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Please restore the link and first sentence of my comment removed at [1]. It is part of my comment: It is the first sentence. It is not a polemical statement meant to piss people off. There is no comparison with drunk driving. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 04:23, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I beg to differ. It is a major ad campaign against drunk driving and you've tailored it to COI editing.--v/r - TP 04:31, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've tailored a major ad campaign to COI editing? That's impossible—I've never seen this ad campaign. Maybe it is major in some locales, but not in mine. Please return my comment, or let me return my comment, to the state I left it as per WP:TPO. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 05:03, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You've never seen it? It's been a major ad campaign since 1983. Well now you know. I'm sure now that you know, the idea of writing anything that associates COI editing to drunk driving and killing people should be reprehensible to you.--v/r - TP 05:08, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, I have not seen it. May I return my comment to its original state now? --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 05:22, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No. Why don't you come up with some other clever insult that isn't related to drunk driving and use that instead with your picture?--v/r - TP 05:49, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Wikipedia talk:Conflict of interest comment regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 06:19, 21 July 2014 (UTC) 06:19, 21 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

30 year old campaign and still running.

So. Fucking. What.

Please explain to me what prevents Atethnekos from coming up with some other non-drunken-child-killing insult, which violates WP:NPA anyway, to use against COI editors and why this particular insult is needed

Please explain to me how you overlooked the following: "...a thirty-year-old phrasal construction -- imitated, parodied, and reused countless times of the last three decades -- automatically implies that the user meant the thirty-year-distant original reference?" Please also explain how you managed to draw that direct connection to conjure up your imaginary comparison when there is not the slightest context that even hints at such a thing,

And to repeat, since you probably missed this, too: " I don't know about "too young", but there's someone in this conversation in need of growing up -- and it's not User:Atethnekos. If you want to be taken seriously, try to not pretend to be upset at imaginary slights. --Calton | Talk 13:02, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Excuse me if I don't find your insults persuasive. That phrase has a root and the root isn't thirty years old - it is still used in commercials today. If you want to address my question, then address it. Try a DH3 argument at the very least. Your insults say much more about you than me.--v/r - TP 13:07, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page stalker)I think the "friends don't let friends" thing has gone through a cultural osmosis. Its a meme used in many contexts now - I grew up with the drunk driving version, but I don't think ive seen in anywhere in years or decades. One of the more common takes on it I see these days is friends don't let friends skip leg day, but there are many many more [2] I agree with you on many things TP, but I think you may have taken a wrong turn on this one. Gaijin42 (talk) 01:33, 25 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.

[[3]]

Hi, I got the email you sent me. As far as the MEDRS subpage thing is concerned, I didn't intend for it to be interpreted the way you read it. I do think this guideline is an important one and try to follow it as much as possible, but in the subpage I was talking about how it is inconvenient. Given that your email has led me to think about the issue of whether this looks like I am complaining unconstructively, though, I have tagged the subpage for deletion. Thanks for the feedback. Everymorning talk 18:26, 8 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely. Let me know if I can do anything else for you. If it helps, I've reviewed 13 people since September and so far have only nommed 3. You're well within a future admin candidate zone but just have a few things to consider. I'd be happy to nom you in 6 months.--v/r - TP 19:28, 8 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi TP. Could you sign your DS alert to User talk:MarieWarren? It's good for the user to have someone to ask if they don't understand the notice. Thanks, EdJohnston (talk) 19:35, 9 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I figured the template would do it for me. Thanks for the heads up, I went back and signed it.--v/r - TP 19:41, 9 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

According to Template:Ds/alert you can specify sig=yes, but it's not the default. EdJohnston (talk) 21:31, 9 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed your comments at ANI about Shooting of Michael Brown and there are numerous cases of WP:BLP violations, misinformation and POV pushing. Pro-Wilson, Pro-Brown sections mingled with completely inappropriate analogies and assumptions. A call for a non-involved admin was requested and while I am not one, there are dozens of issues in the article that need to be immediately removed per BLP. Perhaps I was a little harsh by stating that editors blocking the NPOV tag should be blocked, but those involved are either blind to policy or complicit in the violations. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 18:08, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've got a opinion about the issue and so I probably couldn't remain impartial enough to be an uninvolved administrator. Besides, blatant NPOV violations protected by the system because sysops are unwilling to enforce NPOV when it suits their politics is exactly why I am leaving the project. I feel like I've done my part to combat radical conservatives trying to push conservative POV on this project but I just don't see that sort of effort from my counterparts.--v/r - TP 18:20, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

