Semi-retired or retired. May stop editing suddenly and unexpectedly at any time, and don't know when if ever I'll be back. I was away for years and might be again. For now, I can't be reached by email. By the way, consider watchlisting my Notices page.
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Mathematicians make up the rules as they go along. (Ash and Gross) [1]
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The truth is like a diamond: when different people look at it from different points of view, they see different facets of it; but it's still the same diamond.[2]
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Individual opinion about NPOV is unreliable, ultimately. (Abd) [3]
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The Just Society will be one in which the rights of minorities will be safe from the whims of intolerant majorities (Pierre Trudeau) [4]
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The true scientist lives in the land of possibility, the land of questioning rather than the area of final and complete answers (Abram Maslow)[5]
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Multilicense -- see below. Today's date: December 3, 2024 h
My essays:
Watchlist my Notices page! I'll post notices there from time to time about my activities and things that may be of interest to Wikipedians. I plan to edit it much less often than my talk page so it will be easy for lots of people to keep on their watchlists.
. I think we really need to much more strongly insist on a pleasant work environment and ask people quite firmly not to engage in that kind of sniping and confrontational behavior. We also need to be very careful about the general mindset of "Yeah, he's a jerk but he does good work". The problem is when people act like that, they cause a lot of extra headache for a lot of people and drive away good people who don't feel like dealing with it. Those are the unseen consequences that we need to keep in mind. (Jimbo Wales)[6]
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I oppose personal attacks, incivility and any words which are likely to cause the recipient to feel hurt or uncomfortable, unless they feel uncomfortable purely because they're losing a well-argued debate.
I see three very important reasons to keep incivility to a minimum:
It causes suffering.
It causes good editors to leave the project.
It fosters an environment in which debates are won by intimidation rather than by reasoning – which is less likely to produce a truly NPOV encyclopedia.
When I speak out against incivility, I'm surprised by how often my action seems to be interpreted as a method of trying to support one side of a debate. Is that behaviour really that common? I've spoken out against incivility by those on the same side of a debate as myself, by those on the opposite side, and by those in debates I'm not involved in. I see opposing incivility as a separate matter from participating in the debate itself.
Sometimes people may not realize that they are being uncivil, or the extent to which their words hurt.
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...that setting an example of extremely civil behavior is by far the best way to call someone out for uncivil behavior. The difference will be apparent to anybody looking, and the previously uncivil party will realize that the ball is in their court, to rise to the occasion. (GTBacchus)[7]
This is a way of carrying on content discussions and can be used to help enforce content policies and guidelines such as WP:V, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV. The method is very basic: simply to include the following in a single article talk page edit:
What: quote the words (and wikitext) that you want to add to (or delete from, or change in) an article.
Where: specify where in the article the words are to go.
Why: give arguments, based on reliable sources, policies and guidelines, as to why you think this material should be included.
It's good to put these three things all in one edit, preferably on an article talk page, and preferably as the beginning of a new thread with a meaningful section heading. After having done that, you can then give a diff or in some other way refer back to that edit, here and there on the article talk page, rather than repeating the same arguments and rather than obscuring the content discussion with comments about other editors (which are better kept off article talk pages).
The purpose of doing this is to bring other editors into the discussion. Many article talk page discussions are hard to follow: comments assume that others already know what's being talked about. New editors have to invest a fair amount of time to get involved. But when a message is presented in a prominent and well-organized way, then others can get involved; and if one version is clearly better supported by policy than another, then bringing in more editors will tend to help enforce the policy, since the new editors will see that.
Don't expect administrators to enforce content policies; content policies are generally enforced by ordinary editors, or by administrators acting as ordinary "involved editors" and not using their admin tools on that article. The role of administrators is to do things like protect pages in an impartial way, not (except in limited cases e.g. some situations involving BLP) to decide which version of an article is more NPOV: editors do that by working together and finding consensus or at least compromise.
On Wikipedia I often find myself filling a mediator-like role (mediator-like, but not with all the attributes of a mediator). This tends to occur naturally, depending on the situation. However, if you see me doing this, please don't jump to the conclusion that I'm agreeing to act as a neutral mediator. Unless I say otherwise very explicitly (and as I write this, I don't think I've ever yet done so on Wikipedia), I'm not agreeing to act in a neutral role as a mediator. Instead, what often happens is that I don't feel as strongly about one POV or another as other editors do, or I understand both POVs, so I naturally fill a mediator role. I enjoy helping others arrive at consensus or compromises. However, I retain the right to express my opinions about article content just as much as any other editor. I might have a relatively neutral position on some things but not on other things, or I might change my mind over time: in fact, I believe it's good to change one's mind in response to arguments presented by other editors: that's part of the process of arriving at consensus. So don't be surprised if I start expressing opinions on content disputes too. I encourage others, too, to take on a mediator-like role more often, perhaps by choosing to edit articles where one doesn't have a lot of very strong opinions about the subject matter.
