User talk:Read794

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hello there Read794, welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. I'm sorry that your first foray in editting got caught up in an ongoing dispute with Zestauferov, but we are actually a far more friendly bunch than you might think from our first impressions.

You can find some tips about editing at Wikipedia:How does one edit a page & how to format your contributions at manual of style. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump -- or feel free to contact me. llywrch 00:52, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Llywrch: Thank you for participating in the Wiki project by systematically greeting new identities. I would prefer, though, that these welcome wagon visits not be used to advance propaganda about who is a principle player in edit disputes. I don't specifically recall the elements of a conflict involving Zestauferov, except that someone (Z?) had contributed to a very detailed, esoteric article about hibaru history, a topic to which I was exposed as a young child, and someone else refered to someone's good faith effort to contribute (in part to my understanding of my own history) as "owlish fantasy" and described the slightly speculative but otherwise well-grounded article to be pure fantasy, refusing to recognize any historical validity of the hibaru people their scant historical record that now weights so heavily in world affairs. The reason cited for errors in the article was not contravening information, but rather the character of the pseudonym who contributed the article.

I often find the "heavy" in these disputes is in fact advancing, somewhat unskillfully perhaps, valid and useful ideas. The idea of "problem users" and "trolls" is lost on me. My pseudonyms have been acused of being sock-puppets of about every "problem user" handle circulated on the board, or of being allied with or being victims of those same handles. On the contary, I find problematic practices, especially hasty attributions of motive and hasty generalizations of unfamiliar ideas, to be rampant among well-know pseudonymic contribitors and among some of those dubbed administrators. In my book, there are no problem users - only problem practices.

The practice of attributing, and publishing, alleged motives behind the work a pseudonumic electronic writers will certainly be a leading topic in psychological journals in coming years, as it represents a microcosmic representation of a fundamental barrier to effective communication in families, among communities and on a geo-political scale. Psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error.

Now I suppose somebody will come along and tell me a pseudonym's talk page is not the appropriate place to discuss geo-political conflict as it applies to personal conflicts in an asynchronous open editorial process, because I didn't use enough first and second person voice.

Take a hint from a battle-hardened news writer - If you are going to raise the specter of a conflict, be sure to name both parties in the conflict. And don't expect the outraged cries of the few villagers who rush out to greet a foreign writer to stop the writer from examining why the village was engaged in battle. An old spin doc would have us articulate the arguments of opponents in a way they will endorse, if only to head off any effort to rebut charachterizations of opposing arguments.

Example:

B: ... if the the rats take our cheese, we will have nothing to eat but rats.

A: My opponent apparently thinks the moon is made of cheese and a rat ate it. He is nothing but a trouble maker who wants to shut down industry.

B: I did not say that, I said there are myths about the moon being made of cheese, and that polluters are like rats that eat the moon when they hide nature's beauty behind a cloud of smoke.

Alternative:

A. My opponent says pollution is so severe that clouds of smoke obscure the full moon at night. While it is true that in some areas, specific oxides contribute to what is known as "smog", the moon is far more often obscured by natural moisture, which often makes "smog" appear more dense than the actual density of offending oxides.

B. Well ... wll ... yeh, but pollution is still really bad....

Read794 15:53, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

In other words, I thought I was offering some kindness to a person who appeared had walked unknowingly into a messy fight, but instead I had impaled myself on the hook of a troll? I hope you have received sufficient entertainment from my act. -- llywrch 18:05, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

those certainly are not my words. Any competent reader can recognize those words in no way summaraze or paraphrase the genuing concerns I expressed. What appears to have happened is you offered a social approach in part to test whether I warrant treatment as a human being or whether you could excuse in your own mind degrading me with hostile euphemisms, in the very context responding to a statement about the invalidity of uninformed attributions of motivation. Then you falsely attributed to me motives (pleasure seeking) after being specifically told that it is often considered better to "articulate the arguments of opponents in a way they will endorse" (not to mention properly characterizing the neutral statements of strangers about whom you know nothing).

User:Llywrch, yours is apparently an adolescent world populated by trolls and heros. When you decide to approach the real world in a mature manner using collegial language that recognizes the humanity of those with whom you disagree, perhaps you will have something meaningful to say to me.

Otherwise, feel free to use this page to further document your adolescent abuse of pseudonymic strangers. Read794 22:29, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)