Exerdoph

August 2016

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Medical cannabis. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Please be particularly aware that Wikipedia's policy on edit warring states:

1. Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made.
2. Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes; work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Alexbrn (talk) 19:55, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Notice

This message contains important information about an administrative situation on Wikipedia. It does not imply any misconduct regarding your own contributions to date.

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.

Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.

Alexbrn (talk) 19:57, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

August 2016

Please stop making disruptive edits, as you did at Medical cannabis.

• If you are engaged in an article content dispute with another editor, discuss the matter with the editor at their talk page, or the article's talk page, and seek consensus with them. Alternatively you can read Wikipedia's dispute resolution page, and ask for independent help at one of the relevant notice boards.
• If you are engaged in any other form of dispute that is not covered on the dispute resolution page, seek assistance at Wikipedia's Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.

If you continue to disrupt Wikipedia, you may be blocked from editing. Guy (Help!) 20:09, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Advocacy in Wikipedia

So it is clear that you are passionate about the possible health benefits of cannabis and derivatives of it. It is also clear that you are pretty new here.

Just wanted to leave you a note to see if this can help keep things more peaceful....

People come edit for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that they are passionate about something. That passion is a double-edged sword. It drives people to contribute which has the potential for productive construction, but it can also lead to unconstructive arguments. Some people come to tell everybody how bad it is to eat meat, some come to grind various political axes... we get all kinds of advocacy. A lot of times, people don't even understand this is not OK. I try to talk with folks, to make sure they are aware of these issues.

But Wikipedia isn't about changing the world nor it is a platform for advocates. Our mission is to produce articles that provide readers with encyclopedia content that summarizes accepted knowledge, and to do that as a community that anyone can be a part of.

We have three very good essays offering advice for people who come here and are especially passionate about something - one is WP:ADVOCACY another is WP:SPA, and see also WP:TENDENTIOUS which describes how people who are advocates for some view, tend to behave.

So while it is clear that you are passionate about cannabis in the real world, please do try to check that at the login page and focus on Wikipedia's mission to communicate "accepted knowledge" to the public, and please take some time to better understand the policies and guidelines. And while you are free to edit about whatever the heck you want, please do consider broadening the scope of your editing. (I do realize that you are just getting started here, and everybody starts somewhere! Who knows where you will end up)

I also want to provide you with a quick (as brief as possible) overview of the key policies and guidelines that govern what we do here.

As you can imagine, if this place had no norms, it would be a Mad Max kind of world interpersonally, and content would be a slag heap (the quality is really bad in parts, despite our best efforts). But over the past 15 years the community has developed a whole slew of norms, via lots of discussion. One of the first, is that we decide things by consensus. That decision itself, is recorded here: WP:CONSENSUS, which is one of our "policies". And when we decide things by consensus, that is not just local in space and time, but includes meta-discussions that have happened in the past. The results of those past meta-discussions are the norms that we follow now. We call them policies and guidelines - and these documents all reside in "Wikipedia space" (There is a whole forest of documents in "Wikipedia space" - pages in Wikipedia that start with "Wikipedia:AAAA" or for short, "WP:AAAA". WP:CONSENSUS is different from Consensus.)

People have tried to define Wikipedia - is it a democracy, an anarchy, secret cabal? In fact it is a clue-ocracy (that link is to a very short and important text - please do read it).

There are policies and guidelines that govern content, and separate ones that govern behavior. Here is a very quick rundown:

Content policies and guidelines

• WP:NOT (what WP is, and is not -- this is where you'll find the "accepted knowledge" thing. You will also find discussion of how WP is not a catalog, not a how-to manual, not a vehicle for promotion or advocacy, etc)
• WP:OR - no original research is allowed here, instead
• WP:VERIFY - everything has to be cited to a reliable source (so everything in WP comes down to the sources you bring)
• WP:RS is the guideline defining what a "reliable source" is for general content and WP:MEDRS defines what reliable sourcing is for content about health
• WP:NPOV and the content that gets written, needs to be "neutral" (as we define that here, which doesn't mean what most folks think -- it doesn't mean "fair and balanced" - it means that the language has to be neutral, and that topics in a given article are given appropriate "weight" (space and emphasis). An article about a drug that was 90% about side effects, would generally give what we call "undue weight" to the side effects. Of course if that drug was important because it killed a lot of people, not having 90% of it be about the side effects would not be neutral) We determine weight by seeing what the reliable sources say - we follow them in this too. So again, you can see how everything comes down to references.
• WP:BLP - this is a policy specifically covering discussion about living people anywhere in WP. We are very careful about such content (which means enforcing the policies and guidelines above rigorously), since issues of legal liability can arise for WP, and people have very strong feelings about other people, and about public descriptions of themselves.
• WP:NOTABILITY - this is a policy that defines whether or not an article about X, should exist. What this comes down to is defined in WP:Golden rule - which is basically, are there enough independent sources about X, with which to build a decent article.
• WP:DELETION discusses how we get rid of articles that fail notability.

In terms of behavior, the key norms are:

• WP:CONSENSUS - already discussed
• WP:CIVIL - basically, be nice. This is not about being nicey nice, it is really about not being a jerk and having that get in the way of getting things done. We want to get things done here - get content written and maintained and not get hung up on interpersonal disputes. So just try to avoid doing things that create unproductive friction.
• WP:AGF - assume good faith about other editors. Try to focus on content, not contributor. Don't personalize it when content disputes arise. (the anonymity here can breed all kinds of paranoia)
• WP:HARASSMENT - really, don't be a jerk and follow people around, bothering them. And do not try to figure out who people are in the real world. Privacy is strictly protected by the WP:OUTING part of this policy.
• WP:DR - if you get into an content dispute with someone, try to work it out on the article Talk page. Don't WP:EDITWAR. If you cannot work it out locally, then use one of the methods here to get wider input. There are many - it never has to come down to two people arguing. There are instructions here too, about what to do if someone is behaving badly, in your view. Try to keep content disputes separate from behavior disputes. Many of the big messes that happen in Wikipedia arise from these getting mixed up.
• WP:TPG - this is about how to talk to other editors on Talk pages, like this one, or say Talk:Cannabis. At article talk pages, basically be concise, discuss content not contributors, and base discussion on the sources in light of policies and guidelines, not just your opinions or feelings. At user talk pages things are more open, but that is the relevant place to go if you want to discuss someone's behavior or talk about general WP stuff - like this whole post.

If you can get all that (the content and behavior policies and guidelines) under your belt, you will become truly "clueful", as we say. If that is where you want to go, of course. I know that was a lot of information, but hopefully it is digestable enough.

I hope this was not unwelcome. Jytdog (talk) 01:45, 18 August 2016 (UTC)