User talk:VaraLaFey

Hello everybody. :-)

I'm here to edit a few pages and to create at least one. These are all things I care about, and since I get involved in things I care about, I have (by Wikipedia standards) a COI in everything I will probably ever do here. I'll always be open about that, and I'll always do my best to be objective, and I know y'all will hold my feet to the fire anyway. I'm fine with that so long as you're objective too. :-) VaraLaFey (talk) 02:07, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Vara, and welcome!

We tend to be skeptical of CoI editing around here (it usually goes poorly in exactly the ways you'd expect), but you're already off to a better start than most, by being honest and not trying to sneak around it :)

You should read through WP:COI and WP:COIE - WP:DISCLOSE (a section in the former) talks about how to disclose it properly, since you mentioned not knowing that in your first edit summary. The short version of the rest is that we have a process for asking other people to make edits that we encourage you to use if you're unsure whether something is acceptable. (Sometimes it takes forever. I apologize in advance.)

With that out of the way, here's the standard welcome letter, which has some useful links:

Welcome...

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

Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or click here to ask a question on your talk page. Again, welcome! 3mi1y (talk) 06:43, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi 3mi1y, and thanks for the nice welcome. I hope I added the Xenology paragraph appropriately - I didn't know the Edit Request existed. I just now added a description to the Xenology Talk page. I do not have a diff, don't know what one is, and gave up on making sense out of the diff 'description' page I saw somewhere here.

The Connected Contributor info says that a 2nd editor might add a COI notice to the talk page on the 1st editor's behalf. I wouldn't be offended in the slightest if you were to do that. :-) Then I could check the code and see the actual syntax used.

OH! I also keep forgetting to sign things with the 4 tildes, and yet the system seems to add my sig for me anyway. But I'll try it right now and see how it goes....

VaraLaFey (talk) 18:27, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It does sign for you when you use the reply button, probably because people forget to do that all the time. There's also a bot that goes around adding it after the fact sometimes.

Diff(erence)s are the pages that show what changed in a given edit - for example, here is the one where you posted this comment. You can get to them by clicking 'View History' on a page, then clicking the 'cur' or 'prev' links on any past version to get the differences between that and the current version of the page or the previous one in the history.

I moved the infobox you added up to the top of the talk page (with the other infoboxes) for you, but otherwise, yes, it looks like you did it right. (I've not actually properly reviewed the paragraph itself, because I don't know enough about the notability of various xenology-related institutions and have not bothered to do the research. Someone else might.) 3mi1y (talk) 18:50, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for fixing that. :-) I still don't see how you did it, but I'll review again later.

I think I understand notability in general, but applying it to the Xenology page is weird for me. Maybe you can offer perspective? The idea is notable enough to have its own (low-traffic) article, and I've added to that idea in my op-ed that my article addition describes, but I am completely not notable myself.

OTOH the org which published my op-ed and which I'm a member of, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), is definitely on the rise. It's mentioned several times in the Congressional Record, and board members have been interviewed on CNN and Fox Business while representing SCU. Basically the org has its fingers in most scientifically-focused UFO/UAP investigational activities in the western world, and a few prominent people with Wikipedia article pages are members, so I figure it's time that SCU had its own article. That's really why I'm here. My edits will be related to the overall theme, but I also need to do them to learn my way around. :-)

You won't see these orgs identifying with the term "xenology" - not yet, but maybe someday. They're all struggling with how to identify, and there's a general ambient need to boundary scope a proper scientific field for the topic. I had ideas about that, and SCU thought they were worth publishing. :-)

Thanks for the help and guidance.

VaraLaFey (talk) 20:02, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

All I did was cut and paste what you added to a different place in the same page: diff You have to click the page-wide edit button at the top to see the markup for the top infoboxes, otherwise you just get the section you're writing in. It's the other {{...}} bits at the start.

As for notability: well, we have a full-length page for extraterrestrial life, and it's been there since 2001, and people have been talking about it since before 2001, so clearly that's notable enough. I'm not convinced xenology needs to be its own page rather than a section in that one - like you said, it's kind of... not really a thing yet. It could be, eventually, but it isn't currently.

The SCU, at a glance, is at least notable enough that other people have mentioned them, so I wouldn't object to a well-sourced article about them. The parts people are likely to object to, if they're going to object, would be the significant coverage rule and the no inherited notability rule (re: members having their own Wikipedia articles) - not saying these are intractable, I'm just mentioning them so you can keep them in mind while writing. 3mi1y (talk) 20:52, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I see that all reference to xenology has been deleted unless a user is privileged enough to have the special link you gave me. So xenology as a specific concept, despite its mentions by Frietas and me and in several cases of science fiction, can now no longer be looked up as a specific concept. How does that loss benefit the reader and the knowledgebase of the overall UFO subject?

VaraLaFey (talk) 21:52, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, I decided to just go ahead and do it: xenology is now a redirect to extraterrestrial life. The page as of right before I did so is available here, in case you need it. 3mi1y (talk) 21:36, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That was a speedy deletion as if it was a nonsense page. Can you or I restore the xenology page and nominate it for discussion? VaraLaFey (talk) 22:01, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Xenology 3mi1y (talk) 22:17, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I've been wondering how much of my user talk page here should be devoted to that specific xenology edit anyway.

VaraLaFey (talk) 22:18, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, this is your page to do with as you please, so you're welcome to blank it (edit, delete the entire contents, and save) if you no longer want it here.

Also, this may not be clear in text, but no hard feelings - the whole "just do it, and if someone objects, revert and talk about it" process is a thing here, and your edits had little to do with it besides being the reason I found the page in the first place. 3mi1y (talk) 22:26, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the do-and-revert definitely caught me by surprise.

I don't mind keeping the discussion here, at least for now, but it just started to seem like the wrong place, is all.

I've wondered how you found me. Do you get a list of edits even for pages you aren't aware of, or alerts to new users like me?

VaraLaFey (talk) 22:33, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There's a stream of edits at Special:RecentChanges; most of what I do here is watching that and trying to quickly revert vandalism. You happened to edit while I was watching it. 3mi1y (talk) 22:35, 10 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. I remember a particularly egregious case of vandalism on the Aerosmith (band) article many years ago. VaraLaFey (talk) 00:04, 11 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]