User talk:Xeriphas1994

Welcome!

Hello, Xeriphas1994, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! x42bn6 Talk Mess 19:24, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mystical Seven/7 and references[edit]

Thanks for weighing in on the discussion. I've been suspicious of some of the stuff presented in the Mystical Seven (Wesleyan) article. In particular, some of the edit wars on the page remind me of some of the controversy that happened earlier this year on Collegiate secret societies in North America, which resulted in the uncovering of a nest of sockpuppets. I hope that's not what is going on here; digging into the references can only help. Tjarrett (talk) 21:03, 27 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wow. Discovering nests of sockpuppets looks like it is not fun. In the case you linked to, there appears to have been a silver lining, which was that the checkusers etc. worked diligently to figure out what was going on. Hopefully they will do that again if they need to.

Regarding your post about student media: For a secret society, the verifiable material is presumably not what the members actually do, but what they are rumored to do. Therefore, if the average student newspaper is accused of doing less fact checking than the average "big league" newspaper, that may not be a complete disaster in this case. The example often noted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Secret Societies is the KKK, whose private activities have indeed been documented once in a while because some former members feel the need to reveal them; but is the Mystical Seven such a high-profile organization that its former members do the same? (What I just typed is not based on anyone's research about secret societies but only on my own common sense, so of course it doesn't justify changing the article text.)

In any case, given the discussion so far, I could manage to talk myself into removing the disputed reference (and, if I'm really feeling brave, maybe a copyedit or an NPOV check). I think I won't do that immediately in case anyone else wants to comment. The article was only created in March 2008, which means a lot of people probably don't even know it's there. I don't like it when User:Thaïs Alexandrina yells and says things that I can't respond to because they seem self-contradictory, but it's at least brought a few more pairs of eyes to the article.

Now that I've had a good night's sleep, I wonder if there isn't a larger issue: are there in fact good sources for the 20th-century section of the article? I can understand how the 19th-century part might be covered in secondary sources by now, since (according to the Wyatt-Greene paper anyway) the Mystical Seven was absorbed into Beta Theta Pi and Delta Kappa Epsilon, two huge and prominent national fraternities, and college fraternities do love to talk about their epic histories. :> In the current article, however, the *recent* items in the bibliography either are not independent of Wesleyan University (the Wyatt-Greene paper and the Argus story), are self-published (the member list I brought up originally), or are putatively about chapters at other schools. Xeriphas1994 (talk) 19:54, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Real estate speculation[edit]

Note for future archaeologists: the other half of this thread is here. Xeriphas1994 (talk) 21:33, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I do watch that drama board and from what I gather, such drama only occurs when one party in a dispute falls into one or more of these categories:

POV-pushers
Spammers
Tendentious editors determined to pursue an issue into a battleground
Unhappy newcomers who didn't read Wikipedia's policies before editing and forgot about WP:BRD
Disruptive sockpuppets
The cabal
Newcomers/sockpuppets unhappy with "admin abuse"

Can you expect such drama? In this case, it's a sockpuppet, so do expect such things (similar expectations exist, for example, on Israel-Palestine issues, Balkans issues or Irish issues). If you're "against" an editor that appears to be tendentious, you can expect a bit of drama, depending on how fast they discover these noticeboards.

However, for most cases, if the dispute involves one or more experienced users, the drama is much lessened, in my experience. However, occasionally one gets forum shoppers who can hop from noticeboard to noticeboard causing a bit of irritation.

I don't tend to assume it will happen (WP:AGF) but I feel it helps if you don't try and make giant walls of posts as it seems imposing to others, or get a third opinion in fairly quickly. x42bn6 Talk Mess 18:26, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, anything that gets posted on WP:AN/I will get some sort of answer from established users, and most issues do get solved fairly quickly. However, the most tendentious of users will be able to drag a thread on for a very long time. So in some ways, it was beginners' luck - most disputes are solved fairly quickly. However, you were dealing with a fairly well-established sockpuppet so expect some long rants.

I don't quite understand, "Quite frankly I am having difficulty reconciling that with the length of the list you put on my talk page", however. x42bn6 Talk Mess 02:36, 5 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, now I get it. Yes, in my opinion Wikipedia is growing (too) fast for its own good - I think someone said that now 1% of Wikipedia users are editing 50% of Wikipedia's articles or something. I think we can see the problems - BLP problems, POV-pushers, burned-out administrators, etc. In this case, you'd expect a sorority article not to be very popularly edited - nada. I've seen tiny town articles be edited mostly by representatives of, say, the town hall (and chasing off other users). There's also fringe articles that get pushed by one-or-two users which usually ends in a couple of blocks.

So in this case, I guess you were "lucky" that such an apparently remote article had a sockpuppet behind it. However, there are a couple of long-term sockmasters on Wikipedia who have very varied modus operandi - these sockmasters are usually causing problems in random articles for the sake of disruption.

As I'm typing this, I'm sure there's a new user or two out there making good edits to the encyclopedia only to be reverted by a POV-pusher, Truth^TM bringer or someone who didn't read, "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed for profit by others, do not submit it." Not only because there are so few good users left in proportion to number of articles, but because it's still quite easy for bad users to cause major irritation before being blocked, if at all. x42bn6 Talk Mess 04:09, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

:D No problem - I'm mostly a metapedian nowadays so meta-talk is always welcome. As with all things, don't get too addicted to anything. Shameless canvassing: I'm working on Isles of Scilly Football League and it doesn't look very good. x42bn6 Talk Mess 16:42, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Drive-by remark no. 465-3188(c)[edit]

Replied on my talk page. - Revolving Bugbear 19:10, 30 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]