TP, it's a great shame you feel you have to go, but before you do leave the project, I think you owe it to us to bring such admins to book (if you haven't already done so, that is) or at least lay the trail. I for one, am one admin who is on the warpath for misbehaving sysops, mainly because I'm fed up of us all being tarred with the same brush by the anti-admin brigade, and for the reason why I became an admin in the first place after having been 'assaulted' and insulted by rogue admins years ago. Regards, Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:52, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As a self-identified "conservative" (I'm not so sure I'm "radical" or not) I also would want to have someone at least have the problem editors identified, and I think Kudpung would be a great choice. Regarding some things, like I guess BLP, conservatively erring on the side of caution is probably a good idea in general, but I have to say that if this site winds up being the Rush Limbaugh involuntary gag response of the net, none of us, conservatives or otherwise, do ourselves any damn good whatsoever. Civil or nominally civil POV pushing is one of the biggest problems we have, and several arbs and potential arbs among others have clearly recognized that. Letting someone else know who the worst offenders of that type are would definitely be something that would be in everyone's interests. John Carter (talk) 20:01, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Let's just put it this way, I'm not going to name names, but anyone who pushes Media Matters for America as a reliable source and disputes whether Fox News is a reliable source is a POV pusher. It's that simple. I'm tired of the double standard with regard to source-bias. I'm tired of the editors who push that point of view with a straight (civil) face. And I'm tired of the sysops who encourage and support those editors in disputes because it serves their own purposes such as social or political advocacy. Once again, Santorum is a perfect example. Compare that article to "You didn't build that". The more Wikipedia becomes a cultural icon, the worse it becomes. It's not getting better and I don't want to be part of it anymore. The "encyclopedia" is a tool of activism, now.--v/r - TP 20:08, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sad to say, the encyclopedia has always been a tool of activism. I started editing in 2004 and we had to drag a POV-pusher all the way to ArbCom because he couldn't let that election go. Gamaliel (talk) 20:20, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If he's speaking about encyclopedias in general, though, not just wikipedia, I have to say that I think in some cases he is kind of justified there too. There are at least a few encyclopedic articles relating to religious topics, generally smallish groups or movements or ideologies, which at least to my eyes read more like press releases than neutral overviews. And I seem to remember seeing at least some reviews of encyclopedias relating to recent historical developments being criticized as obviously partisan. And I'm still stunned the last print edition of Britannica contained an article on the Catholic Church which included in its bibliography 4 sources relating to the history of Catholicism in the UK and 3 relating to the history of Catholicism in the entire southern hemisphere combined, with an article rather clearly reflecting that bias.

I don't know if it has any chance of working, but I remember User:Shii, who probably knows more specifically about religion in general than I do, saying recently that in some ways we are trying to do here something that even most print encyclopedias don't do, which is be both neutrally encyclopedic and up-to-date. I agree we ain't really doing a good job of getting there, and I can well imagine people giving up trying, but I'm an unrealistic optimist in a lot of ways and I can hope that maybe sometime we might be able to in some way maybe at least cover most everything that the major topical encyclopedias cover. If we even do that, which we are still a long way from doing, that is at least something. John Carter (talk) 20:30, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is any one person thinking they alone can present an unbiased and neutral perspective on anything. Only by cooperating with others, and I do not mean with our political and ideological allies, can we find balance. Our tendency lately has been to issue one sided topic bans and interaction bans or site bans that entirely and unequivocally prohibit that from happening.

