Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 01:58, 21 March 2010

I'm here only sporadically, so if you leave a message, don't expect a prompt response.

Five monks were meditating when suddenly the wind picked up and a flag nearby flapped in the wind.

The first monk, the youngest of the group, broke his meditation and shouted, "Flag is moving!"

The second monk shouted, "Wind is moving!"

The third monk shouted, "Mind is moving!"

The fourth monk shouted, "Nothing is moving!"

The fifth monk, the eldest of the group, shouted, "Mouths are moving!"

Faith in the Kalama Sutta

The offending section has seemed to have disappeared since you asked my help on this. It seems good as it now stands, but I added my ha'peth worth about faith in the Faith in Buddhism article instead Thanissaro (talk) 16:26, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Outline of Buddhism

You requested this article in the Buddhism Wikiproject. Someone did a lot of work and made it on their own: Outline of Buddhism. Thought you might want to check it out! ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 17:24, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the heads up. That filled a big gap in the religion section of the WP:OOK. The Transhumanist    16:02, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: Does your scope of interest include human knowledge as a whole (the Big Picture, a bird's eye view, EVERYTHING)? If so, please consider joining WP:WPOOK. -TT

I don't really have any fixed scope of interest on Misplaced Pages. I enjoy contributing but don't seriously expect anything much to come from this site. I will edit pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want, if I can get away with it (WP:IAR), which tends to be random, small fixes and improvements, and I don't really bother with the hassle of trying to collaborate with anyone. I'm also lazy about searching for good references. And I'm not a consistent editor, like the type of person who will edit Misplaced Pages every day, several hours a day, week after week. The length of time I spend on here now varies greatly.

So, I might contribute to pretty much any wikiproject, including yours if I happen to feel like it (right now I don't) but I won't make the formal commitment of signing my name to the page or adding some silly category tag, "Support of Wikiproject Whatever," to my userpage. With that said, I think that the lack of good outlines is the least of Misplaced Pages's issues.

Thanks for the offer, though. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 16:28, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

What are the most of Misplaced Pages's issues? The Transhumanist    23:34, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Satanic ritual abuse

Hi,

You've got SRA on your hall of shame page. Now that ResearchEditor has been blocked, I wonder if you still think it belongs there? Just curiosity... WLU (t) (c) Misplaced Pages's rules:/_complex 15:00, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

I thought I deleted that page? I remember somebody complaining about it, that it was "uncivil," etc.. I don't update that page anymore.

Anyway, it wasn't that specific user or edit which I thought was shameful: It was the existence of the entire page. You had a page devoted to a phenomenon that never actually happened. At the time, the article was regularly filled with allegations and speculations that SRA actually might've gone on and I thought that was a LOL funny.

Looking at it now, it seems like the article is much better, no doubt due to the banning of a whole slew of editors and a small group of rational individual editors putting their feet down over such nonsense.

Thanks for reminding me, btw, about all of my stupid subpages. I need to delete some of them. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 15:49, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

You could always slap a {{db-userreq}} on it. Glad you're happy with the current SRA, it was a labour of hate. I really hated the douchebag who thought it was real. WLU (t) (c) Misplaced Pages's rules:/_complex 16:26, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

You shouldn't take Misplaced Pages or such crazy people so seriously. I bet he thinks Satan created rock 'n roll and Obama is the anti-Christ. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 16:27, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Request for assistance

I am currently trying to help the editors in the Falun Gong (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) topic area move away from POV pushing and personal commentary. (Please note: Talk:Falun Gong#Topic area review.) You are an editor that I believe can help facilitate this change. I am looking for some uninvolved people with experience and savvy to become involved in the editorial process. A review of the article and associated discussion, in a style similar to a good article review or broad RfC response, would be a good first step and very helpful. However, some leadership in discussion and editing as a whole would be invaluable and sincerely appreciated. This can cover a very broad range including (but not limited to) identifying article flaws, keeping conversation focused on content, reporting disruptive editors, making proposed compromises, boldly correcting errors, and so forth. If you are willing to help out, please look things over and provide your feedback on the Falun Gong talk page. Essentially, we need some experienced editors to put things on track. Any assistance in this regard is gratefully welcomed. Thanks! Vassyana (talk) 06:55, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Art requests?

