User talk:63.226.38.196

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[edit] Greetings & salutations

If you have come to this page you must have taken notice of something I have done here at Wikipedia. If you have any specific comments you'd like to make about my contributions, please let me know on this discussion page. I will strive to read and respond to each comment.

I am still a newbe, and have already caught myself making several (hopefully non-critical) mistakes. I make it a practice to review articles I have recently contributed to, using these [1] [2] logs (among other things), in order to see if others have had to fix things I've done. For example, by doing this I recently discovered that I made several mistakes on articles with scouting topics. Thank you Gadget850, Djwtwo and anyone else involved for fixing those issues!

I was previously invited to create a Wikipedia username in a very nice note found here, but I am still debating whether to do this, and what pseudonym to use. Having recently (yesterday) lost access to that previous IP address, I can see some of the advantages of having a username, but I still feel a little hesitant. If I create a account, is there any way to transfer the attributions for my contributions from the IP addresses I have used so far into the newly created username? If it is possible, is that a wise thing to do?

I am not completely comfortable writing whole articles, so one of the things I am currently focusing on is editing and wikifying semi-random articles from these [3] [4] lists. Trying to wikify existing content found through these lists seems to be good practice and (hopefully) helpful too. I have also found this to be a fun way to learn new things! Give it a try, you might like it ... :-)

Some of the articles I have had fun cleaning up include:

Again, thanks for noticing me in this vast community, and please forgive me if I have caused you any grief; I can assure you that this is never my intent. -- 63.226.38.196

I reserve the right to retain, revert, reuse, update, &/or otherwise edit the specific message shown above at my discretion; please add comments below the following line. Thank you.

[edit] Contributions from work

I found you! Guess who? You really shouldn't make edits from work & then talk about what you are doing on if you want stay anonymous at home, or at least not edit the same acticles from both places so you don't leave a big trail, but I'll be good and not name names here, I'm in a good mood, its Friday! Try to limit your edits from work just to scheduled lunchs & breaks through, k? Yeah you know who this is now, dont you, and thats OK cause this is just between us (for now) -- -- 12.106.111.10 01:47, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Hello and thank you for leaving this note. Yes I recognize the IP address you are showing above, and yes a few of my edits have shown up under that IP address too, since that is where I work. As you are probably aware (User_talk:12.106.111.10#Info about this IP), all contributions from anyone there at work show up under the same IP address. Because of this, I think that you may have confused me with someone else, as I don't have "scheduled lunchs & breaks", and have no need to have anyone monitor my usage of Wikipedia.
On Monday perhaps you should approach whoever it is you think this is and talk to them about this. I will give you a hint though, I'm not out on the general floor; I'm over in the bigger cubes. Also note that if you are referring to the multiple edits that were done on Continuous cruiser on March 8th, I had several people there at work looking over that article for me that day. If you can find me on Monday, and can demonstrate a legitimate need to know who I had asked to help me out, we can discuss that further. Thank you and I hope you had a good weekend. -- 63.226.38.196 19:03, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] John Boy and Billy and related articles

As you know, these articles are in the middle of a cleanup operation. To that end, it would be really helpful if you bear the following in mind:

  • Please do leave an edit summary when making edits.
  • Please do contribute to the discussions on the talk pages.
  • Please don't remove cleanup, merge and other tags without discussing them and obtaining concensus first.
  • Please don't remove valid wikilinks as you did to John Boy and Billy. That's verging on vandalism.
  • Please do read the appropriate policies, guidelines and templates for the type of page you're editing (as well as the Wikipedia-wide ones), and try to adhere to them.

