Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Robertinventor (talk | contribs) at 22:16, 16 August 2018 (→ (headings just for editing convenience to be removed on posting)). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

To be done as four comments posted separately, one after another.

Context

This is what I'm replying to, full discussion here:

Robert and Dorje108 writing their own Wiki seems like a great solution. And no, I've never edited Milarepa, but Robert's draft does not seem to solve the issues with the lack of an encyclopedic tone.JJ 06:19, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

There were three issues identified, neutrality, sourcing and tone. Tone is subjective. For instance I am the main author of Planetary protection and nobody said it lacks encyclopedic tone. Note that ping|Joshua Jonathan has just edited the main Milarepa article to remove the banner. He gives only one of the two main sources for Milarepa's biography I mention in the lede. He does not mention the issues with his dates of birth and death or the historical context. Although he removed the banner about issues of sourcing, all the paragraphs are still marked as . He also presents a mythological account as if it was regarded as a historical biography, and so does not fix the issue of neutrality. He has also removed the section on "supernatural running". This breaks the redirect from Lung-gom-pa which is the reason I had for retaining that section in my draft. My proposal on the talk page of my draft is to make this into a separate article and run the redirect the other way. In short, it is a hasty edit of an article on one of the most important historical figures in Tibetan Buddhism, and sloppy work, introducing new issues that need to be fixed. RW 11:10, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

You're breaching your topic-ban here. JJ 11:39, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Oh yes, that's definitely a topic ban violation, and also shows why the topic ban should stay in effect. The fact that you didn't use your sandbox approach for at least one reply here shows that the "sandbox solution" isn't a viable solution for you. About Planetary protection: you were far from the only editor there, and it existed before you started editing it. Compare that article to Modern Mars habitability, which you wrote completely and which is not at all encyclopaedic in tone (disclosure: I've nominated the latter article for deletion). CJ 15:39, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

(headings just for editing convenience to be removed on posting)

First a reminder that I am doing this in the context of a formal appeal process. So, ping|Joshua Jonathan and ping|Ca2james - according to WP:BANEX, it is not a topic ban violation to talk about the topic during a formal appeal. The way I brought up the topic is directly relevant to the appeal.

ping|Joshua Jonathan, I am discussing edits that you did in response to appeal discussions. I posted that comment about this article on 06:01, 15 August 2018 to ping|GenuineArt and you started to edit it for the first time ever (as you also agree) at 06:26, 15 August 2018 to remove the POV tag with the edit summary:" no explanation has been given". What I said about your edit is supported by facts. Please note, they are understandable mistakes for someone not familiar with the subject, but they suggest that in the topic area of biographies of Buddhist philosophers, that you may need to take a little more care in future. I raise this issue mainly to show that my own proposed edit is a good one, not particularly to criticize yours, but have no choice, given what happened.

• hasty (removing banners without checking issues were solved). Is treating a poetic mythological biography as if it was fact an issue of WP:POV? What do other editors of the page think? The article was tagged by an uninvolved editor, Matthrick Milarepa - 19 January 2015 - and has been there since 2015, with multiple editors of the article, who have left it in place for three and a half years, and through 70 intermediate edits.
• sloppy (not checking for redirects linking to deleted sections of article). This page shows which links have been broken by your edit rdcheck Milarepa, they are: Lung-gom, Lung-gom-pa, Lung-gomm-pa, Lung-gomm and Lung-gomm-pa. These redirect to Milarepa, which will confuse anyone who does a Misplaced Pages search, expecting to learn about the legendary Lung-gom-pa runners of ancient Tibet. Also Lung-gom-pa in turn is linked to by two mainspace articles In Secret Tibet and Teleportation in fiction, as well as Portal:Literature/Did you know. Again, this will confuse a reader clicking through to find out more about this topic.

