and the Akriggs you can find in Googlebooks; and consider ordering a copy of Early Vancouver which will probably run you $250 a volume; I got $100 each when I sold mine, which were a gift from William Hoffer; MacLeod's Books in Vancouver may have a set. And start looking at all the linked cites I provided long ago...while you were trying to get me blocked.Skookum1 (talk) 08:25, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

examples of bad English composition

there is another I had ready to copy-paste but I had a blue screen of death and will have to find it again - and fix it. But this short passage is a good example of very bad English composition:

Chinese are located throughout Vancouver.[86] 40% of the residents of a large portion of Southeast Vancouver are Chinese. The Granville and 49th area within South Vancouver also has a Chinese population.[87] Significant Chinese populations are located in all Greater Vancouver neighbourhoods.[88] The Vancouver Chinatown is the largest Chinatown in Canada.

Never mind that it repeats statements already in the article, and more than once in most cases; it's trite and "A is B in C"....and don't you see that the third sentence is the very same content as the first one???? You should go to your university that you graduated from and take a course in creative writing....and start reading more than academic-ese, you claim to be a native speaker of English, Level 1, it's time to start sounding like one and writing in a mannner that doesn't sound so........bald. Try reading novels - if not those online histories I've repeatedly recommended, and find a night school course to get help with your English composition skills. This is friendly advice, not NPA. You sound like a high schooler and if this were a university paper, I'd have failed you for not using good English, no matter who you are.

And that last sentence about Vancouver's Chinatown being the largest is dated, isn't it? - per the content elsewhere about Toronto's being the largest, or is that in reference to Toronto's Chinese population in general. As far as area goes, Spadina Avenue's Chinatown is much larger than Vancouver's few square blocks; Chinatown-like areas are found along Kingsway and on South Victoria Drive and more, not just in Golden Village, also. But they're not called Chinatown, which in Vancouver is a name of a specific area and not a general term for areas where Chinese predominate in commercial presence and/or in population (often not the same thing at all as also with the San Gabriel Valley so-called "enclaves" where stores are Chinese, but the residents mostly aren't). Golden Village is also far larger in area than Chinatown per se; there's a new era of gentrification (by offshore Chinese capital) that threatens to destroy much heritage and atmosphere in Chinatown, by the way; you should look that up; should be something on The Tyee or The Vancouver Observer] and maybe in the West Ender or Vancouver Courier or The Georgia Straight. The Tyee has a lot of articles relevant to the CCinBC page, and some authors who specialize in history; you should be researching that, along with all else I've suggested you undertake to educate yourself with not just about the Chinese in BC ,but about all of BC.Skookum1 (talk) 08:47, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

I took a look at the sentences. The sentence cited to #86 and the sentence cited to #88 may be combined but honestly that's all I would do. Wikipedia is a work in progress, so it's perfectly okay to submit something which looks awkward now and can be copyedited to look prettier later. That copyediting often happens at the Good Article submission stage, if not the Featured Article stage.

What is of immediate importance is proper citation: Ref #86 serves exactly the sentence before it, #87 serves the next two (it's talking about much of Southeast Vancouver and a portion of South Vancouver), then #88 serves its sentence. If you combine sentences you'll have to splice the references in commas (The girl traveled to Belgium,<ref>a</ref> Poland, and Russia.<ref>b</ref>, or if you have two references supporting the same clause you'll need to use internal comments to say which information comes from which source.

I think emphasis is being put in the wrong place: your response puts undue emphasis on "beautiful English" which is a luxury and can be copyedited/polished in at any time (there's plenty of Wikipedians who enjoy doing that), and insufficient emphasis on proper citation which is of immediate importance. A clunky-looking paragraph that is properly cited is far more valuable than a poorly-cited beautiful paragraph. Think of it this way: When someone writes a university paper in a non-English major subject it doesn't look beautifully formed right away. That revision comes later. As I can recall most professors in non-English major subjects put more importance on proper citations than perfect English. (It's different if somebody is unable to understand/comprehend the content - that is a problem)

In regards to Vancouver's Chinatown, if somebody challenges that sentence, there is:

• "Of restaurants and renewal in Vancouver’s modern Chinatown." Vancouver Sun. October 20, 2014. "These are all indications that the revitalization project for Canada’s largest Chinatown now appears back on track after[...]" and this is from October 2014.

