Breamk

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We hope you like it here and encourage you to stay after your assignment is finished! Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 14:13, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Teahouse Invitation

Hello! Breamk, you are invited to join other new editors and friendly hosts in the Teahouse. An awesome place to meet people, ask questions and learn more about Wikipedia. Please join us! Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 14:14, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

We interacted briefly regarding your past class on medical missionaries, and I see now that it was meaningful to your students and that you want to do it again. I am writing to offer some online support. If you like, I could give you training through video conference and I would also be able to solicit some community review for your class's work. I am most often free during EST mornings, but could chat at other times. A chat is not necessary but I would like to make it an option for you. If you ever would like to talk, contact me through Special:EmailUser/Bluerasberry. I want your class to succeed because I support Wikipedia's educational outreach program and because I want health articles on Wikipedia to be developed. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:31, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the message. EST mornings are good for me. Chat is fine. Mondays and Fridays are usually best.

A barnstar for you!

	The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
	Harrisonian Barnstar Thiagomoulin (talk) 16:31, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

January 2014

Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to University of Fort Hare may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "()"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:

• [[Missionary]] activity (under [[James Stewart (missionary and physician)|James Stewart]] led to the creation of a school

Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 03:47, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

AfC

I removed your name from our Articles for Creation (AfC) participants list. Although your account is not new, you don't yet have the required 500 un-deleted main namespace edits. There was a dialog on that page explaining the requirements. AfC is not for newcomers as it takes some experience with Wikipedia's guidelines to justly evaluate drafts. If you have draft articles you're concerned about, you're always welcome to post a question at our AfC help desk. Chris Troutman (talk) 14:58, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks so much for removing. While I don't have 500 edits I have been an AfC participant before the 500 minimum was there, use three different professional and personal user names, and have teach a university class on Wikipedia article creation and editing so that my last 40 students have over 2000 edits under my supervision. Since those do not accrue to my user name they don't matter to some. Perhaps we have a different perspective on roles and how criteria should be applied. I would welcome you and others who spend time removing AfC participants to spend some time actually clearing the AfC backlog.

Your submission at Articles for creation: Jean-Marie Coquard (missionary) has been accepted

Jean-Marie Coquard (missionary), which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
The article has been assessed as Start-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

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78.26 _{(spin me / revolutions)} 14:38, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

You have not completed the student training.

Please complete the student training. If you have already gone through it, be sure to click the button at the end to record that you finished it. --Breamk (talk) 03:43, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

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Your submission at Articles for creation: Queenie Muriel Francis Adams (December 27)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by SwisterTwister was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.

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SwisterTwister talk 06:04, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: Geoffrey Lehmann (missionary) (January 8)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by DGG was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.

• If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Geoffrey Lehmann (missionary) and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
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DGG ( talk ) 06:41, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

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Redirection

Hi, it appears that you tried to create a redirect at Canton Hospital, but didn't do it correctly. The correct redirect syntax is:

#REDIRECT [[target page name]]

Good luck.

Also, if you're trying things out then you should use the Preview button before saving. You can use this to check redirects: if your code is a working redirect then you will see a bent arrow followed by the target page title. Example — Smjg (talk) 13:15, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

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Courses Modules are being deprecated

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Thank you! Sent by: xaosflux 20:28, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

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Category:Education missionaries has been nominated for merging

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Page moves

I notice you have been doing some poor page moves, such as this one, which I have reverted. Please familiarise yourself with Wikipedia:Disambiguation and consider using WP:RM to request page moves. StAnselm (talk) 18:44, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment on page moves. Thanks for all your work in religion and theology. Disambiguation has the benefit of adding specificity. I appreciate your perspective on missionaries. I use the more accurate term 'medical missionaries' in managing page moves. This would be similar to using 'physician'(MD) instead of 'doctor'(PhD, MD, EDD, DD, etc.) or 'Football player'(single sport) instead of 'athlete'(whole list of possible sports). Several missionaries have family members (and name sakes) who go into medical missionary work or vice versa which could cause confusion. I believe it is a poor move to use the more general term(missionary) rather than a specific term(medical missionary). The goal of disambiguation is specificity. Breamk (talk) 19:09, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

