MojaveSummit

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Hello, MojaveSummit, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please see our help pages, and if you can't find what you are looking for there, please feel free to ask me on my talk page or place {{Help me}} on this page and someone will drop by to help. Again, welcome! —valereee (talk) 18:00, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Teahouse

Hello! MojaveSummit, you are invited to join other new editors and friendly hosts in the Teahouse. The Teahouse is an awesome place to meet people, ask questions and learn more about Wikipedia. Please join us!

—valereee (talk) 18:03, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

January 2022

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. tgeorgescu (talk) 20:32, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Important note

Hi again MojaveSummit. Listen, the additional allowances one gets for being new only go so far and for so long. Eventually, you're expected to review pertinent documentation and express yourself respectfully, which also includes avoiding posts that are of an inordinate length. On Wikipedia very often less is more, with it being a volunteer project. Editors who become a timesink eventually get shown the door. Just putting it bluntly. Also, calling a contested edit in a content dispute vandalism is considered a personal attack on Wikipedia —see what vandalism is not— so please refrain from that in the future. Thanks in advance for your close attention to this matter. El_C 03:26, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@El_C Thanks for the heads up. I assumed that the more documentation, reasoning, and support there was in these disputes, the better. It appears I had that backwards, so thanks for clearing that up. It appears that I misunderstood the vandalism rule, as I genuinely thought that someone using dubious claims towards another editor as the reason for their edit that they had been previously been warned by admins to stop using definitely met the site's definition of vandalism. I see now that it falls under other specific terms on the site, and I'll keep that in mind from here on out. And for what it's worth, a lot of the issues I had with how he kept insisting on behaving towards me had nothing to do with being new, nobody should be treated like that, and I was absolutely shocked that an editor as experienced as him insisted on repeatedly treating anyone that way. I'll try to show more patience with that, as I do recognize that he's becoming increasingly distraught about this and so I understand now there's a decent chance he'll do or say some things when his temporary block expires towards me and the article in question that I would otherwise be shocked and dismayed could come from an experienced editor. I'll keep these lessons learned in mind. MojaveSummit (talk) 03:48, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, MojaveSummit. The point is to express one's position on the contested content in a dispassionate, matter of fact way that's succinct and un-repetitive. When there is an impasse about, say, what is or isn't dubious, it is expected for disputants to seek outside input so that the consensus on the matter could be clarified. There are a number of dispute resolution requests that could aid in that, namely: Third opinion, Request for comment and the Reliable sources noticeboard. There are a few other avenues (a number of noticeboards, etc.), but they tend to be more eclectic and/or clunky. So that's the way to move forward. Advertise on one of these forums for a fresh set of eyes and go from there. HTH. El_C 04:29, 9 January 2022 (UT

Ah, I genuinely didn't think it was a legitimate impasse according to the site's rules. I thought it was just someone who had been warned to stop already continuing to break the same rules, so their dissent became irrelevant to the content at that point. Especially because on the same day he made the edit, he posted on the article's talk page statements which explicitly insisted the admins were wrong on this matter. I was not aware that doing so could fall within the parameters of a genuine content dispute, and inherently thought that this was an intentional and malicious ignoring of the input from others besides me that had already previously been given. It appears this still falls under the purview of a legitimate content dispute? MojaveSummit (talk) 04:44, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

The point is to give outside parties a chance to determine what's what in a setting and in a way that doesn't overwhelm. If a talk page or noticeboard gets flooded by the principal disputants in what basically amounts to filibustering, then that discourages others from engaging. Admins are not infallible and, outside of conduct matters, their views on content are like anyone else: IP, inexperienced named account, veteran editor and so on. Everyone gets an equal voice on the content. Anyway, you need to appreciate the limits inherent in (and in the combination of) Wikipedia being: a. A volunteer project; b. The passage of time (i.e. in the months); c. There being a ton of material to review, which few volunteers are likely to do unless condensed. It is what it is, so either you make the best of it, or it'll probably be a hard time. El_C 05:20, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Alright, understood. I assure you I was not in any way trying to filibuster, I was simply trying to be adequately thorough, especially since he kept throwing out constant personal attacks towards me at a dizzying rate. MojaveSummit (talk) 05:58, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

