User talk:Yintan

Please click here to leave me a message and don't forget to sign it. I will respond on this talk page unless requested otherwise.  Yintan.

GMT Edit

Hi Yintan,

I work as an assistant editor for GMT Games and C3i Magazine, and my addition of the http://www.c3iopscenter.com/currentops/ link should not be considered spam. If you take a moment to go to the link, you will see it covers and publicizes current and future GMT game publications. The magazine is run by Rodger MacGowan, the head graphic designer for GMT Games, as you can see mentioned in the actual GMT Games wikipedia page.

I will continue adding and updating things on this page, and hopefully you'll see these are good faith edits.

Thanks for reading. Have a good one!

-Steven — Preceding unsigned comment added by Steven.MacGowan (talk • contribs) 00:58, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

While I'm here, I'll pitch in a question I had about this area. Since there is WP:COI on Steven's part, he ought to use the article-talkpage, prolly. There was some complaining recently, that anyone with potential COI problems should have their COI stated right in their usernames, like Steven.MacGowan.works.for.Rodger.of.GMT (or similar). I was against that, because that would mean indefinitely expanding username insanity: Steven.MacGowan.works.for.Rodger.of.GMT.votes.Green.Party.drives.Volvo.prefers.silent.movies.hates.jazz.has.an.unreasoning.dislike.of.apples.my.sister.is.married.to.a.grocer , ad infinitum. When I see somebody with a COI username, should I tell them to change it, so they don't get blocked for COI? Or create a second (linked) account for their non-COI editing? When I see somebody without a COI username, but editing where they have likely COI probs, should I tell them to manually 'sign' their article-talkpage posts with I-have-COI, when they do? Should they make a userpage note, and/or a user-talkpage note, advertising the COI? TLDR, what is the best practice for people with COI, in terms of editing-behavior 'near' articles where they have COI issues? Danke. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 02:36, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi Steven. As IP74 kindly pointed out above, you have a conflict of interest here. So just to be on the safe side, be careful with what you add, make sure it's neutral, and be sure to source it. (I think that answers your question too, 74.) As far as the link to the magazine goes, I don't believe it meets the guidelines for external links. The GMT Games article is about the company and it lists the company's official website. A magazine that one of their staff runs is a different story. You can of course add the link again but I'm fairly sure somebody else will remove it again. Kind regards, Yintan  10:18, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Yintan, is it just purely careful/neutral/sourced, no extra rules/guidance/whatever needed? If answer==yes, skip the remainder of this message.  :-)   Thanks. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 15:28, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

two specific questions, uid is corporate User:DomMusicInc, versus uid is human but may wish to disclose COI in some other fashion

Q#1. I have another person, User:Dommusicinc, that I'm trying to contact. Is their username okay, since it clearly shows their COI, or should they change it to Frodo_at_Dommusicinc, per the one-user-per-UID rule -- I seem to remember seeing complaints about generic corp-name-UIDs? Q#2. In the reverse case, User:Steven.MacGowan, who has a typical non-corporate UID, should he specifically say on his userpage/usertalkpage/editSummaries that he has a relationship to GMT or the gaming-industry? It is a pretty distant but clear relationship, employee of an employee of a gaming corporation.     Meta-discussion of the motivation behind my questions. But what if his spouse is employed by IBM (say), or his kid's second cousin works at Walmart? What is the best-practices way of disclosing COI, when editing/commenting on an article in the COI-topic-area? I'm cool with careful/neutral/sourced, which is no-extra-rules since that's just how *all* articles ought be written, but there seems to be a lot of noise about *creating* extra rules, to satisfy perceived incompatibilities with PR firms, assistant magazine editors like Steven, gallery owners like Joseph, et cetera. I have a modest-proposal solution-looking-for-a-problem scheme, related to this perceived issue <grin> ... but I will happily take the say-so of a griffin that careful/neutral/sourced *is* the solution. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 15:28, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I've actually been thinking about writing a proposal to change the username rules, because I don't think they do the wiki any good. Right now promotional and/or corporate usernames are not allowed (see WP:CORPNAME) and I fail to see the point of that. The same goes for the current discussion about Paid Editing, by the way. As long as these corporate/paid editors follow the content guidelines (neutral, sourced, notability, etcetera) I don't see any problem at all. In fact, if they could use their promotional/corporate names, these could function as a flag to other editors. As in: "pay extra attention to these edits because there could be a COI problem here". Now these editors have to change their names to something meaningless, or edit as an IP, and we've got no indication about their backgrounds whatsoever. Which in itself is okay, but then why bother with outlawing these corporate names in the first place? If somebody wants to edit with a clear declaration of his/her background, why is that a problem?