Remember that Wikipedia is a work in progress and it's perfectly okay for an editor to put in rough drafts in the article space as long as they pass GNG or some other form of notability and don't have BLP violations.

WhisperToMe (talk) 18:13, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Temporary foreign worker program in Canada

Hey Skookum1, I noticed this recent edit you made to Wikipedia:Canadian Wikipedians' notice board/Requests. Were you looking for temporary foreign worker program in Canada by any chance? (Or the more general temporary residency.) There also seems to be information about this scattered within numerous articles about companies and other entities, among them Royal Bank of Canada, McDonald's Canada, Sears Canada , and International Union of Operating Engineers. Mindmatrix 15:04, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

yeah OK thanks didn't know the title. BTW would you please review the goings-on above and on Talk:Chinatowns in Nanaimo and Talk:Chinese Canadians in British Columbia (most recent edits and sections; that page needs archiving bt) and the rife OR/SYNTH and justifications for writing and sourcing in isolation from existing wikipedia content, with a narrow range of biased sources and dumping on other sources, and on me of course. I'll let you read my responses to his rationales for totally questionable and against-guidelines attitudes and non-logics and SYNTH of guidelines; the article needs massive work to make it readable and coherent; he keeps on adding more incoherent jumbles of information without context as if this were his own whiteboard in preparation for a thesis that has a conclusion he desires. That's not just OR, that's a neophyte on the subject drafting an article publicly instead of sandboxing it. That a formal Request for Article was not filed on such an important subject and he has been hostile to any and all input from anywhere including many sources I provided he has ignored while continuing to add bunk from the same small group of sources.....gaaaaaah. More Canadians are needed, and more Wikipedians who recognize a stream of b.s. when they see it; and not interference from people who go after me for standing up to what is more and more a tide of biased, poorly written and repetitive rubbish and WP:SOAPBOXing and blatant OWN behaviour. More eyes and minds needed on this; you may remember me arguing long ago re the History of Chinese immigration to Canada article that a BC-focussed article was needed; well here it is, and it's being authored by a student in Texas who doesn't have any clue even about basic Canadian terminology or political realities, and can't even get geography right, and who is hostile to an actual British Columbian wikipedian and even against Canadian sources.Skookum1 (talk) 06:03, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

I'll see if I can make some time for it, though I should state that because of "real life" matters, the amount of time I've had to devote to WP recently has been reduced significantly (mostly reverting vandalism at this point). Mindmatrix 19:44, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia email re Newspapers.com signup

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HazelAB (talk) 18:28, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Wong Foon Sien

Skookum1, thanks for your edits to Wong Foon Sien. One minor issue I had was with this edit. I think you may have misinterpreted the meaning of the sentence (and I apologize if I phrased it ambiguously to cause such as misunderstanding). The sentence was saying "the CBA achieved its peak" because of:

• influence of his connections outside Chinatown
• his membership in the Liberal Party of Canada
• his "wide acquaintance with mainstream journalists and leaders of other minority groups"

The source states it as "When he became one of the co-chairmen of the CBA in 1948, he brought to that position numerous outside connections, including his Canadian Liberal Party membership and wide acquaintance with mainstream journalists and leaders of other minority groups."