And I'll go a bit further: there is no excuse for this edit summary, and the other editor had every right to be upset by it. And this one was also extremely problematic as well as being misleading. The block was absolutely not for making these edits. The block was purely behavioral. Consider this the final warning you will get for problematic edit summaries; in future, if you are not absolutely sure whether an edit summary will be problematic, ask at WP:Teahouse. valereee (talk) 13:18, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@Valereee: I apologize, I thought those were the best ways to communicate to other editors why the edits were made. Both of his edit summaries as well as his statements on the talk section made just after those edits contained things he had been told to stop doing towards me previously, so I considered that relevant info for other editors who were looking at the edit history. How would you suggest I better communicate those things in such cases as this one?

Furthermore, I'm not the one who was edit-warring against consensus, he was. Power, Lindsay, and FormalDude( who just said he agreed with what Power wrote) all said those sentences didn't belong there. Power (and by extension, FormalDude for agreeing with him) said that some info regarding any similarities between LDS beliefs and Prosperity Theology could be appropriate elsewhere in the article. That info already was elsewhere in the article, and at no point did either of them claim that the two disputed sentences in question sentences should remain in the article. The only people who disagreed were him and GenoV84, and Geno let the edit removing those sentences stand after the first ANI case, even while editing other parts of the article. So when my edits were reverted with false claims that I had no consensus and nobody else agreed with me, it was a clear bad-faith attempt to fool others who hadn't been initially involved, while openly lying and edit warring against the actual consensus. That's why I responded with the edit summaries that I did. MojaveSummit (talk) 20:36, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

This is what you wrote vs what you could have written

A very short example:

I had been waiting to get clarification on something else from Valeree, but it's been a few days, so I'll just go ahead and respond here. I felt quite strongly that it was tgeorgescu who had been was edit warring against consensus here, and made I definitely did take exception to what was written in both his edit summaries and on the talk page, as there were misrepresentations and personal attacks.

That cuts it by at least 75% I think, and it loses nothing. That is what you need to learn to do. valereee (talk) 21:06, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I thought that would have violated the warnings I had been given, as the tone is a lot harsher and more accusatory in this example. For the example you gave on the article talk page, it mainly removed what I had used to try to soften the language and delivery, as well as to provide a little more clarity in order to make it clear what was being referred to. If that's what you want me to do in the future in any cases similar to this one, I will, but I am definitely confused. I was intentionally trying to be as conciliatory and non-confrontational as possible, and I figured that was what would be most productive to a case like this where there have already been significant confrontations and accusations. Is it better to just leave all that out and hope other editors don't take exception to the less conciliatory wording? MojaveSummit (talk) 21:08, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

MS, it's good to think about softening your language, but what you were doing wasn't softening it. It was just making it longer. There's really nothing in there that makes the accusations of misrepresentation and personal attacks less of an accusation. Saying "I definitely did take exception to what was written both in his edit summaries and on the talk page" doesn't make "misrepresentations and personal attacks" softer. It just makes the accusation longer for people to read. Accusations need diffs, not longer statements. valereee (talk) 21:21, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

We appear to have rather different perspectives on what is and isn't softening language, what is an outright accusation, and what is just needlessly longer. I'll assume that your view on it is Wiki's official stance on the matter, and work on adjusting to that when I write on here from now on. MojaveSummit (talk) 21:24, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Oh, lordy, don't assume any editor's opinion is WP's official stance. We don't actually have an official stance on this; WP:Wall of text is an essay. What I'm giving you is my advice based on many years of editing: people won't read long posts, and no one expects them to. We expect editors to learn to write short. valereee (talk) 21:53, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Got it. The length of my post is not something I would have ever considered to be "long" or "a wall of text," as those terms (in all of my previous experience with them elsewhere) are for things 4-5 times the length of what I wrote, and with significantly longer paragraphs than what I used. It appears I'll have to adjust to how drastically that appears to deviate from the norm here on Wiki. MojaveSummit (talk) 22:05, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

That post was probably ten times as long as the average post here. There's a lot going on here, and we all have limited time to volunteer. We value getting to the point. We've got 6 million articles, and the actual articles are only about 10% of what's going on here. Think about that. valereee (talk) 22:21, 12 January 2022 (UTC)