User talk:Raul654

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For your tireless work in making Wikipedia better, for keeping Template:Feature up-to-date, for doing the grunt work of cleaning up Wikipedia:Featured article candidates, for mediating in disputes, for adding lots of really nice pictures, and for still finding the time to work on articles! In a few months you've already become a highly valued member of the community. Stay with us and don't burn out, please. --Eloquence Apr 10, 2004
For your tireless work in making Wikipedia better, for keeping Template:Feature up-to-date, for doing the grunt work of cleaning up Wikipedia:Featured article candidates, for mediating in disputes, for adding lots of really nice pictures, and for still finding the time to work on articles! In a few months you've already become a highly valued member of the community. Stay with us and don't burn out, please. --Eloquence Apr 10, 2004


Contents

[edit] TFA years of birth and death

Hello Raul! I'd be very interested in your feedback about a suggestion for placing the year of birth and death on the TFA blurb of biographies. There's a discussion here. Cheers, --Zvika (talk) 06:30, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A note about the Scibaby situation

I'm finding it hard to write kindly to you because of the intense disagreement I had with you over your claim that User:CreepyCrawly was a sock of Scibaby. I proved conclusively that, given the fact they were using two different IP addresses, and the fact that they interleaved four edits in a four-minute window, and extensive behavioral evidence of different methods and voices, CreepyCrawly and Scibaby were definitely two different people. I wrote on my blog how upset I was that you wrote: "It's possible that [CreepyCrawly is] not necessarily Scibaby." I thought it was an absolute certainty, given the accumulated evidence I had assembled over a three-day period, that CreepyCrawly was not Scibaby, and I could not understand why you failed to see what was obvious to me. The frustration in trying to fight an indefinite block on an innocent user, who would still be blocked were it not for my intervention, led directly to my decision to leave Wikipedia indefinitely. I returned about six weeks later.

Now I understand how Scibaby was causing you so much stress as to reduce your ability to assume good faith on any user without a substantial edit history arguing against the consensus on global warming articles. In my review of the Scibaby socks up to March 16, which I undertook comprehensively in order to contrast CreepyCrawly's activity with Scibaby's pattern, I gained an appreciation for just how disruptive this one person had become. I honestly have no idea how he does it, but he simply refuses to stop. I asked myself, along the way of proving CreepyCrawly's innocence, if anything could be done to stop this sockmaster. I supported the increase of autoconfirm because I knew it would deter sockpuppeteers from attacking semiprotected pages. I have not checked the recent sockpuppets' contribs, but I assume that Scibaby has simply made ten edits and then attacked the global warming pages, with essentially the same result as before. So I guess that strategy did not work.

Ironically, blatant page-move vandalism is much easier to deal with than Scibaby's attacks. It becomes immediately obvious that HAGGER??? is not the name of any nation or commonwealth on earth. I see no reason why thousands of pages can't be move-protected, but that is a separate concern that does not hinder good-faith editors in the least. Even with Taiketsu moving "global warming" to "global warming hoax", which I reported to ANI after it had lasted for 59 minutes - if I had not noticed that, someone else would have found it soon after. In contrast, with a sophisticated, sneaky vandal, it really is possible for his edits to sneak through the cracks if nobody is watching. Since your patience with this pest has been exhausted a long time ago, you took an extreme action, but one that I consider reasonable under the prevailing circumstance of consistent vandalism for the past six months and more. I believe that we as editors do not choose which pages to semi-protect or full-protect: the vandals choose for us. Scibaby made his choice, and you made a commensurate response. I supported TimVickers' protection of the Evolution article for the same reason. (See an edit by Special:Contributions/71.174.111.245 to AN or ANI: that was I.) I do not know if full protection was needed for all the pages you protected, but certainly Global Warming and IPCC needed it. I commend you for your reasonable response to a very difficult situation. I find it unfortunate that other users simply fail to comprehend the scale of the problem Scibaby has caused.