On further review, perhaps neither of us is quite right in this respect, and the sentence needs a bit of an overhaul. Mindmatrix 20:06, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

All Chinese Canadian articles do....both for quality of syntax/idiom and actual meaning, when vague as above was (what I did was a quick fix and didn't look much at the rest of the article), as well as for POV/SYNTH and "false facts" and more balance from non-specialist sources e.g. media, general histories, local histories....there's too many for me to review, or to take on the grammar/idiom overhaul many so badly need, and this includes older ones that have accreted over time, though the collaborative ones seem to have a more neutral tone, I would say because they were collaborations, not primary authorships. Lots of historical bios and company profiles yet to be done, and various gold rush/mine histories to be done...really too much; instead I'm seeing diatribes put up in stead of informative material of interest and in a style accessible to the general reader; very important on town and region articles, also.

As noted elsewhere, what's said here should match in content if not in style/amount what's on related articles like CCinBC; much that should be here is there, and that article is becoming too bloated by minute (and over-cited) detail rather than useful context. What's on this one about the scandal aspect of the Benevolent Association's dealings doesn't use that word, though scandal is what it was; but made me wonder if the scandals in British Columbia cat might apply.

Wrote some further comments that went on, so will email them to you instead. GTG ready to teach some ESL in a while.Skookum1 (talk) 08:01, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

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passages of policy for you to keep in mind i.e. NPOV which is *not* subordinate to Verifiability

Moved from User talk:Viriditas because Skookum refuses to be brief or to focus on one subject as previously requested

Italics below were added by me to emphasize the points highlighted in regard to your current encouragement of a very obvious POV fork and walled garden; Quality of content and NPOV should be your concern, not just whether something is well-formatted or not. I'll be cleaning up the TRIVIA/SYNTH and bad English and repetitious mention of the same events and the entire sections built on only one biased author in the next while; and will ignore the POV fork now under construction nuntil it is fielded as an article; when it will immediately deserve an NPOV template, and also a SYNTH template; I've had a look, and the same problems and POV agenda are not just much in evidence, but shamelessly re-perpetrated;

NPOV is a policy. Conflations that WP:Verifiability mandates exclusions of sources that don't fit the target POV are nonsensical and as noted before, not at all what that policy, or the RS guideline, actually say. Whatever, if the following passages of the NPOV policy don't jog your sense of wiki-responsibility I don't know what will. Condoning NPOV violations in the name of mediation is not valid; truth and untruth are not equal, nor are NPOV vs rank POV. My discoveries of further cites re the "Hongcouver" section that are contrary to the cherry-picked ones presented as a SYNTH argument are just one example of the many things wrong with the content referred to (see the history at CCinBC), and the following passages of the NPOV policy mirror exactly what I've been saying for months.... and been persecuted and even threatened with punishment/discipline over, even though it's policy that I'm seeking to have respected, rather than dismissed as unimportant vs someone else's (false) claims about what the Verifiability policy says.

• Bias in sources

A common argument in a dispute about reliable sources is that one source is biased and so another source should be given preference. The bias in sources argument is one way to present a POV as neutral by excluding sources that dispute the POV as biased. Biased sources are not inherently disallowed based on bias alone, although other aspects of the source may make it invalid. Neutral point of view should be achieved by balancing the bias in sources based on the weight of the opinion in reliable sources and not by excluding sources that do not conform to the writer's point of view.

• Balancing aspects

An article should not give undue weight to any aspects of the subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight appropriate to the weight of that aspect in the body of reliable sources on the subject. For example, discussion of isolated events, criticisms, or news reports about a subject may be verifiable and impartial, but still disproportionate to their overall significance to the article topic.

• Impartial tone

Wikipedia describes disputes. Wikipedia does not engage in disputes. A neutral characterization of disputes requires presenting viewpoints with a consistently impartial tone; otherwise articles end up as partisan commentaries even while presenting all relevant points of view. Even where a topic is presented in terms of facts rather than opinions, inappropriate tone can be introduced through the way in which facts are selected, presented, or organized. Neutral articles are written with a tone that provides an unbiased, accurate, and proportionate representation of all positions included in the article.

The tone of Wikipedia articles should be impartial, neither endorsing nor rejecting a particular point of view.