The latest version is still treating a poetic mythological account as real. Probably almost none of those supposed biographical details actually happened, especially when you realize who wrote the "biography", an inspiring and gifted poetic nyönpa, or "religious madman". See this paragraph in my suggested revision (I have worked on the draft some more since submitting my appeal), emphasis added:

"The earliest account of his life is attributed to Gampopa (though probably they are lecture notes by one of his students), and it leaves out many of the events of the later story. No hail storm, no murders, mother apparently dies young rather than his father, no building of towers....

However the later story of the life of Milarepa is based on the traditional "Songs of Milarepa" and "Life of Milarepa" by Gtsang-smyon He-ru-ka. He was a nyönpa (Wylie: smyon pa) or "religious madman". When local villagers saw his body covered in human ashes and blood with his hair adorned by human fingers and toes , they gave him the name 'Nyönpa. He later used the name Trantung Gyelpo (Wylie: khrag 'thung rgyal po) "King of the Blood-drinkers", "blood drinker" being the Tibetan name for the meditational deity Heruka sometimes used in deity yoga. These eccentric ways were influenced by an Indian sect of yogis called Kapalikas or "skull-bearers",..... Many monks questioned his behavior and way of dress but Tsangnyön was known to strongly defend his unconventional practice through rigorous argument and accurate quotations from scriptures. As well as a famous teacher, he was also a composer of religious songs. These are classics of Tibetan literature."

Although the biography is an inspiring story and has a poetic truth, as Quintman explains, it is not regarded as historically accurate. Rather, it is a result of poetic religious inspiration. It is like relying on a William Blake poem for a biography. You do not make this clear to the reader, and so I do not believe that you have solved the issue of neutrality and WP:POV, which was a major factor in my own revision. As I say in my version Milarepa draft, citing Quintman, and paraphrasing him, little is known about the historical Milarepa, as all we have are these later poetic mythological stories. Gampopa's account is earliest but it differs from the later one in many respects, and he doesn't attempt to use this to reconstruct a definitive life story of Milarepa.

Note, if I am unblocked, I would not do a bold edit of Milarepa myself. I would copy my draft from my miraheze user space over to my Misplaced Pages user space, and then post a brief note to the talk page to see if editors there think that my draft would improve it.

This is my normal practice as an editor when contributing to mature articles, as you can see from my contribution history. Instead of BRD, I do DB (continues DBRD, but the R is very rare after DB) and for another editors bold edit, I do BDR. For recent examples of my use of DB see my edits of the talk pages for: Conformal cyclic cosmology and Cosmic microwave background. I expect those edits to be uncontroversial, as all they do is to fix minor omissions, but just in case of stepping on anyone's toes, I comment on the talk page first. This also leaves a more detailed record of the proposed edit than an edit summary. I generally go back a while later, go through my contributions history and deal with the things I suggested (which usually get no replies). After all, what's the hurry? Most of the articles I edit with DB have been like this for years. This is what I would do with Buddhist bios too, at least until I am sure my edits will be uncontroversial here.

I raise these issues under WP:BANEX because as someone who proposes to edit Buddhist bios, I wish to establish that my proposed edits of Milarepa are good ones and that I will be a benefit to wikipedia.

In my edits I relied on the best source you could get on this topic. As reviewed by Rondolino

"Andrew Quintman’s study of the literary transformations of the life story of the renowned Tibetan yogin Milarepa is a welcome adaptation of his 2007 doctoral thesis,a piece of research that, albeit unpublished, had already been a key source to at least three further doctoral works on Milarepa’s legacy which, to varying extent, all build on Quintman’s work "

It won the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual Studies and the 2015 Heyman Prize for outstanding scholarship from Yale University.

Since you are editing the article mid appeal - for the benefits of anyone reading this, this is the version of the bio that I'm commenting on Milarepa (12:49, 16 August 2018). I hope also with these remarks to persuade not just the other editors here but you yourself also that my proposed edit of Milarepa is a good one.

If you and your fellow editors continue to say that my proposed edit of the Milarepa article is unacceptable, I am not interested in making a battle of it. I will go to another bio and edit that instead.