The rule of civil POV pushing goes like this: remain calm and dismiss your opponents concerns in the most simplistic and patronizing way possible. Whatever it takes to get an opponent to slip. Because once they slip, you have a direct line to their nerves. Civil POV pushing is a cancer to this project and no one is willing to address it and sysops routinely play their role in the strategy.--v/r - TP 20:59, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Those first two sentences describe well how Wikipedia is supposed to work. Nobody is neutral but everyone should try to be. Collaboration is supposed to compensate for any one person's inherent biases and allow collaborators to point out and compensate for each other's biases. This process is disrupted by POV pushers because the collaborative equilibrium is thrown out of whack when one party isn't trying to be neutral and the other parties are. It doesn't matter how civil the POV pusher is because the effect is the same in the end. I'd love to see POV pushers banned entirely but I'm not sure how to frame a policy in a way that is fair to everyone, even if such a policy could ever be accepted by the techno-libertarian-utopianists who equate freedom with being able to act like an asshole online and make up a large percentage of vocal Wikipedia editors. Not the least problem with framing the policy is how we decide who a civil POV pusher is. I have some names that I could share privately with you and I'm sure you do as well, and we'd probably vehemently disagree about our respective lists. Gamaliel (talk) 22:23, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)Probably would. On the other hand, we'd also be aware of some of the behaviors and we'd be able to be more aware on our own. The issue I find is just about everyone claims they are the ones trying to be neutral while the other isn't. And, I'm sorry to say and I don't mean it as a pejorative, but most of our admin and editor base hold liberal beliefs. I do not know of any other admin that is openly conservative. According to isidewith.com, I am just left of center but on Wikipedia I am described as conservative. That tells me something. If a barely liberal sysop like me is considered conservative on here, then our center isn't matching up to the world outside of this project. Perhaps it's because the American center is to the right of most of Europe? I don't know. But I do know that, depending on the topic, there is a hostility toward conservatives. I also know that depending on other topics (such as religion) that there is a hostility toward liberals. I don't know and your perspective is probably completely different then mine.

But from where I am sitting, I just don't see any way at all to get this project to take any claim of an overall political bias seriously and it's been draining on my faith in the project. There are only two ways forward, I could start whining everywhere that we're dismissing claims of bias too easily and become disruptive or I can just quietly bow my head and humbly leave. I don't want to leave is some kind of anger and frustration over the issue and so I gave everyone a 6-month heads up. But I would have left the day I decided to leave 12 months ago if I didn't think the project would think I am just some radical-conservative who has been playing nice for so long finally blowing up. I'd rather just shake hands with everyone and leave as friends and so I set a date far enough out where no one's shock would cause them to become defensive over my views and think ill of me.--v/r - TP 22:42, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't doubt that what you say is true. However, I have the opposite impression of editors here, having witnessed hordes of conservative editors constantly scrubbing clean the articles of conservatives and advocating the use of Breitbart as an RS while deriding the New York Times. And I think we're both right to an extent, as perhaps, due to their inherent biases, people are more likely to notice and remember abuse of a certain type. I think after years in the trenches a battleground mentality develops, despite good intentions and efforts to the contrary. After years of seeing and being the victim of POV pushing and abuse, an editor is less inclined to see a well-intentioned editor of a different political persuasion as a collaborator and more likely to see them as as more radical than they really are. (Which I think may be in part why some people like myself have perceived you as more conservative than the actual you.) It would be nice to get rid of the well-poisoning POV-pushers so well-intentioned editors could collaborate in a harmonious atmosphere, but I have no idea how to accomplish that. Gamaliel (talk) 00:41, 12 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think you've added two perspectives to it that I hadn't considered before. One being that you are seeing the exact same thing from the other side, which I always assumed to be true, but you frame it in a different context with the same conclusions. The second is that what you describe is essentially that editors have become jaded - and understandably so. I don't know what the solution is either, but I think open discussions like the one we're having is the start.--v/r - TP 01:51, 12 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Stupid as it sounds, and believe me I know it sounds stupid, the best thing I can think of to help address POV concerns and WEIGHT concerns and other matters is to just see what as many of the relevant well-regarded reference works as we can see say on a topic, and try to balance them out and include as much of the relevant content somewhere, in some article. Even that will only work for content old enough to be included in such, of course, and the article at the title of this thread isn't one of them. But I can honestly say that even looking at all the good reference sources can be a terrifying undertaking. The ALA Guide to Reference website lists somewhere over 3,000 well-regarded reference sources, and it doesn't cover very well a lot of reference works related to material not regularly of interest to Americans. John Carter (talk) 22:37, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've had my issues with NYT and I've had my issues with Fox and all the others. I do not trust any source based on its origins. Wikipedia needs to adopt that stance, but as long as people are thinking of reliability and verifiability being tied to a publisher or brand... well, its going to be shitty. I do not even trust NRHP listings, because people make errors or assumptions that get picked up by mistake. I am free from much politic bickering in NRHP, but East District School has incorrect dates and the NRHP nomination bungles quite a bit. I try to keep out of political arguments because they are described as two halves of a coin which is really a die. You want to know a scary progression of Wikipedia thought mirrors philosophy and we are to subscribe to Kant's flawed concepts of intention-based morality. The cynics may like Thomas Hobbes's notions, but thankfully neither that or John Stuart Mills theories hold out. Its a bit of game theory and true morality which governs the interactions of the good-natured. Most people, in the wider community innately follow the same path, but those with a mission deviate and cause the most disruption of those who normally would defend themselves. Shame its not a perfect analogy for real life. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 02:36, 12 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nominations for the military historian of the year and military newcomer of the year have now closed, and voting for the candidates has officially opened. All project members are invited to cast there votes for the Military historian and Military newcomer of the year candidates before the elections close at 23:59 December 21st. For the coordinators, TomStar81

