Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 22:18, 1 April 2006

I am placing some of my previous writings that I feel are superceded, unimportant in current context, or just plain moldy, in /Cecropia rants and mouldy fluff archive 1 in the interests of transparency, rather than simply delete them.

Cecropia, Action ex-Bureaucrat

Don't worry, I'm not about to give you a Drama Queen story of my departure from the Bureaucracy, but I do want to say why I requested Angela to remove the Bureaucrat flag from my account. After all, no harm keeping it, right? I don't believe anyone is afraid I would start admin-ing socks or make Willy on Wheels a Bureaucrat. Hmmmm... Never mind!

Maybe I can explain best this way: I'm a fairly big critter: a lad eighteen two hands high and more than 17 stone. Consequently, I always have to watch how much I eat. I discovered long ago that if there are snacks around or (at work) a candy machine, I am doomed. But if there is no food, no temptation. Easy. Same idea with the bcrat flag. Sometimes you just need to make a clean break and I also figure the community is entitled not to wonder whether I'll be flitting in and out of RfA.

At this point I feel the responsibility to provide something for those who want a dramatic angry exit, so I will quote, verbatim, my mentor. the Emperor Ming, who departed from the Martian Court late in Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars with these words:

"As you have rejected me as your ruler, I will leave you now; but I will return as your conqueror."

Love to all, Cecropia

Misplaced Pages and Me

I had been accessing Misplaced Pages for a while, mostly for easy-to-convey tidbits about math, physics and other subjects while reviewing my elder daughter's schoolwork before I realized the nature of the project. I edited a few pieces before getting a username, then began editing as Cecropia at the end of December, 2003.

• I became a sysop on April 13, 2004.
• I was a bureaucrat from June 24, 2004 to April 1, 2006.

Duck Duck Goose

Animals are interesting critters; once you get to know them, you realize that (like humans) they have their ideosyncracies: they act differently, play differently, even have different taste in food, even within the same species. Everyone knows that squirrels like peanuts, and if you have a bird feeder, their favorite is sunflower seed. But feed them other stuff, like peanut butter on a cracker or a piece of juicy apple, and one will grab all he can get, while another will sniff at it and hop right over it, looking for that peanut.

Animals have group behavior, with more or less complex family relationships, and they sometimes seem to mirror what we are like as humans. Humans have intellectuality, or as it is put religiously, free will. So we make choices that we think are conscious, but may or may not be. All kinds of philosophers have argued about whether humans are "naturally" monogamous or polygamous, faithful or unfaithfull creatures. Animals don't philosophize about it (I think), they just do.

Living in the midst of the North Atlantic Flyway (and having lived for some years adjacent to a lake) I've seen a lot of waterfowl and have observed their habits. I've seen all kinds of ducks, geese, swans and other waterbirds. The mating habits of the different birds is quite striking. Ducks will do it with almost anything that quacks. Someone once described duck mating as "the closest thing to a gangbang in nature." Canada geese choose a single mate and stay with that mate through the raising of the goslings, then they go their separate ways until the next mating season. Do they get together again? Perhaps by chance, but apparently not by design. Swans are another story as they mate for life. Each year they raise a new brood of cygnets to maturity, drive them away when they are fully grown (to college, perhaps?) and later begin their next family. One of the sadder sights I've seen in nature is a swan sticking by the lifeless body of its mate, night and day until the unfortunate creature is taken away.

I've known ducks, geese and swans among my human friends, as well. What kind of bird are you?

Cecropia Explains it All

Being tidbits based on my evaluation of the best way to deal with various tasks that a Wikipedian and especially an Admin may encounter.

Admin advice: Page Protection and Unprotection

You'll get a different answer from different admins. Wikipolicy is that page protection is bad, so that pages should be protected only when absolutely necessary (to stop immediate vandalism or a major revert war) and/or when requested to do so by editors on both sides of a disagreement in an article who want a "time out" to work out differences.