As far as I can tell, User:Dommusicinc's username is not acceptable under the current rules and should be reported at WP:UAA. User:Steven.MacGowan could mention his connection to GMT on his userpage, would be fair of him, but I don't think he has to and, in my opinion, it doesn't matter anyway. I'll judge his edits, not his background. Yintan  16:07, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'm going to suggest they change it to foo_at_Dommusicinc, and if there is anybody else in the office, that person should create baz_at_dommusicinc, rather than share a password. Alternatively, I may just suggest they edit as anons (since for technical reasons multiple-users-per-IP *is* allowed), and just manually sign their talkpage-posts and their edit-summaries as 'DomMusicInc' to disclose the COI. Basically, wikipedia has 4M articles, and 30k editors. Dom is a Notable band that won several awards, but recent band-membership-turmoil means they only have two semi-regular editors, both likely with COI. Rather than the article become an orphan, I'd like to have fooAtDom and 89trees continue to maintain it, following careful/neutral/sourced guidelines. This is per WP:IAR, rather than any lesser WP:PG.

    As for proposals, methinks only one thing makes sense: we need to have some kind of WikiData system, or some sort of Category system, that is applicable to usernames. For yourself, you would fall into the admin-group, rollbacker-group, reviewer-group... but also orthogonally into the griffin-group, teahouse-group, punk-fans-group, crass-fans-subgroup (or maybe I'm projecting here)... plus there would be some COI groups-and-subgroups you would fall under, based on your politics/religion/employer/etc. I'm actually more interested in getting a grouping-system like that set up for *articles* in mainspace, not just for usernames-in-login-space, because I think the current manually-maintained largely-ignored utterly-unbalanced-and-weird category-system is not very helpful. Anyways, I would be very much interested in seeing a detailed proposal. See also the Modest Proposal which is called WP:NOUSERS by an ancient WikiDragon. I have a bunch of comments on the essay-talkpage, proving how badly I misunderstood what they meant, and am working on my own WP:AdminsAreSecretService username proposal which I believe fixes many problems. No doubt some of them highly unlikely in practice.  :-)   Thanks for improving wikipedia. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 18:15, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

One quick remark before I answer more later (time is limited right now): I definitely do not fall in the admin group. Yintan  22:48, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

It is the colloquial-admin. You've got rollbacker. You've got reviewer. You've got 18k edits per month. You're an admin, who was too chicken to submit themselves to the poison of RfA. Deal with it.  :-)     I have the same jargon-disconnect when I try to have discussions about WP:BITE with botmasters, and call their work a bot, and they incredulously say, "you know $bot is actually implemented as a mediawiki extension in php with a set of regex rulesets parsed by a custom closed-source perl script, riiiight?" Yintan==admin. AbuseFilterRuleset57==bot. WikiJargon==overrated. And truth be told. As you may grok / given my prior $messages. Grammar==overrated. Though I try to be more judicious in my mainspace contributions. Think of the readers! After all. Thanks for improving wikipedia, talk to you later. Think I've given you enough walls-of-text to chew over, so I'll take my leave for a day or two. Ping my talkpage when-and-if you have a bit more spare time. See you around. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:25, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

a Modest Proposal

Hello Yintan, believe you are the first identifiable WikiGriffin that I've had the pleasure to run across; nice to meet you, call me 74, if you please.