I worry with CreepyCrawly that instead of banning people, we may be moving in the direction of banning opinions. CreepyCrawly was accused of being a meatpuppet even if he was not a sockpuppet: that really made me lose my composure. We should never stop anyone from posting to the global warming page a dissenting opinion if that user does so in good faith: BOLD, revert, discuss still applies. But when that person is Scibaby, and when that person has used up your valuable time and patience tenfold, it is entirely appropriate to take extreme measures in response to extreme provocation, and I commend you for making a bold decision despite the criticism. I will support your right to make that decision even if others oppose it. You, of all people, by your tireless work on the Scibaby problem, have earned the right to say, "Enough is enough." Yechiel (Shalom) 22:11, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] October War categories

You didn't do the process right for listing the October War categories. First of all, you tacked the discussion onto an existing one instead of creating a new page. Furthermore, if you want categories to be deleted, they go to Categories for discussion, not Articles for deletion. I'll list these at Categories for Discussion for you. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • (Broken clamshells•Otter chirps) 17:42, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Whoops - that was me being careless, both for typing AFD instead of CFD, and not noticing that it was a templated discussion (CFD isn't, AFD is). Raul654 (talk) 18:16, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] FAR

Raul, I'm afraid that you might think I think poorly of you after I made this comment. That's not true. I think very highly of you, and appreciate all of the work you've done for Wikipedia, in the past, and especially the recent past, knowing that it has built exponentially. Again, thank you for all of your work. —OverMyHead 07:36, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Roman Catholic Church

Raul, I was forced to a dialup this week when my house was poltergeisted by a power surge. When Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Roman Catholic Church reached 340KB, I restarted; it's again over 400KB, with new comments being added to the talk page because the main page won't load. It's impacting the overall FAC page; I couldn't load FAC from a dialup. There are 12 unstruck opposes. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:07, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Wow, it's a monster. Yes, I can take care of it, but what do you suggest? Raul654 (talk) 16:09, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm at a loss. It has been impossible to keep discussion focused on WIAFA, combativeness and divisiveness have polarized everyone with reviewers stating they're giving up, and I'm unclear as to which issues have and haven't been resolved. I'm concerned about the size of the article (in the sense that it has grown so much at FAC in response to reviews, and I'm not clear if the organization, flow and prose are well thought out or if the article has grown piecemeal in response to FAC pressures, but it's almost 50% larger than it was at one point in one of the FACs). I can't recall any other FA with 30 refs in the lead so I don't understand what that is about; if so much of the article is controversial that the lead needs 30 refs, including double and triple refs on individual clauses, that could be an indication of unresolved issues, but even that is unclear. The biggest issue is that I don't have a sense that the nominators understand that reviewers seek to prevent a mainpage bashing if there is any perceived POV in the article; I'm not sure nominators understand that reviewers have the article's and Wiki's best interests in mind, and this has made it very hard to get parties to work together to assure a smooth potential main page day. I simply can't determine if we have consensus or what issues remain because the FAC has been so combative. Some of the polarization revolves around charges of reviewers being pro- and anti-Catholic, overlooking that even some Catholic editors have opposed. I've pondered whether an unprecedented second restart would help; I don't think so, because it doesn't seem that nominators understand the process. I'm concerned it's going to end up in Marskell's lap if parties don't work together. On the other hand, there have been improvements, parties are almost starting to work together, just when the page is too massive to deal with ... Something novel is needed here, but my last attempt at a novel approach (archive the long page rather than a permalink restart) didn't help, and made reviewers mad. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:31, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm leaning towards failing the nomination. Letting it sit fallow for a while might give everyone the chance to cool off, and hammer things out before bringing it back to FAC. Personally, I think there are some things that are over-referenced, like the claim that the RCC has been an important influence on western history (trivially common knowledge does not need to be cited). Raul654 (talk) 16:40, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Time off hasn't cooled it off before (similar issues have repeated, even grown, in each FAC), so a closing note about the process might help. Yes, I suspect the answer to some of the opposes has been to add additional references. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:43, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
Anyway, I have to deal with electrician, phone company, cable company and tree removal ... back on later tonight. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:51, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Flag of Canada on main page

Thanks for choosing an article I worked on for main page today. I'm actually kind of surprised because I thought that usually articles that have been promoted a long time ago have higher priority? Gary King (talk) 00:34, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, explained at User_talk:SandyGeorgia#My_FA_article_is_on_the_main_page_right_now. Thanks anyways! Gary King (talk) 01:10, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Unblock requests

Hi. There is a request here from a user that you have unblocked before. Also, I wonder if there is any chance that this request could be legit. Cheers TigerShark (talk) 10:24, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

He's caught in an anon-only range block. Once he logs in, he should be unaffected. Raul654 (talk) 03:25, 15 June 2008 (UTC)