No, the goal of disambiguation is to have just as much specificity as we need to. If we had too missionaries of the same name, then we would need to get more specific (but we would probably disambiguate by year of birth). Also, we don't capitalise disambiguators. StAnselm (talk) 19:33, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the capitalization issue. Based on your standard, you would change all the sports star disambiguations to "athlete" rather than their specific sport. Like athlete, the term 'missionary' remains ambiguous and the more specific 'medical missionary' is more accurate. Please see Wikipedia:Disambiguation regarding "not using what first comes to your mind". Missionary may first come to mind but 'medical missionary' is more accurate and appropriately specific.

No, that doesn't follow. The thing is, I can only find a couple of articles that use "medical missionary" as a disambiguator. StAnselm (talk) 20:25, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I understand that it "does not follow" for you based on your perspective. As I read your messages about my edits and my logic about specificity, it is hard to see how you are assuming good faith in my edits. Please consider reviewing Wikipedia community standardsWikipedia:Assume good faith. In identifying my specificity for disambiguation as a "poor move", as well as simply answering "no" when my logic is different from yours, you give the appearance of not following the wikipedia standard. I have given specific examples where increased specificity is helpful and logical steps to get there. You have responded with unsubstantiated opinion. I hope that you will consider the behavioral standards for wikipedia in your communications and in your changing of other editors work. Breamk (talk) 03:36, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

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Student Editors

Kent, you may have noticed that I have flagged a number of your students' contributions for notability concerns, as well as moving a couple to draft space.
While you have been using wikipedia with students for a number of years, I am concerned that your students do not seem to have a good grasp of notability requirements (this was a particularly egregious example but many others show no real sourcing outside of the missionary organisation that sent the person).
I'm also unclear why your students are not encouraged to use the WP:AFC process (where they can receive and respond to feedback) rather than moving poorly written and poorly sourced articles into the main space of the encyclopedia (again, this was an obvious example where the student had clearly labeled it as a draft but still put it into main space). Are you approving these moves (as per WP:INSTRUCTORS)?
I understand that these are students doing their best, but once in mainspace, their articles should meet the same standards as all others, and I can only imagine they are discouraged when experienced editors here template or move their work due to these issues.
Can you please clarify your own understanding of (a) the approval process for your students to move articles into the main space and (b) of the notability requirements you are working with for medical missionaries? Thank you Melcous (talk) 00:06, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your caring concern about quality on wikipedia.

1. Please rest assured that the students understand notability and have a positive intent in their interpretation of such. The students work with a professional librarian (>20 years experience) in addition to the academic staff and review notability several times in the development fo their articles. The university library has also hosted and worked with Wikipedia liaisons over the years. I understand that individuals may have different interpretations of notability and may personally have a higher or lower bar. Are they perfect, none of us are. Are they committed to notability, absolutely.

2. Thank you for the link for the instructors page. Our course dashboard already exists. The course students over the years have created articles with more than 12 million hits. They impress me. The students have a WikiEd liaison and engage in training through WikiEd and in the classroom. As per our class collaboration with WikiEd over the past 12 years, articles are moved directly to the mainspace rather than AFC. This change in process was made over 5 years ago recommended by the leadership of WikiEd. I appreciate the decades long partnership. As an aside, I believe the change was made around not using the AfC process due to the timing adn delays with AfC, the presence of support already throughout the process from librarians and WikiEd, and sometimes the lack of constructive feedback in the AfC process.