Appreciate your comment over at my drastic proposal for ArbCom election juries and all that. Contrary to the impression you apparently got from my explanation over there, I did not actually invent the solution, and then seek a problem where it might be applied.  :-)   In fact, the reason I made the proposal, was because I disliked the three existing proposals, as incomplete solutions... Od_Mishehu and Monty845 wanted to protect candidates from being blocked, and Risker wanted to protect arbcom seats from being filled by blocked candidates. Mine was a composite, that did both.

Given that you opposed Od_Mishehu's *singular* proposed new rule ("only arbcom can block a candidate beyond 12 hours") on the basis of no-extra-rules, I'm not too shocked you opposed my dozen new rules. Fundamentally, I agree with you that fewer rules is better in general, and in particular that the mostly-unwritten rules which have made RfA so deterring are bad news. Anyways, my proposal was not intended to solve *historical* problems, of past elections... it was intended to combine the Od_Mishehu and the Risker proposals, since I presumed *they* must have seen historical problems, motivating their proposals.

Should you have time (and feel motivated), I would like it very much if you could give me the five-minute overview, of actual historical problems, or even better, of what you think a non-poisonous RfA process ought to look like. Currently my main self-appointed WP:RGW mission is related to WP:RETENTION, trying to triple-or-better the number of active editors we have on enWiki... and I'd like to increase the number of admins by more than that factor, simultaneously. If you have little interest in such discussion-topics, or are otherwise busy on griffin-business, no problemo, of course. Thanks for improving wikipedia, see you around. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 02:23, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi 74, thanks for your message. A non-poisonous RfA process, now there's a challenge . Nah, it shouldn't be too difficult, really. Over the years RfAs have been allowed to become more scrutinizing than your average NSA wire tap, and I think it should simply be cut back and streamlined. A few suggestions from the top of my head:

• No more additional questions, the standard three are fine. Anything the additional questions ask can be found in the candidate's edit history anyway.
• Candidates must have at least rollback or reviewer rights.
• Candidates must have been active for at least a year.
• Candidates must be co-nominated by an experienced editor or admin.
• Candidates must have a clean block log for the last 6 (9, 12, whatever) months.

If these conditions are met, hand out the mop. I find it ridiculous that good candidates go down in flames because they haven't created enough content, for example. It's an argument that keeps popping up at RfA and in my opinion it makes no sense at all. If I need a guy with a mop to clean the classroom, I don't expect him to be able to teach as well. If he can, great, if not, no problem. Anyway, these are just a few ideas that come to mind. Does that answer your question? Yintan  10:50, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

We are on the same page. But I will play devil's advocate. In practice, at the moment it is *impossible* to get the admin-bit unless you have at least 6000 edits, and are clocking around 1000/month. This necessarily makes all admins tend to be deletionists: the only way to get 1000/mo edit-counts is by holding down the trigger on that revert-button, an hour a day or thereabouts. (On *that* subject... did you really make 18k edits just during March, after roughly zero in February? Or is that a bug in the wikitool?) Your proposal, at face value, is that somebody with less than 100 edits, based on 'active' being defined as 5/mo, would be fine. Once in, they can nominate all their ~100-edits-so-far friends, too. This *would* dramatically expand the admin-pool, true. But no floor on edit-counts, the Sole Measure Of Worth according to some weasel words? 74.192.84.101 (talk) 15:39, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

p.s. As you can tell, I have a problem with WP:WALLOFTEXT. Please let me know if you are overwhelmed with my questions, and I'll take it to the teahouse.  :-) Thanks. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 15:40, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't believe the editcount is a good indication of the quality of someone's work, but it does give an indication of activity, obviously. And somebody who is doing ~100 edits a year, is not "active" in my book (I'm not sure if your claim about needing at least 1000/mo edits to become an admin is correct, by the way). If you'd press me to come up with a minimum number for RfA, I'd say about 1500 a year, preferably spread across various wiki areas. (And yes, that 18K peak in my editcount is correct. I was very, very bored at the time.) Yintan  16:16, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Well in that case, wikipedia herself thanks you, and I thank you. A.m.a.z.i.n.g.... But as you say, just a rough indication of 'activity' with little to say of quality. My definition of 'active editor' and count of 31k-down-from-36k-two-years-ago as meaning 5+edits/month is straight from the WMF, scroll to the bottom, we are flatlined.[1] Click the 'secondary' tab at the top to see the 3100-down-from-3700-two-years-ago count of 'very active editors' that manage 100+edits/month. Those folks seem more in line with your idea of admins (1500/yr == 125/mo).