• Point-of-view forks

See the content-fork guideline for clarification on the issues raised in this section. A POV fork is an attempt to evade the neutrality policy by creating a new article about a subject that is already treated in an article, often to avoid or highlight negative or positive viewpoints or facts. POV forks are not permitted in Wikipedia. All facts and significant points of view on a given subject should be treated in one article except in the case of an article spinout. Some topics are so large that one article cannot reasonably cover all facets of the topic. For example, evolution, evolution as fact and theory, creationism, and creation-evolution controversy are separate articles. This type of split is permissible only if written from a neutral point of view and must not be an attempt to evade the consensus process at another article.

• • From the content-fork guideline:
    • A content fork is the creation of multiple separate articles all treating the same subject. Content forks that are created unintentionally result in redundant or conflicting articles and are to be avoided.......A point of view (POV) fork is a content fork deliberately created to avoid neutral point of view guidelines, often to avoid or highlight negative or positive viewpoints or facts. All POV forks are undesirable on Wikipedia, as they avoid consensus building and therefore violate one of our most important policies.

Given the meaning of those passages, it's very clear that policy is being violated, and likely has across dozens of other articles by the same author; I despair that the NPOV board will see any action taken, and may consider this as an ARBCOM matter.... but the bureaucracy and senior adminship don't seem ready or willing to take meaningful action on scores of POV matters around Wikipedia, so I don't hold much hope that NPOV will ever actually be regarded with teh important it deserves; rather many of those senior Wikipedians don't seem to have enough knowledge of the respective subject matters, or are already compromised by COI/AUTO contexts, to be able to discern or are ready to deal with POV content the way it should be; deletion, with the perpetrator banned and all their contributinos reviewed and/or deleted.Skookum1 (talk) 09:14, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for alerting me to your concerns. Feel free to take them to WP:DRN where you can present your concerns to the wider community. Remember to be brief when you file your report. Thanks again. Viriditas (talk) 09:52, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

hahahah yeah, "the community" where bear-baiting is so helpful as opposed to discussing issues that are very important. And there's ONE issue in the post you kept out of view on your talkpage by moving it here, and one only. NPOV. Claiming that something else is on the table still (as I haven't kowtowed by agreeing to it) when what it says about policies is not negotiable i.e. you can't put one before the other; I've been talking about NPOV from the very start of WhisperToMe's multi-pronged assault on Wiki CanCon, American spellings/usages and various gaffes aside, and incredibly sub-collegiate writing, and been dragged into the muck by "the community" - by people who don't know the subject matter, don't care about it either, and now by someone actively condoning a policy breach rather than facing up to the very very very POV nature both of the draft POV fork, and all the gunk and bad writing and missing context/facts on the CCinBC article, where "consensus", per what the POV fork policy section says.

To me there's no disputing what you are doing; it is clearly in contravention of policy, and more than one guideline; just as WTM has been; and you know even less about the subject matter, and have come up with this reason not to allow it to be discussed - page-cites. In other words, you have engaged the red-herring nature of that instruction creep/claim as must-be-dealt-with-first technicality, in order to avoid having to recognize the POV nature of the content, and the manner it has been presented.

Not the first time I've seen somebody who's done things against guidelines and/or policy and who doesn't know the material has been censor-ish in rejecting debate, and saying "here, go play with the wolves for a while" as a way to avoid respecting neutrality of content, which neither YOU nor your now-protege have been doing; or seemingly intend ever to do:

All his POVism and SYNTH is being rebuilt in that sandbox under your care and encouragement, and the pretense that the harsh POV of the resulting contents, never mind their TRIVIA and UNDUE and ESSAY and other guideline and style violations (and more American spelling/usage, no doubt). You claimed to have wanted to resolve the problem, which is NPOV violation, rather you took one side and now refuse completely to listen to someone bringing policy into your lap by saying that it's not allowed on your talkpage unless some red-herring technical issue is resolved; it has been; it's not in guidelines or policy anywhere; only by extension/SYNTH; a false technicality being used as a roadblock by you. That makes your pretense of neutrality and.....authority?.....all the more strange, and undeserved.