3. While it is easy for experienced editors to simply move a page or template a page, there is an opportunity to collaborate to improve a page as well. It may take more work, but it makes a better wikipedia. It is also an opportunity to support and mentor new wikipedia editors. It is easier to criticize than to collaborate and contribute. Please consider building a page and not just templating or moving. Consider using the individual wikipedia editor talk pages to communicate with them. While the semester is over, you are welcome to communicate constructively to the students who have become new editors. Unfortunately over the years critical wikipedians have gotten a reputation that is handed down between students of not being very helpful in their feedback. There is at least one that the students call a stalker or bully because they seem to stalk the students' work and just criticize and suggest deletion. I hope this can change and the students can see experienced wikipedians as collaborators rather than critics. It is a challenge sometimes to see the positive intent of the critics.

Hopefully I have brought clarity to the AfC issue, the notability issue, and my awareness of the WikiEd program. Thank you for your concern and investment in time and interest. I hope you will be a positive contributor and not get lumped with the critics in the students eyes. be well Breamk (talk) 05:52, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

It could have been helpful to tag me in this reply so I would be notified about it. I appreciate your responses, but I still have significant concerns, and I have seen that others have raised similar concerns previously (just for one example PamD here). My goal is not to dissaude student editors, and I did seek to engage with a couple of your students on their talk pages, but got no response at all. I moved two articles that I felt were particularly poor examples of readiness for mainspace. And so my question to you as the instructor, and per the advice on that page that clearly says In particular, please require students to obtain your approval before moving content from sandboxes into the main article space., did you approve this move of an article with extremely poor notability, and did you approve the move of Charles Stiebel (Medical Missionary) to mainspace even though it was headed as a draft at the time? Melcous (talk) 00:22, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Your tone gives the impression that you do not have positive intent in your page moves, deletions, reversions. I have seen that others have raised this concern on your talk pages and edits multiple times. Given that your defense to your actions is often that "others agree" please consider the same rationale for thinking about the perception you give. Are you aware that you give this negative impression? I have seen one editor even ask you to stop having move battles. There are many positive, constructive editors on wikipedia who are able to give helpful and collaborative feedback to new editors; you have not been one of them. Please learn from them and consider constructive and collaborative contributions.

The language in your most recent reply on my talk page comes across as harassment. I have answered already that students work with WikiEd, me as their instructor, and a library professional who works with Wikimedia Foundation. The tone of your request sounds like an inquisition. Please try to demonstrate a positive intent and I will work to re-assume positive intent. Please work to give the impression of collaboration rather than accusation and haranguing.

You have already effectuated the deletion of the Charles Stiebel page so I will not lower myself to engage with you on that page; I have referred the issue to the WikiEd team. Your moving the page twice and then immediately suggesting that it be deleted came across as rooted in malice. Your behavior on attacking that page has given a very negative impression of you and wikipedia editors to several people both inside the university and outside. I have apologized on your behalf.

What is most concerning is the articles you seem to focus your criticism and negative feedback on. Your focus seems to be on minoritized and historically excluded populations and religions. The justification for your reversions seems to come from omniscience. I hope you will consider the perception that your focus and actions give.

Finally, I will not be tagging you and I have even asked WikiEd if it may be safer to remove class tags on the student articles to prevent you searching for them. I have also asked if there is a way to restrict your access to the class dashboard. This is to prevent you from personally focusing your opinions and perceptions on the student editors and taking action against their work. Your focus on following me and the students in my class, and our edits personally, is concerning and gives the perception of cyberstalking. Please stop this behavior. There are many editors who have positively helped to improve the students' articles, we do not need your feedback to improve the articles in addition to the constructive feedback from others. Please allow space for other editors, who want to improve rather than delete, to support this courses' students. Please rest assured that the weaknesses in the student articles will be improved even without your individual input. Wikipedia will not collapse if you let others help with the students' articles. Wikipedia is a very large community of positively contributing editors. I have confidence that the system can work without your policing the students in the class.