Hey, I'm asking you this because you seem like the type of person who'd know...

Do you know if there's any place on Misplaced Pages where a person can request that a piece of artwork be made for Misplaced Pages (for the Wikimedia Commons)? I know there's a place for people can request scripts or bots, so I thought, why not art?

Because I had a good idea for something for the Outline of Buddhism article, which would also be a fun project: It would be neat to have a single image depicting the various mythological creatures of Buddhist cosmology. Nagas, Garudas, Gandhabbas, Yakkhas, Snow Lions, etc.. There are some pictures of these things on the Commons already, but they're not very good and couldn't be combined into a single presentation, for instance, for the Buddhist cosmology article or the Buddhist Outline. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 12:38, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

GIMP rocks!

I highly recommend that you try to do it yourself. Many graphics software programs are free, and are as or nearly as powerful as their non-free counterparts. You'll be surprised how easy graphics programs are to use when you have the proper instructions. For instructions, Misplaced Pages-style, see...

Misplaced Pages:Graphics tutorials

A program not listed on there is Splashup a raster graphics program run online (from its website). Misplaced Pages needs a tutorial on it, so if you get good at using it, please contribute one.

Another free program not listed, but of the download type, is Paint.NET.

See also: Graphics software and Graphic art software.

Dipping into the effort yourself will help you understand the programs better so that you can better specify what you may want others to do, and so that you can touch up their work (very handy). And you may be surprised at the quality results you can produce yourself.

To find others who can help, see:

• Misplaced Pages:Requested pictures
• Misplaced Pages:Graphic Lab/Image workshop
• Category:Wikipedian vector graphics editors
• Category:Wikipedians by graphics editor

I hope you find my advice helpful.

The Transhumanist    23:34, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Revert

Why did you revert my edit here? ☯ Zenwhat (talk) 02:01, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

To remove this unsourced/uncited controversial statement:

"When he got there, he found that Buddhism, which had already been established, was perverted by superstitious devotionalism, devoid of true insight. Thus, Bodhidharma focused on direct insight about one's own experience, under the instruction of a Zen teacher, discouraging misguided veneration of Buddhas for the sake of superstition."Jikaku (talk) 18:08, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I didn't add that, though. I restored it after a user removed a fair amount of content from that section without explanation. I agree that anything there which is not sourced should be sourced, though, so would it be okay if I restored it and added a tag? When you made that revert, you also removed a paragraph that was previously there and was sourced. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 18:26, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough. Regarding Barry Graham - while wikipedia shouldn't be in the business of determining who is and isn't a "legitimate" representative of any religion - Barry has been the subject of a wide controversy and follow-up investigation by the American Zen Teachers Association, as well as the Soto-shu administration in Japan - the findings were that regardless of his current relationship with any teacher, his "past story" about training in Scotland, and receiving transmission in Japan are completely false. Now, if this were an article about Barry, or even about Western Zen authors - then I could see where it would be appropriate to list him, along with mentioning the "controversy" with citations for "his story" as well as the official findings and statements calling him a fraud. But this isn't that - it's an article about Zen in general, and this seems too thorny an issue to bring up there. Does that make sense? Jikaku (talk) 02:02, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Accusations of bad faith

are beneath you, when what you say is not supported by the evidence. Please strike or remove. These issues that you claim are small cut right to the heart of the matter, and have been staple of that WP:SPAs editing - which has involved meatpuppetry, misuse of WP:3O etc, and other tendentious and disruptive editing tactics. Verbal chat 21:48, 12 August 2009 (UTC) (Referring to the Ian Stevenson article)

I'm not accusing either of you of bad faith. I'm saying you're both good faith editors who are misjudging eachother as bad faith editors.