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:33, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't always agreed with you, but I appreciate that you understand that "No one loves the messenger who brings bad news." Messengers such as myself will lose a fair officer when you hang up your mop.

Lightbreather (talk) 20:09, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the kitten. After I didn't receive a response to my last email, I was afraid I'd scared you off. Figured you identified as a liberal christian on your user page and said you had your bible handy, so I felt pretty confident that I wouldn't be encroaching on your beliefs by quoting from it, but when you were silent I was concerned I'd offended you.--v/r - TP 21:52, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi TP, I consider you a "cut through the BS" kind of Admin and there's a situation that I think could benefit from your perusal.

There was a recent ANI involving this article Vehicle registration plates of Pennsylvania (that presented as simple content dispute) with one particular User who has been disruptive, Edit Warring, and non-communicative after numerous messages and pings on the article Talk page and the Users Talk page. This person has gone so far as to blank their Talk page, so we know that they have seen the messages. In fact, when I informed this person of such, my comment was blanked again with an edit summary that I was making a threat.

Rather than take this again to ANI or another Noticeboard, will you take a look? Thank you in advance for any help or insight you can provide, --Scalhotrod (Talk) ☮ღ☺ 21:54, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take a look. On the subject of admins, though, could I entice you to endure one of my admin reviews for an RfA?--v/r - TP 21:57, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, that was a swift and decisive response...!

As for the request, do you mean weigh in on active RfA's or "go through the meat grinder"? I've never made a secret about aspiring to become an Admin, but at the very least I probably need to wait until my Topic ban has expired in January. LB and I share it currently. But I am happy to accept any advice or criticism in preparation for the Gauntlet... :) --Scalhotrod (Talk) ☮ღ☺ 22:17, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ahh, well, your anti-gun, huh? You're one of those people. Ahh well, I've never let politics get in the way of who I've felt was good admin material before. I am concerned about the edit warring and disjointed communication, though. At first, I thought perhaps you two could talk it out but I think the edit warring would still be brought up in an RfA. Perhaps it is wise to wait until it expires, and then some.--v/r - TP 22:26, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Anti-", au contraire... :) I definitely fall into the "pro choice" category about guns, LB and I were admonished for reverts of each other. Somewhat of a BOOMERANG for LB and a "knock upside the head" (and deservedly, I might add) for me. From my perspective I was attempting to keep things neutral and prevent WP:UNDUE creep in content and sources, but LB did not see it that way.

For the record, I made the first attempt at peace with LB and offered an olive branch way back in May long before the Eric Corbett "C word" debacle (that I was smack, dab in the middle of in a Forrest Gump sort of way...) But due to a variety of factors, many of which I'll probably never fully understand or appreciate, LB became more and more defensive and jaded. Because of off-wiki email sent to me, I can genuinely understand her outing concerns and even the "it wasn't me" claims with the sockpuppeting. But on that same note, if I am to believe any of what I was informed of off-wiki, "Karma doesn't mess around".

As for communication, I have been conscientiously making the effort to improve that in all ways. The license plate thing is an example of that, I was advocating for communication by all parties, doing what I could to notify and encourage it, and even closed the ANI based on the promise of the OP agreeing to "talk it out". I've lost track of how many times I've used the {{User}} template since my TBan went into effect.

I thank you for your consideration and will strive to continue to be a good candidate. --Scalhotrod (Talk) ☮ღ☺ 22:57, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]