    But we already *have* 1500 admins. Under your 1500/yr unwritten rule, even if we had automatic-admin-bit-granting for every person with a UID, 12 months min, 1500 edit-count min, and 100+edits/mo ongoing, we would max out at 4k or 5k admins, which works out to every single admin being responsible for personally keeping somewhere between 2000 and 3000 *unique* readers happy, each and every day. In fact, the number of humanReaders/perAdmin/perDay would be much higher due to readers who visit wikipedia more than once a month... do we *really* want to cap our admin-count at 5k or thereabouts? Why not 50k? But hey, of the 1433 admins now, only 633 of them manage to contribute 15+edits/month... no data on how many admins consistently manage 100+edits/mo but we know it's less than 633 of them... so if we *did* automatically grant the admin-bit (for a time-period of one month in length) to everybody who managed 100 edits the previous month, our active-admin-count would immediately leap from 633 to 3800. Which might shake up the wikiCulture caste-system a bit, so I'm tentatively in favor of the scheme.

    That said, the real problem is not how many people have the admin-bit, the real problem is how many people survive their first 99 edits, and go on to keep contributing for the long run... even just. 5. edits. per. month. <music swells> Think of the children! For just one edit per week, a few pennies of your telecom bill, you can help build the encyclopedia anyone can edit: wikipedia for the ages. <music fades> By the way... User:SineBot has well over a million edits, making *you* look like a total slacker <grin> ... and, not-that-ironically-perhaps, User:slakr is the botmaster of SineBot. As for the 1k/mo minimum RfA standard...

You darez to citation-needed-snark-tag meez? Episode five, wherein Yintan learns a valuable statistical lesson