Thanks. Waggers 11:45, 16 March 2006 (UTC)


Hello Waggers and thank you for dropping me a line; I'm sorry that we have to meet under such circumstances. After reading what you wrote here I'd like to respond to some of the points you made, but for clarity purposes in framing my response, I'd like to review a couple of things here first.
I edited John Boy and Billy and Jeff Pillars last night, and these are the only two articles that I can currently see that has any overlap between the two of us so far, [5] so I am left to assume by the title you used here, that it is these two articles (and only these two) are what your comments are concerning. If this is not the case, please let me know, as I edited several other articles during that general timeframe.
As you so rightly reminded me (as have others), I have a bad habit of forgetting to add edit summaries to contributions I make; I actually have a sticky note on my computer monitor to remind me, but then I have to remember to look at that note! :-) If I had remembered to do this to my edits last night I might have avoided this whole thing.
In place of those missing edit summaries (which I unfortunately cannot go back and add), here is a more detailed description of what I did on one of the two articles. Based on this log [6], in the section titled The crew of John Boy and Billy, I basically made two categories of changes.
1. I reworded one single paragraph from this:
Jeff Pillars - (born July 13, 1958) is a writer for the show from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He has acted in a number of movies and television shows, most recently Pirates of the Plain (1999) and Ernest in the Army (1998), the latter of which he co-wrote the screenplay for. He writes many of the skits for the show and performs several of them.
to this:
Jeff Pillars - (born July 13, 1958) is from Kalamazoo, Michigan and is a writer for the show. He writes many of the skits for the show and performs several of them. He has also acted in a number of movies and television shows, most recently Pirates of the Plain (1999) and Ernest in the Army (1998), the latter of which he co-wrote the screenplay for.
I do not understand what objections you might have to this rewording. Moving the location where he is from into the the middle of the sentance is more consistent with the other entries found in other paragraphs in this same section. Also by doing this I put the more important concept that he is a writer for the show at the end of the sentance, where it is more obvious. Likewise by moving the sentance that expands the description of his role with the show to where it is the very the next sentance, the paragraph seems to flow better. Unfortunately you reverted this admittedly fairly minor contribution, without explanation for this part of the revert either in your comments here on this talk page, or in the talk page for the article.
2. I "unlinked" the internal wiki-links that noted only years or day/month combinations that did not include years in the link. Examples: "...John Isley (born March 28, 1956) is from..." to "...John Isley (born March 28, 1956) is from..."; and "...married since 1986 and has..." to "...married since 1986 and has...".
I'm afraid that I do not understand how you could construe this as "remov(ing) valid (i.e. useful) wikilinks", therefor I have a great deal of difficulty with the emotionally provocative comment that my actions detailed above were "...verging on vandalism". Given the those who are serious in their editing of Wikipedia (which I consider myself to be) are very sensitive about vandalism, claiming that someone you are having a editing dispute with was instead doing anything even passingly similar to vandalism would certainly not seem to be in keeping with the the rules of engagement.
Wikipedia:Vandalism "Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change to content made in a deliberate attempt to reduce the quality of the encyclopedia." "Any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism. Apparent bad-faith edits that do not make their bad-faith nature inarguably explicit are not considered vandalism at Wikipedia. For example, adding an opinion once is not vandalism — it's just not helpful, and should be removed or restated." Wikipedia:Counter_Vandalism_Unit "It is imperative to understand that not every (apparently) destructive edit is classified as vandalism, in particular content disputes are not vandalism." See also Wikipedia:Assume good faith, Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers, Wikipedia:Ownership of articles, Wikipedia:Civility, Wikipedia:Etiquette and Wikipedia:Resolving disputes (I include these last few links more to act as bookmarks for my research while I was formulating my response, as I may need to refer back to these at some point in the future).
I contend that by removing what I saw as valueless internal links, I was not just making a good faith effort at enhancing Wikipedia, but that I actually achieved this goal, and that the revert may actually have inadvertently cause a minor diminishment of the quality of the article.
Wikipedia:Make_only_links_relevant_to_the_context#What should not be linked "It is not useful and can be very distracting to mark all possible words as hyperlinks. Links should add to the user's experience; they should not detract from it by making the article harder to read."
"What should not be linked
  • Months, years, decades or centuries, unless they will clearly help the reader to understand the topic. (This is in contrast to full dates—see below.)"
I did not delete any full date links, which I understood then, and understand now to mean links which include day, month, and year all within the same link. Also I did not delete any links that, if followed, would contribute in any meaningful way to a understanding of the subject matters being discussed in the article.
I apologies for going on so long, and for not responding to the other points you made -- you made some really good points, but they did seem to be a little impersonal and non-specific in places, like the text was taken from some standard boilerplate. I may regret posting this while I have become so upset by what I have taken as a deep & serious personal attack (re: near vandalism charge), but I believe that I have tried to keep this response in as neutral a tone as I can. I hope you do not see this response as an attack on you, but instead I hope that my comments here clarify what I was doing. If you still feel that my contributions were not valid, I'd say I can agree to disagree with you, and I'll just walk away from the edits themselves. I really don't care that much about the topics of these two articles (I got so bored with Jeff Pillars I didn't even finish the editing what I started on it when I split out the TV & movies, but I see you finished that up). What I'm having great difficulty with is your allegation that my efforts detailed above came anywhere even mildly close to approximating vandalism.
I try to educate myself both on the official policies as well as informal rules-of-thumb that both seem to govern Wikipedia, and if I have even come close to crossing a line, I'm sorry. I just am having difficulty seeing what I did (re: near vandalism charge) as truly being even close to an issue, and I'm afraid that I may just not be understanding a very important point. I look forward to your response. --63.226.38.196 05:57, 17 March 2006 (UTC) As I have become very upset by the time I have finished preparing these comments, I reserve the right to edit this specific posting at any latter time to remove emotionally tinged language; I also reserve the right to fix typo's, spelling mistakes, minor formating issues, and to otherwise make minor clarifications to my comments (editors can sometimes make the worst editors of their own work) so long as I do not change the core content of what I have written here