I have seen on your user page you have listed many articles created, please focus on building your own articles rather than tearing down others'. You are a productive creator of articles, keep creating.-- Breamk (talk) 01:11, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

You have found my tone here lacking positive intent, I find yours condescending and lacking in good faith. Of course the problem is that text can never communicate tone. I'm happy to stand behind both my record of article creation (largely on people from "minoritized and historically excluded populations and religions" in fact) as well as editing in the areas of COI and Notability concerns. It is not "cyberstalking" to notice problems in a particular area and then seek to follow up on whether they are being repeated. I'm not trying to police the students in your class, but I do find it highly disappointing that someone who has taken it upon themselves to instruct students in editing here does not have a better understanding of core policies, meaning students may well waste their time creating articles about people who are not notable, and therefore they may well end up with negative interactions with other editors who find such contributions frustrating and even suspicious. Melcous (talk) 02:15, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh and by the way, I did not "effectuate" the deletion of the article on Charles Stiebel - I didn't even participate in the AfD. Melcous (talk) 02:22, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

@Melcous@Breamk Chipping in here as I've been pinged, above. I do think it's very important that instructors ensure that the subjects on which their students create articles are bomb-proof notable. Don't leave it to the students to decide this: they, by definition, are inexperienced editors. Perhaps this is where the WIkiEd staff could help too.

If a topic isn't notable then the most conscientious A-grade student putting in hours of work on it is still going to find that their article gets deleted, which will be dispiriting and discourage them from ever editing Wikipeia again. If the topic is notable, and the student shows care and a willingness to learn, then I and other editors will sometimes put a lot of time into improving the article, explaining what they're doing wrong, encouraging them to stick around and continue editing. But topic choice is the foundation of a useful student course. Perhaps WikiEd should keep track of which courses produce articles which are deleted for non-notability at AfD, and offer guidance to the instructors involved. PamD 09:44, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @PamD for the input. I appreciate your thoughts. As mentioned, all of the students work with me, a librarian whose field is Medical Missionaries and who utilizes a special library collection on medical missionary as well as international databases, and the WikiEd support team. In addition, except for a rare exception, all of the missionaries are sourced from published biographic dictionaries/registries (as suggested by notability guidelines for biographies). The librarian works with the students to assure notability and we review it often. I appreciate your perspective that other wikipedia staff and editors can help with this.

Notability is not objectively easy to define.

I do question whether the standard of "bomb-proof" is the right standard. I think the opposite would be better. If we have a goal to decolonize wikipedia's unconscious bias towards one kind of notability, and increase the representation of women and people based in non-European/"Western" countries, then we probably need to be more permissive rather than an assure-protection-from-an-explosive (to stick with the metaphor) assessment. A strict version of notability, as defined by Brits and citizens of England's former colonies, is the definition of unconscious bias in evaluation to me. This is nothing personal about your skill or my skill or anyone's skill or our established standards. Unconscious bias comes from sticking to our collective traditions and privileges about assessing a certain kind of biography on wikipedia.

As an example, one of the articles this year is of a Christian missionary in what was then British India and is now Afghanistan. As we know, fundamentalism and war in areas of modern Afghanistan has led to the destruction of much of the physical record related to religions other than Islam. Perhaps we cannot expect to have multiple, robust, independent sources for important, notable, events that occurred 100 years ago in what is now rural Afghanistan. Perhaps the history of Christian missions in rural eastern Afghanistan have been mostly erased. Should missionaries from what is now Afghanistan be excluded from Wikipedia because their historical record less than India, China, or countries on the African continent? Or can we take what record remains to assess notability?

We have had a refugee from the Rwanda genocide in our class and a Palestinian refugee in past years. Their perspective on notability was very different from mine and our librarian's. The newspapers and textbooks of New York and London were a much less important and independent source of notability than sources from their home countries or communities when thinking about "enduring historical records" or "well-known and significant awards". These community records, however, we might call too close to the source or not independent. Maybe they are too close; and maybe we should not judge everything with a NY/London historicity lens (even if you and I are not in NY or London). Maybe we should not define "well-known" or "significant" when it comes to awards by if they appear in the NYT.

