Misplaced Pages

Latest revision as of 07:02, 8 March 2010

Ash

Ash (talk · contribs · count) Just past my 20,000th edit, this is probably a good time to review how I go about things on Misplaced Pages. Nearly 3½ years contributions is a far amount of time contributing to Misplaced Pages and it has encouraged me to learn about areas that I would otherwise have never delved into. Your criticism here, positive or negative, will be carefully thought through to ensure my contributions improve. Ash (talk) 13:27, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Questions

1. What are your primary contributions to Misplaced Pages? Are there any about which you are particularly pleased? Why?

I feel rather pleased (hubris perhaps?) with:

• The long term stability of Gay bathhouse. This was a fairly controversial topic but investing significant time to get it to GA status meant that this article is now a valuable general resource for a poorly documented topic.
• The time creating {{aan}} was worth all the debugging as it has become a recommended auto-numbering archive header and I had to learn a lot about what was possible with templates.
• I proposed, drafted and gained a consensus for WP:Third opinion/User FAQ, this has definitely stimulated more consistent third opinions and made this dispute resolution process easier to understand for new users.
• A number of rather gnomic contributions stay in the background, sorting out tricky categories, deleting and consolidating articles (such as teasing out Category:Goetic demons, an on-going back burner task) and beating back the spurious growth of COI/doubtful sourced religious articles such as those related to Theosophy or UFO religions.

2. Have you been in any disputes over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

There have been a couple of long running debates but I can honestly say only a handful over my years contributing. The most difficult for me was handling User:Binarygal a SPA that was devoted to some open-forum links at ITIL. It was tricky to stay on high moral ground when there were repeated accusations of bullying, harassment and secret off-wiki collaboration. At times I slipped off the high ground and going through a process of raising multiple RfCs, WQAs and ANIs did have an outcome of Binarygal being indefinitely blocked as s/he refused to change their behaviour but also raised many valid criticisms of my behaviour and style which hopefully I have learnt from (in fact I wrote this essay based on the experience). A recent dispute worth mentioning is the ANI raised by User:Delicious carbuncle. This resulted in a non-conclusive result, probably unsatisfactory to all parties involved. I have backed off what I believed was an unnecessary attempt to introduce BLP scope creep for gay pornography and decided not to edit whilst the ANI was active. The key lesson for me was to be prepared to walk away and have a better time somewhere else rather than engaging in drama, a useful editing policy for me in this situation in the future is to contribute or reply to such a heated discussion only once every 24 hours.

Reviews

• I have found Ash to be a skilled editor, and, for this new-ish user, Ash is responsible with new users, assumes good faith, and is willing to offer thorough advice. His/Her help is appreciated. 38.109.88.196 (talk) 07:02, 8 March 2010 (UTC)