If none of my edits to add content to Buddhist bios are acceptable to editors of this project, I will do wikignoming. This is what I did originally in this topic area. One way or another I will feel that I can still contribute, at least in a minor way, to part of the project.

The reason I was so verbose is that it is something I care deeply about. Imagine if you were a theology wikignome, and one day you get an alert on your watch list that a favourite Misplaced Pages article about the Resurrection has been altered in a bold edit to say that Jesus was not resurrected. Imagine, what's more, that all material about the Resurrection has been removed as inaccurate and not historical? That is similar to the situation I found myself in, after your bold edits. That is why I was so passionate about it. And why I kept coming back to it. But I now realize that the situation has moved on, and that those 2014 articles are now in our past. I have solved it by working with ping|Dorje108 on our EOB instead, which says things that were removed from the main Misplaced Pages Buddhism project. That includes the statement of the Four Noble truths in the lede and the many attributes of Karma in Buddhism in the Karma article. The old 2014 articles themselves, which I so appreciated, are preserved in the new encyclopedia and are being actively worked on and improved.

These are are amongst the most central of all the topics in Buddhism, for instance traditionally, the Four Noble Truths was the main subject of the first and most important sermon delivered by the Buddha, immediately after his enlightenment, in which he presented the Buddhist path. The old articles explained them as I was taught by my teachers, and as our equivalent of modern Christian theologians teach it, like the Dalai Lama, Walpola Rahula, Prayudh Payutto, Ringu Tulku etc, and as I understand them as a Buddhist practioner following the path of the Buddha. I understand that WikiProject Buddhism is following a different direction.

I think to try to explain what changed, and why it changed, from my own viewpoint, is beyond what I can do under WP:BANEX. However, that there is a significant difference of some sort is clear. E.g. Four Noble Truths, compare old version and Karma in Buddhism, compare old version. As a result the newest versions of these articles are no longer of interest to me as a practitioner - though they have some academic interest.

My main focus is on improving articles in our new EOB. In the process I may produce new material that I think will benefit Misplaced Pages. If I feel that the content is not welcome in Misplaced Pages, I will not add it. Robert Walker (talk) 14:05, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Ca2james AfD (header to remove)

ping|Ca2james - I was surprised that you took my Modern Mars Habitability to AfD without posting on its talk page first. Perhaps you found it through this t-ban appeal? You are not in its talk page or edit history before you added it as an AfD . Nor have you ever edited Life on Mars even as a wikignome. Your user page says you are happy wikignoming for now, and in our past collaboration you contributed as a wikignome. As the article progressed you agreed that I had improved it by responding to your comments and at the end were satisfied with the article. The article was eventually merged away - I had been told by one editor on the Talk:Morgellons page that this was an appropriate article to write but after we were finished, two other editors of that article came to the talk page and told us that they did not agree with that view and meged it away back to the main article. But that wasn't the fault of either of us, who created the article in good faith.

Your wikignoming to improve my content is much appreciated. But I find it rather unusual for a wikignome to take an article to AfD for basically wikignome issues, especially one as long as this. Why didn't you commment on it first, as you did the previous time, and see if we could solve the issues without an AfD?

You found what you considered to be an issue of WP:POV. As far as I can tell the only issue however is of WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV. I agree that at the time you sent it to AfD the lede paragraph had an unattributed paragraph that expressed a WP:POV and can understand that it would seem WP:POV because the mainstream view amongst astrobiologists on this topic has changed a lot in the last decade and much of this has not yet percolated far beyond specialist journals such as Astrobiology journal and the specialist planetary protection debates. However the WP:POV I mentioned in the original lede was attributed later in the article and I just forgot to add those cites to the lede. I have fixed that by rewriting that paragraph describing the full range of POV's of modern astrobiologists, all attributed with multiple cites, and finally, the main stream POV attributed using a carefully chosen suitable high reputation cite (from the German Aerospace HOME project on Mars habitability).