This is not an argument against notability as a standard. It is a reflection on: how strict we must be in defining notability, what personal standards we use and how they can be biased, and what the risks are in using a permissive versus a bomb-proof standard in allowing biographies to appear on wikipedia from people who are long dead. I understand the standard for living people who may be using wikipedia as a tool for commercial promotion. But what are the real risks in biasing notability towards inclusion instead of exclusion?

Over the last 13 years, I have had students contribute literally hundreds of articles on medical missionaries to wikipedia. Some had weak notability, some had bomb-proof notability(smile). Each year, in the past, maybe 1-2 articles (often none) would be templated for notability or suggested for deletion. The students understood that and worked with editors. All of the articles would receive support from fellow editors from around the world, especially for the weaker ones. Occasionally there would be a problem external editor that would seemingly attack for political or social reasons (especially on some specific middle east articles and ones that had to do with communist China). We have a whole class on notability and on political risks for certain missionaries in the past who worked in geographies or with populations of modern political conflict. Students are aware of both the notability expectation and the political risk. We review notability and support improving communicating about notability in at least three class sessions during the semester. We have used the same process this year as we have for the past decade for identifying missionaries who have notability.

Thank you for sharing your perspective on bomb-proofing notability. I appreciate you sharing it. I hope you will consider that there could be a more permissive standard used, especially for dictionary/register based historic missionaries in far flung areas of the world. be well Breamk (talk) 16:18, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

I came here from the "Arthur Colborne Lankester" AFD. To me a "bomb-proof" notability, atleast in the area in which you are currently working on would refer to any subject for which you are able to find two in-depth third-party sources that cover a subject in depth from the time-period (The definition of third-party can be looser than modern-day definitions, but it must not be a self published book). I'm not sure what kind of review the Arthur Colborne Lankester article in question went through, but imo it was definitely inadequate.

Secondly, coming to your point above, I don't doubt that finding sources on 18th/19th century Indian missionaries is hard (heck I had a hard time with John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune and Girish Chandra Bose back in 2020). However, if we can find zero coverage about a specific event or missionary from it's own time period, how are we supposed to differentiate between reality and fiction ?

Finally and lastly, WikiEd's primary objective should be improve Wikipedia's coverage of certain areas, while still being inside the bounds of our current notability policy (which is fairly permissive in my opinion when it comes to historical information) and while teaching students how to use Wikipedia. By allowing students to create dubious articles that test our bounds of the notability, the students are having a bad experience with Wikipedia making them less likely to contribute to the knowledge that we already have. I don't think that is a good outcome, and it might be useful for you to re-review the practises that you are following to check and screen that the subjects for which artocles are being created are indeed notable and ready for inclusion in the English Wikipedia so that the students have a good experience overall. Sohom (talk) 12:21, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

I am curious about your point about "self-published book". I think our modern definition of self-published books is very different because of the ease with which everyone can publish now. In the past, there was not direct access to printers. Similarly, the "third-party" that selects these books for our class is often a researcher library that decided that a book, even if autobiographical, was worth acquiring and cataloguing in the 18th, 19th, or early 20th century. But I understand why it may be hard to understand the significance of publishing and being placed in an academic library. I also know that I have a bias at our institution because our institution's missionary collection is the library from a significant training seminary that was given to our library a half century ago. In addition, to assure that it is not "fiction", all of these "self" sources are verified in databases from international missionary societies.

In history, we have no way of telling reality from fiction, we mainly look for the most proximate sources as well as collateral sources. I wonder if our beliefs, and confidence, of notability distal to these sources is more or less fiction than the books that are published and collected, and the collateral medical journal articles that are published collateral to the individual.

When thinking about making Wikipedia more inclusive, I am wondering why there is a need to maximize our modern skepticism about notability. We are not discussing self promotion on instagram. We are discussion developing a global encyclopedia.

I suspect I teach my students a more open minded approach to the past rather than proscribing history to my personal about truths. Breamk (talk) Breamk (talk) 21:25, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

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