User talk:Sgerbic/Archives/2013/12

A barnstar for you!

	The Real Life Barnstar
	I heard the interview you gave on the SGU - very interesting and presented WP in a very positive light. Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 00:21, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you Gilderien. If you look at the bottom of my most recent blog you will find links to other podcasts and blogs that talk about GSoW and how our goal is to improve WP in all languages.Sgerbic (talk) 02:02, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Is this planned to be a replacement to Michael Shermer, to get it up to GA? If we could manage that it could go on the main page as DYK.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 00:13, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Nope, that was something I was doing when I was making a training video for GSoW. I don't think I even wrote that, just copied it. Can't even remember which video it was. DYK has to be nominated within 5 days of the pages release.  ;-( Sgerbic (talk) 14:55, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Not anymore - see Wikipedia:Did you know/Good Article RfC. Also, if you create an article in userspace and then move it, the 5 days is counted from the move.--Gilderien Talk to me|List of good deeds 00:19, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Great to know. I'll give this to my team!Sgerbic (talk) 02:05, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

reply to 'old' AN/I commentary

Hello Susan, you can call me 74... a while back, I pulled a snippet from policy, and left off the end — "Do not recruit your friends, family members, or communities of people who agree with you for the purpose of coming to Wikipedia and supporting your side..." — which you corrected like this.

You are missing this very important part of the sentence "... of a debate."Sgerbic (talk) 03:08, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I guess I agree with your point, such as I understand it. Typically what the policy refers to is e.g. a particular content dispute, or a particular AfD vote, or an RfA, or similar. But I take it more broadly, and left that portion out *because* I take it more broadly, and had not realized it can be read more narrowly. I think the "debate" being referred to is a real-world debate. For instance, there is an editor who wrote a biography on Ada Lovelace, and when they first arrived here, were convinced that their real-world nemesis, who *also* wrote a very different sort of biography on the same historical person, *must* be here editing the wikipedia page on Ada. They are engaged in a real-world debate with the other author... and are now coming to wikipedia to continue that real-world debate.

  If one of those biographers were to recruit additional folks in the real world, to come to wikipedia and edit-war in mainspace, argue on the article-talkpage, or even snipe at each other on user-talkpages, that recruiting effort *might* be okay (the bad behavior of warring/flooding/sniping would of course not be okay even if the recruiting wasn't meatpuppetry). My take on the recruiting-aspect would depend on whether they were secretive about it, and most importantly, whether they intended to or tried to drive away the other side, or merely discourage the other side (either in real-life confrontations or via on-wiki confrontations).

  p.s. I'm tangentially familiar with your work, and although I've not looked into it deeply, nor met any guerrillas besides yourself, I think your efforts are awesome.  :-)   You are quite open. You recruit via your youtube channel. You don't try to drive away other editors, or hide your article-work, or any other anti-pillar-four behavior. You advocate sticking to the sources, and keeping a neutral tone. Minphie was making a bunch of mistakes, but their main mistake was in emphasizing that they wanted to WIN, and that they were willing to cheat (calling every source a "journal" even when it was a blog). That's where they crossed the line for me... though I could not tell from the thread, if *they* personally crossed that line, or if another person did it for them.

  Anyhoo, I always greatly appreciate recruiting efforts that bring more editors here, and train them in how to follow the five pillars, Minphie did not use "guerrilla" jargon, but was trying to start a WP:BATTLEGROUND, with their recruiting. You ironically *do* use '"guerrilla" jargon, but in fact you are the worst guerrilla ever, telling everybody what your strategy and tactics are, and sticking to the sources, and keeping a neutral tone!  :-)   Thanks for improving wikipedia. p.p.s. Please leave me a talkback if you reply, danke. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 05:20, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

danke - Thanks! BTW I have no idea what a talkback is on WP, so I'm just responding as I would normally. As you say, recruiting and training like-minded people can be just fine, or a problem. I guess it just depends on their actions. You say you haven't met other GSoW people, but then how would you know that? We are legion ;-) Actually I almost responded to Tom Morris who said "we" should watch groups like mine to make sure we don't start breaking rules. I almost asked him who "we" is? But I want to remain respectful. If I am doing things correctly, no one should be able to tell one of my editors from a normal WP editor. Accept that I brag about their accomplishments and talk about how proud I am of them.