NPOV is what it is; rejecting it and encouraging someone clearly intent on building a walled garden POV article when there are many others covering the same topic is clearly against the NPOV and POV Fork policies.

DRV is as pointless as RM as a place to find redress and correction for top-priority policy violations; and seeing how the OR and RS boards have been so misrepresented as to what was said on them, this is not a dispute, no, it's been a "shut up and obey" game for a long time now, again to silence discussion of the NPOV issues and SYNTH and other violations of too many things to list. No, indeedy, this is not for DRV; whether ARBCOM is useful or not, this will be a formal complaint of serious policy violation, in the name of giving precedent to conflated/false claims about guidelines being used to block discussion or information highly pertinent to the NPOV policy and the POV fork sandbox....which quite honestly, should be deleted as clearly against violations, given the context of its origin and its direct violation of the POV fork policy and other passages of the NPOV policy.

Please take down that quote from the Dhammapada, given your treatment of me - and your willingness to pander to really offensive POV - it's really quite unfitting for you to play the bodhisattva role; as too often in Wikipedia, talking softly isn't always as CIVIL was it sets itself up to be, and those who talk softly often have little of value to say, and just as much disrespect for content as they do for editors.....Skookum1 (talk) 15:47, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Province of Saskatchewan Map used in infoboxes

I thought I would pop off this note as I noticed you had an interest in the Canada locator maps. I started a conversation on the help desk regarding the map of Saskatchewan under the title Error in maps and therefore in the GPS coordinates. The map titled File:Canada_Saskatchewan_location_map.svg does not look my province of Saskatchewan. There should be curvilinear lines north and south. The eastern and western borders albeit are parallel lines, however they are in no way parallel to each other. I see the map NordNordWest used as a template File:Canada_Saskatchewan_relief_location_map.jpg, but it is not a good one at all. The boundaries for Saskatchewan have never changed, I think the cartograher who made File:Canada_Saskatchewan_relief_location_map.jpg took a short cut and made it rectangular with square corners in error. This one MapSK.JPG shows the not parallel east west boundaries and the curved north south borders the best, but it should be oriented more north and south and not off on a diagonal. This also shows the borders well. Saskatchewan Municipalities.png, or this one SK-Canada-province.png. I have contacted user_talk:NordNordWest, the creator of the SVG locater map who seems to have good map making skills BTW I know they have to be rather particular to work with the GPS robot. Kind Regards SriMesh | talk 14:36, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, it would help you to realize that the eastern and western borders are based on lines of longitude which are inherently not parallel, but converge slightly as they go northwards; and in the case of the MB-SK border, between the prairie being flatter than the surface of the earth in its southern portions, and various adjustments northwards, it's not a straight line but very jagged......I haven't looked at those maps yet but will try and understand what you are raising as a problem; I'm opposed to the use of robots over humans btw and don't really like the pushpin bot-maps, partly because of their backgrounds (e.g. in BC's case Regional Districts are used in Wikipedia maps, the more relevant map to use would be the highway grid...).Skookum1 (talk) 02:01, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Hwlitsum

For a complete list of task forces, see Template:MILHIST.

Critique Request

New to Wiki and saw that you had an interest in Alaska/BC Geography. Would appreciate your unofficial review of an article I have almost completed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Geospatial_Summary_of_the_High_Peaks/Summits_of_the_Juneau_Icefield

Added more to explain why minor peaks were included. The article does seem like OR, but what I have done is cross reference USGS datasets between themselves so as to permit a method to report the Nunatak and HUC areas (2 dimensional) to a one dimensional location for reference purposes. The Nunatak and Glacier articles are almost done and would have been included in one article, but they exceeded the template capacity of WP.

The article started out as a compilation of peaks (unclimbed) in the Juneau area for a future expedition, but got out of control.