Well then!  :-)   Fine, be that way, here's your WP:OR.[2] See also User:Kudpung/RfA_criteria#My_criteria who I submit is a *pushover* compared to most folks that run the RfA system. On paper, you and kudpung agree that you want 12 months of active time... but in practice, Kudpung expects you will have 1k/mo during the past six months, and anecdotes about min-num-to-pass-RfA that I linked to basically back that up: 5k *is* the minimum edit-count in real life, and that number is rising.     This has insane practical consequences: there are only 9500 people that could even *theoretically* become admins.[3] Per the statistics on very-active-editors above, prolly only about a third of those folks are *currently* in the very-active-editors category, as opposed to retired/wikiBreaking/gumptionDestroyingSadness. There are something like 200M uniques per month, just to enWiki (maybe way more now). We have 31k 'active' editors, about 3k of them *very* active editors (plus another 7k very-active-editors-in-the-past), but all the numbers are slowly dwindling. Not counting a good portion of non-admin-bit editors that fight vandals, act as diplomats, and otherwise serve-n-protect wikipedia, we have hundreds of admins-with-the-bit... but once again these are slowly dwindling away, since few can be suckered into doing an RfA nowadays.[4] (Does not includes *losses*, please note.)     Doing the math, there is a damn good reason you don't really have the time to hand-hold Joseph the gallery-owner through their dilemna, and instead use an wiki-tool designed for anti-vandalism to give them template-spam on their talkpage, and auto-ask them to go read the oh-so-easy-to-grok 10-page WP:EL, which of course cannot be understood without reading the hyperlinked 7-page WP:RS, and understand jargon like 'featured article' ... and so on. The nutshell is flat wrong, by the way, from Joseph's perspective: "External links in an article can be helpful to the reader, but they should be kept minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." The nutshell *ought* to read Helpful To The Encyclopedia, because pretty much everything in WP:ELNO is helpful to the reader, right? We disallow most such things -- albeit with subtle exceptions everywhere you look -- for other reasons, which are not something that can be explained in a nutshell.     We don't have time to document well enough, or granularly enough. We don't have people to handhold. We don't have wikiLove tools, we have wikiWar tools that get pressed into emergency service, and do it poorly because they aren't designed for doing it at all. We do not have enough vandal-fighters and anti-spam-warriors, so there is still plenty that slips through, despite heroic efforts. Wikipedia is a top-ten-in-the-world-website, with a hundred-odd eeps, that mostly make youtube videos about how awesome nice collaborative friendly the average wikipedia editors are. AAAARrrrrrrggghhhh. Wikipedia needs to have a few million active (5+edits/mo) editors, at least one admin for every hundred such editors, and one arbcom member for every thousand such admins. *Then* we'll have the available time/people/resources to properly help Joseph, as well as to properly maintain Dom (musician) without risk of POV/SPA, and so on. WP:RETENTION. We get about 1000 new editors per month... and *lose* about 1000 per month, plus also lose 50 experienced editors that got fed up. If we can manage to net 500 of those editors per month, at the end of 2016 we would have 50k active editors, rather than 25k.     Anyways, sorry about the rant. As you may be starting to grok, I have a lot of wikithusiasm... but in very specific channels. I want fewer rules, like you, but not because I think the current rules are good enough... because I think the current rules are Utterly Nuts and no sane person, whether a Honda mechanic, an Assistant Editor, a Band Rep, a Gallery Owner, a Boutique Clothing Retailer, an Assistant High School Principal Of India, a Justin Bieber Fan, a Published Biologist, or any of the other people I've personally seen driven away from wikipedia by our wikiCulture, are going to learn five bazillion rules. None of them believe templates are anything but rude, and none of them believe WP:NINJA reversion is anything but a slap in the face. If we must have rules, they should be at the top, for ArbCom members to comply with, never at the bottom, for anon gallery-owners to stumble over. Where in the five pillars does it say, if you have the work of the artist in your gallery, you may not have your external link in the article? You can kinda see it there, buried in the 'wikipedia is an encyclopedia' pillar, if you really squint. You can maybe see it in NPOV, if you wear some COI sunglasses when you look. But it is NOT OBVIOUS AT ALL, and there is only one way somebody like Joseph will understand it: by getting it explained to them, diplomatically, by a real live human.     Which, with luck, this time, by chance, will be me personally. But I want to change the wikiculture, so we start retaining beginning editors, rather than driving them away. I want to flip the pillars on their head, and treat them as a countdown sequence, rather that as the *main* five rules. Most important is rule#5, WP:IAR aka WP:BOLD, if it improves the encyclopedia, do it. Next most important, above anything else but serving and protecting wikipedia herself, is WP:NICE aka WP:AGF. Right now, all template-messages instead WP:ABF, and all edit-summaries assume WP:CLUE. Freedom is #3, we have a bunch of non-free-imagefiles, a bunch of closed-source bots, and a bunch of secretive processes that need to be shaken up. Near the bottom, we have the two keystone rules that make wikipedia special: WP:NPOV as the second to last, and WP:NOT as the last rule. There is no WP:PG, for the average contributor, in my world. Sure, for *admins* there are WP:PG, but not for readers, not for the everyday editors. If two of our *million* everyday editors get in a squabble, they just find the nearest of our tens-of-thousands of admins, who has on tap the subtle ramifications of the five pillars, plus a five-bazillion-page policy-book if they get stuck.     At the end of the day, I'm trying to start small. I want to fix template-messages. I want to fix our ontological systems, to handle COI and category-intersections and topic-search-tags. I want to get a *good* VizEd, and other wiki-tools that help improve friendlyism, specifically, rather than being mal-adapted anti-vandal weaponry. I especially want an auto-chat side-panel, that makes wikipedia work more like twitter/facebook/email, rather than like mediawiki, and makes good-faith-but-low-policy-experience editors stand out *as* good-faith. Everybody knows the current problems are fatal, and has since 2009 or 2010.[5] Given the negative level of progress on editor-populace since mid-2010, I think WMF flat-out cannot help us. Either we'll figure out how to bootstrap wikipedia to the next level, or, sooner or later, sure as the egg in midair will eventually get acquainted with the kitchen floor and break, wikipedia will sell out. There will be adverts in mainspace. There will be data about the readers sold to the highest bidder. There will be abuse of the BLINK tag, and other horrid things! We must not permit it. Yintan, User:Obi_Wan never told you what happened to your father... join me, and together, we'll no-extra-rule the wikiverse, as WikiGriffin and Son! errr, welll, okay mebbe noht, as WikiGriffin and WikiElfBot... no, that can't be right either. Where is my wikiScript? I'll be in my wikiTrailer. <screen door slams> <distant thudding noises> <fade to black>