Unprotection is even more of an art, much more so than bureaucracy, which is pretty dull except when there is a heated disagreement. My opinion is:

• If the article was protected because of constant vandalism, try unprotecting after 24 hours, but be ready to reprotect for another 24 hours if it resumes.
• If unprotection is requested by one of the editors on an article after a content dispute, see what the requester's reasoning is. If the request is from only one of the editors, ask (on the article's talk page) whether it is generally agreed the page should be unprotected.
• If unprotection hasn't been requested but you see there has been no discussion for a week or so, propose unprotection on the talk page of the article. Say "without objection, I intend to unprotect this article in (whenever, "soon," 6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours) and then do it if there's no flak.

IMO, you will rarely go wrong as an admin if, before you take a possibly disputed action, you are confident you can defend it as though you were actually being paid to do this. ;-)

Admin advice: Threatening a Block

The question was raised: If an admin tells an editor that he must stop a certain behavior or be blocked from editing, and the editor does not stop the behavior, must the admin block him or her?

1. First, do not threaten a block unless you are confident that the behavior is worthy of a block.
2. Once you are determined that a block is appropriate, I would first tell the user that he is subject to a block: i.e., "Please do not vandalize Misplaced Pages. Persistent vandalism may cause you to be blocked from editing."
3. Once you have given the first warning (or if another admin has already given a warning) then it is appropriate to be more firm in your wording: "Please stop vandalizing Misplaced Pages. If you persist, you will be blocked."
4. Now to the answer the question of whether you must block after issuing the second warning and observing (after a short time to reasonably believe that the offender has received the second warning) that the behavior continues, you must block. If you don't, then there is no point in making the threat in the first place.

• Caveat: Of course, if you encounter someone who is actively engaged in rampant vandalism, you may have no choice but to block immediately, and then inform the user why it was done.

Creation

God made man

But He used the monkey to do it

God made man

But a monkey supplied the glue

Devo, Jocko Homo

Articles I started

Here are the articles I began, best as I can figure out. I've tried to avoid stubs and redirects—i.e., these were started with at least some useful content, sometimes a lot, and sometimes I added to the articles later.

I have slowly begun adding articles that I didn't start but have written from stubs, marked with * or have significantly rewritten or added to, marked with a †.

Useful links

• Misplaced Pages:Policy Library
• Misplaced Pages:Cite your sources
• Misplaced Pages:Verifiability
• Misplaced Pages:Wikiquette
• Misplaced Pages:Conflict resolution
• Misplaced Pages:Brilliant prose
• Misplaced Pages:Neutral point of view
• Misplaced Pages:Pages needing attention
• Misplaced Pages:Peer review
• Misplaced Pages:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
• Misplaced Pages:Village pump
• Misplaced Pages:Boilerplate text

Full disclosure: I cribbed these from Sam [Spade. Thanks, Sam!

Some thoughts on Misplaced Pages and Wikis

I'm fascinated by Wiki's ability to become a storehouse of knowledgeable arcana that usually receives short shrift in other encyclopedias. If arcana aren't exactly the bricks of the house of knowledge, they're at least the pebbles in the mortar.

I find this a wonderful experiment in establishing a free, useful resource for the wide world. Even edit wars and an overall bias that may be seen in certain articles can be useful for future scholars and historians (since the edit history is all archived) to see what arguments were raging at a given point in time and to try to assess the positions and biases of the (often faceless) protagonists for one view or another.

Some of personal curiosities for the future of Wikis include:

• will contentious articles even out in the end, or will they end up representing the POV of the most persistent?
• will the unspoken, even unconscious, biases of whoever constitutes the bulk of contributors eventually drive away honest contributors who adhere to a different view?
• will a valuing system eventually be placed on articles?
• will Wikis resist becoming hierarchical or "clubby"?
• will hard-and-fast rules begin to replace consensus?
• like other new and exciting ideas, like ... erm ... Marxism, will we one day see a WikiInc® keeping the framework but destroying the intent of Misplaced Pages? (eventually to be bought out by a Microsoft)?
• sort of like the above, will a wonderful and well-thought out experiment someday see its Jimbos replaced by its Josefs?