Your other main point is on encyclopedic tone. Again I think that mainly applies to the lede. That was your main objection on the previous articles, commenting: "Encyclopaedic articles start a particular way, which is to define the title of the article.". Since it seems to be likely to be the main issue here as well, you will hopefully be pleased to hear that it is one of the things I'm working on fixing. If anyone looks at the article please be aware it is mid edit. For another example to show how I write in encyclopedic tone see Hexany. I created the article and did more than 50% of the edits. If there are issues of tone in any of my articles, it can be fixed with copy edit and often wikignomes help.

Moreover, I do not think this point is relevant to my t-ban appeal as I was not sanctioned for my editing style of main stream articles, but for talk page activity. Robert Walker (talk) 12:16, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Ca2james long posts (header to remove)

ping|Ca2james - a point of clarification - I was not told that every reply I make in the Buddhism topic area has to be done in the sandbox first. I was told to not make lots of minor edits of my posts after I post them. What I did would seem to be permitted by WP:REDACT so long as I only edit my comments before anyone replies. However, I was told that in my particular case because I do so many minor edits of my comments immediately after posting, that I shouldn't do it. ping|Softlavender suggested I use my sandbox, I agreed that this seemed a good approach to avoid this issue, and ping|Euryalus agreed in the closing statement that this potentially can solve the problem. Also, I wasn't told to totally refrain from minor edits of my posts, the issue was quantity rather than doing them at all. Even using the sandbox, sometimes I find a minor issue I missed in the sandbox or forget my signature - they weren't talking about things like that. You can get an idea of the issue I was sanctioned for, if you look at the number of minor edits in my sandbox between posts .

As for walls of text, the discussion mentions the issue, but the admin summing up does not, only mentions WP:REDACT. I was not told I must only make short talk page posts. I am aware of it as an issue at times, and do what I can about it. With the post you mention - I could have trimmed it down a lot after posting it. I did not do that because I'd been asked not to do such edits after posting. But there was no unnecessary or irrelevant content, it just could have been copy edited to be shorter.

Also you may get the impression from the talk page discussion here that comments in the Buddhism topic area are typically short and that mine were notably long. Although it is true that @Joshua Jonathan: is succint here, in the talk page debates he wrote long comments. Here is the comment he did on the WP:RSN where he objected to my walls of text in the discussion - and in context here: Response by JJ - note how long it is (1071 words and 6920 characters, not including signature), and scroll to the end where he says "NB: still walls of text... " - how could I take that warning seriously in that debate after such a wall of text himself? When I posted a short summary of the main issues with the Four Noble Truths article, this was his reply: and in context here: Response by JJ - scroll up a bit to see what he was replying to. His reply was 1726 words and 11,164 characters. I'm counting the text itself there not the wiki markup. That was in response to my new short summary of 627 words and 3572 characters, during which I was attempting to present the issues as succintly as possible.

It is clear that in this topic area 1000+ word comments are the norm. Those are just a couple of examples - in our debates from 2014 through to 2017, ping|Joshua Jonathan did them frequently; many more examples could be found. By both of us. As for myself, I welcome long comments by other particpants in a debate. I much prefer a long one to a short one that can be interpreted in more than one way and may lead to misunderstandings. That is a personal preference but from ping|Joshua Jonathan's conversational style on Misplaced Pages, it is reasonable to suppose that it is his preference too. So I do not think that long posts by themselves were the reason for the t-ban. Robert Walker (talk) 15:54, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

1. Quintman, A., 2013. The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the biographical corpus of Tibet's great saint Milarepa, [page 160 and following. Columbia University Press.
2. ^ Quintman, A. and Heruka, T., 2010. The Life of Milarepa.
3. Beer, Robert (2003). The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols. Serindia Publications, Inc. p. 102. ISBN 978-1-932476-03-3.
4. Quintman, A., 2013. The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the biographical corpus of Tibet's great saint Milarepa. Columbia University Press.
5. Reviewed by Rondolino, M., 2015. The Yogin & the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa {{quote|". Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 22, pp.13-24.