Hi again; thanks for giving such a detailed response and not taking offense. In retrospect, I think you're justified in removing the wikilinks based on the guidance you've cited above. I'm aware that dates in other articles on Wikipedia are nearly always wikilinked (relevant or not) and I was just trying to be consistent - but actually, as you've demonstrated, the guidance stipulates otherwise. I don't have any problems with the rewording itself, so I apologise for the revert.

Just to clarify, the "other articles" I was referring to are the many stub-like articles linked to from the John Boy and Billy page, many of which have now been merged into the main article since they weren't notable in their own right and contained barely any information that wasn't already available. I know you haven't made edits to the other pages, but I think the cleanup needs to apply to the whole lot (as they're all fairly messy), so I see the collection as one. Hope that explains where I'm coming from a bit.

Thanks again, and keep up the good work! Waggers 09:43, 17 March 2006 (UTC)


Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my comments. As we now appear to agree that your revert was an honest mistake, would you be willing to undo the revert (or re-revert, what ever the correct wording is) for this particular contribution? I do not want to do it myself, since I want to avoid even the appearance of an edit war.
One other thing I didn't mention in my previous comments is that I really do appreciate your efforts countering vandalism. From your contribution log it's obvious you have done some really great work on that. Anyone with so many contributions is bound to make a mistake occasionally; as the saying goes "to those with a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail". I now realize that by edited from an IP address instead of an account, and by deleting content without including either an edit summary or comments on the talk page, I sent all the wrong signals. Thanks again, -- 12.106.111.10 17:16, 17 March 2006 (UTC) (Sorry I'm at work, so this will show up under another IP - I guess I really do need to create an account).
Consider it done. Waggers 15:19, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] London Steverson

I appreciate the cleanup efforts you have made to the London Steverson article. If you registered for a user ID you could get more of the credit you deserve. And seconding the remarks above, please use edit summaries. (May have been more than one editor at this IP address, another good reason to get a user name. Thatcher131 17:03, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for noticing my efforts. I almost didn't start editing that article when I realised how big of a challenge it was going to be (I wasn't sure I was up it yet). I'm glad that it turned out so well in the end. I hope that the origional author can come through with some more sources, as I have had great difficulty finding that myself. I think that Judge Steverson has had a intresting life so far, and hopefully he will eventually write a autobography.
Also, thank you for the coaching/mentoring/moral support on the talk page & through your edits on the article itself. It was nice to having that colaboration while working on the article; so many of my other efforts have been on articles where no one else was working on it with me. Thanks again -- 63.226.38.196 07:11, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Created account

I have created an account (see User talk:Argon233) and I also will probably be losing this IP address latter today, so this may be the last contributions I make under this IP address. Thanks, -- 63.226.38.196 00:34, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Out with the old and in with the new. Goodbye & Hello -- Argon233 00:37, 27 March 2006 (UTC)