The question of OR is a fine line. It is reported in many scientific journals (ie. Journal of Glaciology) that the Juneau Icefield contains 53 outlet glaciers. I was not able to find what they were. By compiling the list of reported(by the USGS) glaciers, I can count them. What happens if the WP article in summarizing the USGS data finds that the scientific articles are wrong? Is that original research?

More guidance is appreciated.

I'll try. I had similar questions for myself when making the Boundary Peaks of the Alaska-Yukon-British Columbia border list but it's more than TRIVIA because of the treaty status of those peaks. Note also Category:Rivers of the Boundary Ranges which was challenged as original research by someone who didn't even know what they were and had no idea about geography categories (long story, never mind); a lot of the glaciers you're talking about feed those rivers, of course.

First off, the Juneau Icefield's Canadian side is where a lot of those other glaciers are; there are 76 named glaciers in BC; there'll be similar searches possible on CGDNB. Note some border peaks have different names in the US than in Canada, and some with real names are also "Boundary Peak n" i.e. they have a BP number. There's also huge resources at Geomatics BC with scalable topos with information on them not in BC Names and also options for boundaries, hydrography and more; that will link through that first BC Names search for glaciers if you try advanced search;

for such searches I'm pretty sure the whole of the Canadian side is in only one Land District which you can use as a search parameter on the maps found on Geomatics BC and also on BC Names; maybe by regional district too in which case the option is the "Stikine Region" which is in the same hierarchy as regional districts but isn't one (directly administered from Victoria and doesn't include anymore much of the Stikine itself despite its name).

Bivouac.com has full prominence data for all summits, including US side, that have more than 150 feet (I think the parameter was, or 100m) of prominence.

Overall your images are too large 300 px or less is more normal other than for panoramas. Layout with that amount of data is tricky to make visually useful; there are given parameters for MOS; and note the lower-casing "rule" (not really a rule but applies here) means your title should be

• "Geospatial_summary of the high peaks/summits of the Juneau Icefield"

Though really "Geospatial summary of summits of the Juneau Icefield would fulfill WP:CONCISENESS and WP:PRECISION. A lot of your redlinked items will never have articles, particularly those without names.

Will be watching.Skookum1 (talk) 06:57, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Final warning

Skookum1, this battle with WhisperToMe must end. You've received advice from a number of editors on the situation, and have chosen to ignore it. You need to either disengage with the editor and the article until you are able to approach it rationally, or take a break from Wikipedia. Which is it? The Interior (Talk) 14:08, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

You need to have a good long hard read of the NPOV policy and recognize bias and SYNTH when you see it. Behavioural claims when his own behaviour is glossed over and what I have to say about it regularly ignored - or come back at me with threats of punishment or blocking if I continue to talk about it - is contrary to the "NPOV is not negotiable" part of that policy. I'll ignore that POV sandbox but will continue to FIX the Chinese Canadians in British Columbia article so that it's readable and conforms to policy, which right now it doesn't do, never mind all its so incredibly stilted writing and POV cherrypicking. A comparison of the de-POVized same-sections as he's now fluffing and maniacally over-citing will be a pretty clear demonstration of biased content vs unbiased content.

This whole harassment-of-me to support someone who displayed rank obstructionism over and over and over, plus disorganized mass dumps of material to justify his lobbied-for split and pad out the POV SYNTH while at the same time launching massive board discussions and being ongoing combative against ANYTHING I said, made false claims about me and about policy, and abused sources by distorting and "trimming" them to fit his SYNTH is a travesty of the way things should be on Wikipedia. NPOV goes unpunished, those who dare to talk about it are threatened with blocks......get a grip, Tim. I've been grossly personal-attacked in no uncertain terms because of all this and treated with AGF by WTM since he first showed up in Canadian article-space.