I agree it's extremely annoying for a single editor to dominate an article the way that Noirtist does, but from what I've seen of his edits so far, they aren't too contentious. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 21:53, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. You say I revert all his edits, that's a bad faith accusation as it is clearly untrue. I do revert or copyedit his bad edits. I'm afraid he has shown his colours and is clearly editing with an agenda on this page and not with the goals of the project in mind. Verbal chat 21:55, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

He listed his 13 edits, they seemed fairly reasonable, even if many were arbitrary, and you regarded them all as wrong, and reverted all of it, which seemed unnecessary. A POV-pusher isn't going to bother to take the time to itemize his edits. POV-pushers also tend to be highly concerned with removing certain content, but from what I've seen thus, he's been reasonable, allowing or even adding content critical of Stevenson. Both of you have been reverting eachother's edits for relatively silly, minor, trivial issues, which both, as I said, lean in the direction of weasel words but never goes so far as to be a serious problem. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 22:05, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect again. You don't seem to have dealt with many POV pushers in the pseudoscience area. Take Dana Ullman for example, this is very similar behaviour. As you said his 13 edits were arbitrary, apart from a few that were clearly non neutral and incorrect. Hence I reverted them all. After he "justified" his edits I reverted only those that were still incorrect. You are enabling his bad faith and anti-wikipedia behaviour, and the only reason I take issue with you making incorrect accusations of bad faith rather than other editors there is because you are reasonable. If this is an attempt at being even handed it is coming across rather badly, especially the demonstratively false and bad faith accusation you have made. You are support the weasel worded, anti wikipedia version through you enabling and bad faith comments. I hope you look again and realise this. I do not regard the whitewashing of this material as a minor issue, and he has only kept material he has been forced to. Verbal chat 09:02, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

You have yet to refactor or strike this bad faith accusation, which has been picked up on by another editor. Note the other editor has several times taken me to ANI, where the community has decided I have acted correctly and in defence of NPOV. Verbal chat 10:18, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Talkback

Verbal chat 21:58, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Longchenpa

Hello, Zenwhat, it's been a long time. We worked on the Jetsunma_Ahkon_Lhamo article together last year.

A while back you asked me if I was Bill Cassidy in an off-line wiki email. No, I'm not. But I conveniently left off the fact that I am the former Ani Dechen from The Buddha From Brooklyn. The anti-Jetsunma -- and anti-Dharma, really -- slant of that book is largely my responsibility because Martha Sherrill and I became very close in the writing of it. I'm a very good actress, deceptive, with the self-deception coming first. The long and short of it is that I was upset with Jetsunma for taking my robes away even though I wasn't keeping the vows. I was never troubled by the "beating" as I called it. I exaggerated quite a bit and used it later because I knew other people would find it shocking. Actually, she never hurt me, swatted me lightly once, missed another time, and yelled at me quite a lot after I broke my monastic vows and hid it.

At first I tried purifying my mistakes, but then started looking for people (ex-members of Jetsunma's temple) who would tell me what I wanted to hear. I convinced myself that if Jetsunma wouldn't let me wear the robes of a nun when I still had some of my vows unbroken, then she was putting me in danger of breaking the remaining vows and had no compassion for me whatsoever. I didn't see that she had confidence in me that I'd stick with it.

Once I'd convinced myself she had no compassion (for not giving me what I wanted) I decided I needed to "save" people from Jetsunma and began this crusade against her. I filtered everything through this new lens of "she has no compassion" without considering that I was the one who wasn't considering the effect of my actions on others. The aggressive slant of the Misplaced Pages article was part of that crusade.

I spent 13 years trying to connect to other Dharma centers and teachers and kept running into my own mind and all the anger I'd created. Finally, one Lama told me to thank my teachers, that that's why I couldn't move on.

I wrote to Jetsunma with two lines of apology and then asked her help with a personal matter -- and even with a 13-year crusade, the book, my manipulating the Misplaced Pages page, she was effortlessly kind. And I was her student so long -- 12 years -- that this wasn't even a surprise to me.

She's shown her qualities, and I've shown mine.

Don't buy into The Buddha From Brooklyn. You've met one of the main people responsible for the attitudes in that book. Martha Sherrill could only write from the sources she had. Longchenpa (talk) 13:58, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Hmm. My intuition tells me you're lying and I have a pretty good intuition. But it's not my problem. Jetsunma's karma will fall upon her alone, whether the Misplaced Pages page or books about her are accurate or not. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 01:58, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Wikiproject Essay

ɳoɍɑfʈ 04:36, 23 January 2010 (UTC)