If anyone has thoughts on these issues, please place them in my Talk, not here.

Interests

I've been writing or editing on a wide if odd mix of subjects of interest, including (in no particular order) Great Expectations, Egg Creams, Coney Island Creek, Anti-Semitism, Autism, Freedomland U.S.A., Dog catcher, Jukes and Kallikaks, Multiple-unit train control, Good (accounting), L. Sprague de Camp, Terrorism, Law of land warfare, Vietnam war, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Shining, Kristallnacht, Red herring, Yellow ribbon, Asymmetric warfare, Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Illegal combatant, Autistic savant, Political subdivisions of New York State, War crime, Wesley Clark, George W. Bush, Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, New York subway, Fulton Fish Market, General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy, Malbone Street Wreck, Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, and others I'm too lazy to think of at the moment.

I have a POV about certain subjects which I try to be open about; no point really, people usually see through users who make obviously partisan changes under rubrics such as "the article is too big," "this belongs somewhere else," and my favorite: "I don't have a POV, everybody else has a POV." :) But I have been writing for a long time (my first paid article was written for the long-extinct New York Journal-American) and I make an effort for my edits and contributions to be NPOV or to balance existing POV, to be accurate and, if controversial, to be well-documented. At any rate, I stand behind the integrity of anything I write.

Personal stuff

Since I'm pushing social security age, I've worn a lot of hats in my lifetime. The only more or less common thread that's moved in and out of my life is programming and computers. When I began in the trade, COBOL and Fortran were the thing, and loading your program meant begging a cranky Univac not to chew your punch cards. Now I'm very next Tuesday with Linux and web services and all. Learning UNIX back when was a big help and I'm a Novell CNE, which I guess is also kind of dinosaurish now.

But I've also been:

• A typographer (set type by just about every means there is except Monotype)
• A printing foreman
• A military instructor in the U.S. Army
• A military policeman
• A technical writer
• A transportation analyst
• A writer of local social, physical and political history
• A rescuer of fair maidens
• A husband and father, unexpectedly perhaps my favorite role

Politically, my family was liberal/socialist. I was a lifetime Democrat, but dropped my registration in 1998 and am now officially an Independent. I am a 30-year plus labor union member and former union steward. I have libertarian leanings but am too libertarian to join that or any other party any more. I retain my liberal belief in the basic goodness of humans but also feel that people sometimes poison their minds when they adhere to groups instead of seeing others as individuals.

I have been involved in advocacy and public speaking on various topics across the political spectrum. I am the father of an autistic child and am interested in the science, education, and social treatment of those with different and altered abilities.

Favorite quotes

I'm afraid some of these are necessarily quite heavily paraphrased, where I don't have access to the original quote. Presented in no particular order.

• The father of an old friend, who told his teenaged son, as they were about to depart for "resettlement in the east" during wartime Germany: "Have courage. Everyone dies. It's just a matter of when." The father, son and his brother survived. The friend's mother and sister were murdered.
• Bob Dylan, early in his career, commented on the bevy of pundits and critics who were trying to "expose" him: "Don't they understand? I expose myself every time I walk on the stage."
• William J. Ronan, once head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (New York): "What small bits of power people fight over."
• My dad, when I was about to pursue our family dog under the couch: "Don't follow him there. Even an animal needs a safe place."
• Also my dad, after I had lost a favorite toy: "Don't be too upset about something that can be replaced with only money. The most important things can't."
• Paul McCartney, commenting on his attitude toward rumors of The Beatles reforming: "You can't rewarm a souffle."

Favorite poems

The night has a thousand eyes,

     And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
     With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
     And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
     When love is done.

               —Francis William Bourdillon

And only if my own true love was waiting

     and if I could hear her heart a'softly pounding
Only if she were lying by me
     could I rest in my bed once again

               —Bob Dylan, "Tomorrow is a Long Time"