And who's getting harassed? The Canadian editor who knows the subject matter and sources who dares to dispute the cherrypicked claims by obscure "scholars" which fly in the face of easily-findable FACTS that put the lie to them..... and highlight their distortions and bias and "deliberate omissions". The material I've been adding for balance and to counterpoise to the one-sided statements and sometimes semi-mythical claims of the Chinese POV sources he wants to keep his opus restricted to is all online, from sources I've fielded for months he hasn't used, while continuing to lobby to get me blocked.

Blocking me for continue to edit to make usable and fair the raft of biased and poorly-written content dumped on that page when nobody else (other than yourself, maybe) in the ongoing get-Skookum1 campaign knows enough about BC history and geography to do so is......really ugly and a sad comment on the state of Wikipedia nowadays, and its cult of behavioural criticism and its refusal to face up to mounting POV problems on many fronts.

His article might as well be called Chinese Vancouver or [[Chinese colonization of British Columbia) (per the British, French, Spanish colonization titles). This all the moreso now as he wants to include China's trade/transport and investments and Chinese citizens-in-British Columbia.

With content that severely veers of the main course of British Columbia history content, based on racial bias and massive generalizations about non-Chinese "Whites".

I have other articles to write, and want to be left alone from claims of behavioural irregularity when nobody has had a good long hard look at his reams of pages of obstructionism in order to dismiss or discredit - or even had a good long hard look at hte POV/SYNTH of the content he is building...without ever having been to BC and never having read any general history of the province i.e. one without racial tub-thumping and with correct geographic terms.

My defence of myself took up huge amounts of time that kept me from adding to and/or editing the article of its very badly-written English; that was by design. I note that this campaign was stepped up, even stronger, after I started work on cleaning up the dreck and "intefering with" the content; similar to how Uyvsdi's and Maunus' ANIs against me were launched when I'd made considerable progress getting consensus to revert Kwami's changes to the endonym titles.

Procedural warfare and campaigns to block someone for daring to stand up to bullshit as the way to deal with content issues is not credible.

I'll refrain from POINTy edit comments when editing the page, but will continue to comment on POV items and on points-of-information re context on the talkpage. Let him go build his over-cited nice-looking but rankly POV/SYNTH opus but stop carping at me about my behaviour and long posts when you and others have not had a good long look at his behaviour and very-long posts.

Whatever; because of all of this and the inanity of things like mindless lower-casing of titles by people who have no knowledge of the subject, and who seem to not have read all of MOS and NPOV (if they can't read what I say, it's pretty clear that they don't have the comprehension skills to read the whole of those items, or others), and seeing the morass of POV disputes that t urn into attacks on those raising the POV issue, my time here is coming to an end.

Other BC editors have gone on to be published authors (Bobanny in particular we could even say is "celebrated"); I should have stayed out of Wikipedia and let the Tory rabble vandalize native articles as they were doing, and not give a shit when a Chinese-background American sets out to rewrite British Columbia history on biased sources to the exclusion of anything else.

I have some fixups on the Mission and Lillooet articles to do, and to finish cleaning up the repetive, POV dreck and bad writing on CCinBC; and move some of the t own-content material to the town/chinatown pages/sections and also transplant the UNDUE and off-topic materia about Chinese investment and commerce off to Chinese investment and influence in British Columbia and/or the Economy of Vancouver article (which is so out of date it's pitiful).

I'll never get to Cassiar Gold Rush or Great Smallpox of 1862 or the Grouse Creek War or Salmon War and more; and see that when it comes time to write about those I would be far better off writing without the style constraints and without the endless meddling by the arrogantly uninformed than has become staple fare at Wikipedia; where biased editors can go lobby uninformed editors with no knowledge of the subject with one-sided complaints about someone around who knows a lot that points up that bias for whta it is.

Go have a long read of NPOV and note the highlights in the section Viriditas refused to read, posted above; there's more and more passages I see all the time in it that are about exactly what I've been saying about POV all along........... his disingenuous "there is no POV" is hogwash.Skookum1 (talk) 03:46, 16 March 2015 (UTC)