    Now that we have *that* out of the way. Ahem. I'm pretty harshly critical of wikipedia's systems right now. I think many existing editors and most existing admins are Doing It Wrong... they are too busy to help the Joseph-look-alikes of the world over our hurdles, and hardly even recognize the hurdles *as* hurdles, rather than Protective Trenches In The War On Spam. ( believe it or not, Some People don't even think template-spam is abrupt, rude, or spam!  :-)   But don't get me wrong. You personally are doing amazing. Absolutely. Positively. I am a big fan. I've posted as an anon 74-whatever in a bunch of places, and there are four or five admins who responded positively -- among which I number anybody who uses stiki/huggle/twinkle/wpcleaner/botmaster/etc wiki-tools on a regular basis... not just people with the AdminBit -- and most folks will not give me the time of day. But none of them are doing anything bad... they are doing nothing wrong, at all. WP:REQUIRED. WP:BURDEN. *Crucial* to retain.

    But I'm convinced that WP:RETENTION is at the core a wikiCulture problem, that we design our tools to create a caste-system, and that we think that *deserving* the honor of being an admin requires a military-grade obstacle course (to swipe a GFDL phrase from you), but more importantly, to think that reading ten-page-long incredibly-labyrinthine WP:EL should be required of a beginning editor that wants to insert an external link... when really, anybody who will just briefly skim the five pillars, *ought* to fully deserve the honor of being a successful editor. Bluntly put, we're killing wikipedia herself, in some not-to-distant-future, by eating our own seed wheat; admins are so rush-rush busy-busy no-time-for-anything-but-WP:TEMPLAR simply *because* they don't take time now!

    It is a vicious cycle, the busy-template-rush-from-fire-to-fire approach *guarantees* that very approach will be necessary. Instead, I want folks to concentrate, just a wee bit, on WP:RETENTION, and over the next few years grow the number of editors from 30k to 90k, from 90k to 270k, and from 270k to millions. The people making five edits a month, regularly, steadily, are the seed pool from which future 100+edits/mo very active editors, stiki/huggle/etc admins, botmasters, and wikiDiplomats of all stripes will someday emerge. <jingle> The preceding spiel was sponsored by Wonder Bread, that yummy delicious yet surprisingly nutritious food that every wikipedia editor loves. See you next week, twinkies! — 74.192.84.101 (talk) 00:55, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Holy shit. Give me some time to digest this, while your keyboard cools down. Later... Yintan  01:30, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Mat Chivers

Hi Yintan

I just received a rather abrupt and rude message from you? I am the official representative of Mat Chivers, the reason for adding my link to his wikipedia page is that it is a resource for additional information on Mat Chivers - I do not see how you could deem this irrelevent, misleading or vandalism? Please can you explain?

Regards

Joseph Clarke . Gallery Director — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.113.166.88 (talk) 11:26, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

It's abrupt nor rude, it's a template used to alert new users to their mistakes. If you had read the guidelines for external links, mentioned in the messages I left you, you'd see why the link to your gallery was removed. The same goes for the other articles you added it to. See also WP:ELOFFICIAL. Kind regards, Yintan  11:30, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Joseph, thanks for improving wikipedia with the extra info on Mat, appreciate it. But as Yintan has helpfully filled you in, we are Super Extremely Leery about external links around here. You did nothing wrong, but Yintan is on a hair-trigger, by necessity. As you can imagine, wikipedia is under constant attack by spammers trying to get BuyCheepViagrahDotWhatever sneakily shoved into wikipedia any way they can; Yintan is a wikiKnight (today at least) who Defends The Realm, keeping Mat's page free of Veeahgraa, who is not trying to be abrupt -- he is in fact well above average. Since you are the official representative of Mat, a link to your gallery *might* be appropriate, assuming Mat does not have a separate official homepage.