If you look at my blog you will find that I recruit every where I can, not just on YouTube. I am often on podcasts and actually lecture. The idea of improving WP is a very popular one, yet the majority of people who volunteer flake out always for the reason of time. It is frustrating but at least most don't even start the training process before dropping out. Probably one in ten actually finish training and go on to become editors. And our training can be very hands on, just depends on what the person needs. I'm willing to help them in any way, we ask them to do everything in user space first so we can look at it before posting. The editors that do eventually finish training are awesome. We all learn from each other, and have formed a community that is not found on WP in general. I think that is what is the biggest problem with WP, the human bonding that we all need.

As far as our name. I'm quite busy in skepticism and it was a name that my BF and I were using to mean that people should get off their butts and stop complaining and do something. I didn't mean to start a group on WP, I was just editing by myself and started telling others that they should also edit WP and why it is important and so on. People just joined me and eventually I just had to start the group. Then I had to do training and so on and it just kept growing. Some people have problems with the name, but I think actions speak louder than words and I'm not changing my name just because of a few people (who aren't even in the group). We have a lot of fun with it, photos of guerrillas and such, for Halloween I dressed up as Che. GSoW knows that we look aggressive, we know we are being watched, we also know that with each blog I write bragging about my editors someone could start keeping track of who is on the team if they really wanted to. The Deepak and Sheldrake groups that complain about GSoW don't seem capable of figuring that out. Hell Sheldrake can't even spell my name right, yet he has been trolling my photos for the various blogs he writes about me. They don't seem to understand that every editors history is available with a couple clicks. Much easier to just make blanket statements and accuse everyone of being a part of my group. In my opinion that is something to be proud of, not a slap in the face. So because we are very public and have a aggressive name, we have to be very honest and abide by the rules. I think that is a good thing. Sgerbic (talk) 22:34, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

For maximum confusion, I will reply in reverse order.  :-)   Absolutely a good thing, and my congratulations on being the metaphorical Guevera... you should put your costume-pic on your userpage, too, or maybe get one of those che-style-tshirts made. <grin> Sheldrake page is where I heard of you, actually, with a bunch of folks swearing up-n-down they were not part of GSoW, no matter what Sheldrake said; they spoke truthfully, from what I can tell, the phenomenon there was just emergent, a combination of TEDx and FTN which snowballed into a WP:BATTLEGROUND of attrition warfare, the *opposite* of what guerrilla 'warriors' do to succeed. Anyhoo, don't let the nay-sayers make you drop the name, it is just peachy, it is the right mix of catchy and ironic.

  I've thought long and hard about the need for bonding... I have mixed feelings there. I don't want wikipedians to build deep relationships. They tend to lead to protectiveness, jealousy, clannishness, and so on. Plus, they become a goal in themselves, WP:NOTFACEBOOK is partly to keep people from feeling guilty about not socializing more... the point of being here, it to build the encyclopedia, not to build relationships. On the other hand, I don't want wikipedians to treat each other like dirt, WP:NICE is my favorite pillar after WP:IAR (and there's hardly ever a time when WP:IAR means breaching WP:NICE methinks). Having usernames helps (even if I eschew one), because people can recognize each other easily, add colors to show their pride in being a wikipedian, and all that. But we naturally treat usernames... as friends, as enemies, as in-crowd, as outsiders, as newbies, and as legends. Usually that's not very good; wikipedia is not quite as bad as junior high, but it is close. Tough question, methinks.