Rather than the phrase "bad block", I prefer more neutral terminology such as "I oppose the block" or "I propose overturning the block", which expresses an opinion without implying that the admin had done something objectively wrong.
...the comment about "whitewash" betrays a POV, that something is or should be black or blackened. ... This does not mean whitewashing. It means being accurate as to the shade of grey that a thing is ... Skeptics [of global warming] object to spin that denigrates their position. Sometimes, then, the removal of such spin is seen as favoring their position, which isn't accurate... Spin implies movement: if we achieve a stable version ... then we've probably removed the spin. It can be hard to see spin in favor of one's own POV, it can seem like the plain truth. That's why we need skeptics to participate in the article, and to welcome them as well as educating them so that they too will work for NPOV. (Abd) [13]
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Minority viewpoints involving scholarly disagreements and controversies should be given low weight, not simply edit warred out of articles mercilessly. (:Literaturegeek) [14]
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...psychologists found that groups who communicate electronically deal with dissenting opinions very differently from groups who meet face to face. People holding dissenting opinions expressed their arguments most "frequently and persistently" when they communicated online, the researchers concluded. "At the same time, minorities received the highest level of positive attention and had the greatest influence on the private opinions of members in the majority and on the final group decision when they communicated face to face." The fact that expressing a dissenting view in person is much harder socially, in other words, gives that opinion much more credence in the group's deliberations. (Gladwell, The Tipping Point)[15]
Please don't quote WP:AGF at me that you don't have to assume good faith in the presence of evidence to the contrary - that's utterly contrary to the point of AGF, which is meaningless except in the presence of evidence to the contrary. (GTBacchus) [16]
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Looking for cases where you're "allowed" to drop assumption of good faith is a fool's errand, because there is no situation in which it's remotely useful to drop assumption of good faith. (GTBacchus) [17]
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I've personally blocked people, and supported community bans against people, all the while assuming good faith (GTBacchus) [18]
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The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. (Shakespeare)[19]
As a mathematician, I get to just make stuff up and publish it in peer-reviewed journals, so it counts as a primary source. (Ramsey2006) [20]
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"Invented by Wikipedians" doesn't mean "approved by the Wikipedia community." (Blackworm) [21]
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with having technical discussions on the article talk page... sometimes you have to go into the realm of OR in discussing a contentious edit. The trick is not to put that OR into the article itself. (Blueboar) [22]
In talk page discussions, I tend to reset the indentation
to the left margin when there are more than about 7 to 10
colons. I prefer that other editors also refrain from putting
more than about 10 colons, since it gets hard to read stuff
when it's all squashed into the right margin.
Re use of the word "vote": I know perfectly well that a "vote" is not a vote. Er, that is, that those thingies people post in discussions are not votes. I just use the word "vote" as a convenient term to mean "thingy", not to mean "a thingy is a vote," which I don't mean, because it isn't, and even if it were, I prefer to represent a statement with a sentence rather than with a word. Voting wouldn't work on a sockpuppet-prone wiki.
Help put in interwikis: links between similar articles in different languages. One tool for doing this is:
Flacus' Interwiki Link Checker . It's a fun and convenient way to quickly help add many interwikis. You choose two languages, and it shows you pairs of pages with the same name on two different language Wikipedias. You click "yes" or "no" to indicate whether they're about the same subject or not. You can go through many pages quickly. After a small number of people (3) agree that two pages are about the same subject, a bot puts an interwiki link between them.
Adding citations to Corporal Punishment-related articles and thinking of merging/rearranging some of these articles
Minor contributions to statistics pages
Adding lots of redirects so I and others can find things, for example the pages of instructions and guidelines
Writing definitions for Simple English Wikipedia
Translated Canada's Food Guide page into French
Translating Hellenistic art into Simple English
Added minerals to the Hrvatski version of Essential Nutrient
Translated Essential Nutrient into French
Putting links among many nutrition-related articles in many languages
Other miscellaneous contributions
Ik kan enkel een klein beetje Nederlands spreken, tussen 0 en 1.
Ich kann mehr Deutsch sprechen als Nederlands, zwischen 1 und 2. Hablo un poco de español, pero quiero apprendar más. I have access to TERMIUM, an extensive online French/English/Spanish phrase dictionary. More precise Babel might be en|fr-3|la-1.5|de-1.5|nl-0.5|grc-0.5|es-0.05.
^Gladwell, Malcolm (2002). The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. U.S.A.: Little, Brown and Company. p. 174. ISBN0-316-34662-4. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
^From the song "Über den Wolken" by Reinhard Mey. This song, steadily popular in Germany since the 1970s, is about someone wistfully watching airplanes take off at an airport. lyrics at Mey's website.
Multi-licensed with any Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License
I agree to multi-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and 2.0, and the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.
Released into public domain
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Today's date is 9 divided by 3.
English Wikipedia has 848 admins and
6,918,987 articles and
61,950,263 pages and 48,353,205 users.
Today's date mod 2 is 1.
Today is an odd day.