   But in cases like these, without looking into the details of yours yet, typically there would be a link from wikipedia to Mat's homepage, and then a link from *there* to your gallery-page. Wikipedia is not supposed to be a website that provides value to readers by offering them one-click-checkout, we want them to get all the encyclopedic info about Mat right here, written in a neutral tone, and then be able to visit his main official page (with pointers to various subsidiary official pages), should the reader's initial interest lead them to now want non-encyclopedic things. Anyways, I will reply further on your talkpage, and try and walk you through the relevant policies. Should only take a few minutes to get you ready to rumble. Thanks. p.s. See also WP:TEAHOUSE, where Yintan or myself can answer any questions or concerns you may have (Yintan is also a WikiFriendly when not on duty as a WikiKnight), now or in the future. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 14:01, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Yintan, template-messages are pretty much always overly-officious, and abrupt... in the sense that somebody clicked ctrl+shift+3 or something using a wikitool to auto-delete-and-auto-form-letter-notify. Whether or not this is rude, depends on how one personally feels about computer-generated automatically delivered officious-sounding form-letters. (I actually have a big WP:RGW about this issue, and I'm rewriting some templates in userspace. I might get a reality-check on my scheme from you, if you have time... and more importantly for my scheme, from Joseph, if they have time.) Anyways, the truth is, the personal note from Joseph looks like what it is, a polite request for help... and the template-message looks like what it is, a terse form-letter that promises there is an iron fist behind that templated glove.  :-)       Still, nothing you did was wrong, and in fact almost certainly the core of your action was dead-on-right... wikipedia is not a linkfarm, it is an encyclopedia, and by removing it you protect her reliability and focus on relevance-as-an-encyclopedia... so while we differ on templating protocol, I remain grateful for your griffinly services, and thank you for improving wikipedia. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 14:01, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi 74. Again, thanks for your messages. Just for your information and clarity, I didn't answer Joseph's message here with templates. In fact I was kind of lenient. I just templated each time he re-entered the link to his gallery. I could have reported him to WP:AIV for spamming but found that a bit too strict so I left it after 3 warnings, although he inserted the link 4 times in 5 minutes. Then his message here arrived, some 20 minutes later. Also, Mat Chivers has his own site (http://www.matchivers.com/) which is already listed in his article. Cheers, Yintan  14:23, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

PS - Thanks for calling me "well above average" . Yintan  14:34, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, quite frankly, you are well above average, just talking wikiCulture. You actually, really really, assumed good faith! But by the normal Business Correspondence standards with which Joseph's already familiar, even *you* were abrupt, and rudeQuestionMark-pardon-me-did-you-just-say-my-gallery-is-disruptive-gasp? You don't see template-spam as rude, which is average (not above average sorry :-) for wikipedia regulars. But you did not block him, and you responded to his note kindly, as a wikiGriffin ought, and you *bothered* to use template-spam-to-an-IP, whereas plenty of admins (or wannabe admins) around here would just ninja-revert, and once they tricked Joseph into crossing the 3RR line, report him for an IP-range-block. Point being, I do *not* want Joseph getting the idea you are the toughest they'll come across... you *are* being quite lenient with them, by wikiCulture standards. And you are helping wikipedia, doing your griffinly-duties, which I'd like Joseph to have a glimmer of.