  This philosophy about bonding leads directly to a philosophy about training, and about time-commitment, and similar. You're taking the high road (high-bonding high-training high-timesink), which is a very necessary demographic, and as you say, turns out great editors, albeit only about 1 or 2 out of ten. I'm trying to work out a wikipedia Jungle Survival Manual, aimed at the low-road demographic (almost-zero-bonding almost-zero-training almost-zero-timesink), with the goal of growing from 30k active wikipedians to 10x or 100x that many, each of them doing just one or two edits, every weekend. *Some* of those folks will get WP:ADDICTED, and get into your GSoW training, or the CVUA training, or some similar high-road activities... so maybe I'll come back when the SMoW rough draft exists, and let you give it a once-over. Anyways, getting near the top now, methinks when Tom said "we" he fully included you and the other GSoW folks. It was the editorial we, or the scientific we, or the royal we!  :-)   We wikipedians all tend to be terribly smart, incredibly good-looking, fabulously wealthy, and of vastly superior genetic stock... no surprise the GSoW membership fits right in, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. No wonder you have to brag a bit, right? Right. But like Tom says we-to-include-the-GSoW-membership have to keep our eyeballs peeled. Wikipedia is self-organizing and self-correcting, and so should GSoW strive to be. Looks like you're doing a bang-up job so far. Nice to meet you, and see you around, thanks for improving wikipedia. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 05:41, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

  p.s. The "talkback" thing is one of the weird wikipedia-only mechanisms, like watchlists. As you may know from working with anons on articles or on training, they are prevented from having watchlists (for social caste-system reasons rather than technological reasons). That means, that unlike most other internet technologies, on wikipedia when you reply to my message, I have no way of knowing!  :-) The workaround, is for you to reply here, and then visit my talkpage, and leave me a note. There are various kinds of automatically-formatted-notes, with the 'talkback' being the most common. Here is the instruction-manual, in case you ever want to use one. Template:Talkback#Usage. Personally, the templates are too cheesy for me, and so if somebody wants a talkback/whisperback/whatever, I just head to their talkpage, hit new section, type "replied" as the section-title, hit the four tildes, and click save. Seems faster than the 'official' talkback instructions, and I can leave a personalized note, if need be. I'm chatty, so I usually do. So now you are a talkback pro, and you get a gold star in my official talkback training-program.  ;-)   Hope this helps, talk to you later. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 05:41, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) the alternative is to ignore the long winded so and so until heshe gets an account like the rest of us. Hi 74!!! --Roxy the dog (resonate) 10:49, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

How.Dare.You talkstalk me, you... you... oh! Roxy don't do that.  :-)   For philosophical reasons (the encyclopedia anyone can edit), I shall be permanently resisting pseudonymification mightily, but I'm working on an offline watchlist app to boost efficiency. Still, getting in the habit of using talkback (or the faster and more friendly personalized note) is a habit well worth getting into, for on-wiki recruiting Susan is likely to be involved with, now or in the future. Speaking of, Susan, you should see if you can get Roxy interested in GSoW: biscuits, a few t-bones, a good pet on the the head and scritch behind the ears. Not a bad salary, for a solid editor who's been in the trenches. They're even friendly!  :-)   74.192.84.101 (talk) 22:39, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Now Now you two. Actually I never ask people to become editors for GSoW, they have to volunteer. I want their soul to be signed over to me without duress. ;-) In fact I just got an email from someone just now who is asking to join up. I never recruit current editors, like to keep you all separate. Your all doing what I want you to be doing, keeping WP honest, your on my team even if you don't know it. Sgerbic (talk) 03:18, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

It may not be helpful to frame things in terms of people and teams; I'd suggest looking at it in terms of rules and environments. One editor is just one person; they might be wrong; they might be fallible. However, the rules of en.wikipedia as a whole seem to be very compatible with the principles underlying skepticism (First, get a source); so it is natural for the two to get along most of the time, even if we might not agree on every word. bobrayner (talk) 03:24, 23 December 2013 (UTC)