    But I also didn't want to scare Joseph off, with my usual wall-o-text disease, so I tried to condense it into something they would grok, without being unduly offensive to the griffin. Thanks for taking it well. :-)   The only thing I would say you could *specifically* have done better that go-round, would be to have directed Joseph to WP:TEAHOUSE where somebody could walk him through WP:EL, in both your revert-summaries and your template-messages and your personal-note-reply. In the future, if you run across some other beginner, who is obviously trying to edit in good faith, but perhaps has not memorized WP:PG cover to cover just yet, please leave a note on their talkpage directing them to *my* talkpage, and I'll try to give them the crash-course explanation, tell them about the teahouse, and the community-portal link, and whatnot. That's just a temporary measure, until something more formal can be worked out, but convincing people over on the WP:RETENTION talkpage is slow going, and I'm impatient.

    p.s. *Is* there a template you could have answered him here with???? "Dear $ipAddrOrUid, thank you for your message. Your problem understanding $policyKeyword is very important to me. However, I am currently quite busy working on $((select top 1 from todo_list)), so I suggest you please contact WP:TEAHOUSE. Thanks for improving wikipedia, have a nice day, $yintan." That's just wrong.... 74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:17, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Dualidad

Hello Yitan.

I was a user of Wikipedia as a consultant for long time and I have donated also a couple of times but recently I have created my first account "Dualidad Fractal" because I wanted to help directly.

My intention is to help with translations: spanish, catalan, english and, maybe, a little bit of german. I am still familirinzing myself with Wikipedia functions, rules and policy.

In any case, I am aware that I should never publish any copyrighted information and I have also no inttention of making any kind of publicity or marketing of any kind of product or idea.

The info that I wrote in my personal profile, was personal and I had no intention of beeing public. In adition, it doesn't advertise any comercial product or tries to spread any ideology. Actually, it almost makes any sense, it was suposed to be only a test.

If you tell me how I will be glad to delete my profile text and edit another one. I want tolearn more about Wikipedia functions.

I hope you will be comprehensive and encouraging with a new "volunteer". I try to do my best with my limited time.

Thanks for your time.

Dualidad Fractal (talk) 22:20, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi. Your userpage has been cleared so don't worry about that. I am of course more than willing to help you should that be necessary. You can also ask questions at the Teahouse or check out WP:HELP. If there's something I can help you with, just let me know. Happy editing. Yintan  22:45, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

User:Dualidad Fractal

If you want to help with translation, that would be great. There's a page about it here, but it's really just common sense. I've recreated you page with a few userboxes to get you started. Sorry about not being Yintan :-) James^x12345 22:56, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Nikolai Yezhov

Please do not let your probably communist upbringing interfere your objectivity that much. Thank you.

Wow, now I'm a communist as well. My CV gets better all the time. And thanks for complaining about my objectivity while you're the one who jumps to conclusions. That was fun, too. Oh, and do read WP:SOURCE, please. Thanks. Yintan  23:13, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Only a pinko commie hippogriffin would find fun in this message! Begone from this objectivist-only user-talkpage, "yintan", if that even is your real name!! <humour> <kidding> <talk to you later> — 74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:29, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

You see, not that long ago I was told "you are just another rich muppet screwing the poor", and that's exactly the other side of the spectrum. From ruthless capitalist to brainwashed communist in a matter of weeks. Wow. I know I'm flexible (vandals keep telling me I can fuck myself, so I must be) but I didn't know my political views were made of rubber as well. Oh well, live and learn. Yintan  01:38, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Yup. Anyways, I'd recognize that jargon that 182 was using anywhere. I left a message on their talkpage; objectivists can be very snarky, but they are also incredibly dedicated and productive. I'll fill them in that, just because something is WP:The_Truth, does not therefore mean it belongs in wikipedia. Which, of course, explains why wikipedia is such a pit of commies, and simultaneously, a tool of the bourgeious pigs. Some People say Jimbo Wales built wikipedia to propagate his objectivist tyranny across the universe... but Some People say he's really a turncoat, out to torture true Objectivists into submission. In my book, either way, may he live ten thousand years. ;-)   Thanks for improving wikipedia. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:49, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	Hi. I was reading your userpage and thought it was really funny! Thanks! Epicgenius(give him tirade • check out damage) 16:37, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, too! Yintan  17:07, 4 November 2013 (UTC)