Stephoswalk

Welcome

I know I said it back in the article, but I thought I'd reiterate it here: Welcome to Wikipedia. I've added a template that I tend to think is more helpful than the basic welcome template, but if you want to take a look at it anyway, you can type { {welcome} }, and just remove the spaces betwen the brackets. Also, if you want, come and check out my User page and look through some of the helpful links. Let me know if you need any help, but I think that your interests are going to send you to different areas than I am familiar with outside of the Jack the Ripper article. - Arcayne (^{cast a spell}) 03:40, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I really appreciate the template you posted on my User page. It will definitely come in handy while I am still learning. Stephoswalk (talk) 12:47, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I also welcome you to the wikipedia. I have a long standing interest in the Ripper case and used to work at the Providence Row Hostel in Spitalfields where the ghost of Mary Kelly was reputedly still hanging about. Apparantly Kelly used to live there before she moved to Millers Court a few yards down the road from where we were...Colin4C (talk) 15:23, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome. I hope my input can be helpful to the article. Jack the Ripper is a fascinating character. - Stephoswalk (talk) 04:18, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Removed post

I removed Colin's post, as it was largely off-topic and essentially a rip on DG. It was tendentious, and had nothing to contribute to the article, so I pulled it. I think your follow-up post got caught in that, but since you were responding to Colin's wig-out, I think it's best if we just move on. If DG wants to preserve it, he can use the edit hisotry, instead. It serves no purpose to keep it in the active discussion. - Arcayne (^{cast a spell}) 21:30, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

That's okay. It does get frustrating trying to keep the discussion on track. I am going to try and compile a list of points that are still in dispute regarding the Jack the Ripper article tonight. Hopefully that will help everyone move forward. - Stephoswalk (talk) 02:42, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

My edit on Illinois

Why did you remove my little edit on Illinois? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.99.216.2 (talk) 17:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

("Be warned; Illinois people are not very nice or neighborly.") Your edit was clearly vandalism. - Stephoswalk (talk) 22:00, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Summaries

Excellent job on that. :) hey, you;re pretty useful for a sockpuppet. lol (hopefully, you'll get the joke). - Arcayne (^{cast a spell}) 06:12, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! ;) I just hope it helps get the article unlocked. - Stephoswalk (talk) 06:55, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Jim Jones

Thanks for reverting the page. I started to do so, added the note to the contributor's page, got distracted and then fell asleep before I got to revert it. Thanks again! Wildhartlivie (talk) 20:53, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

No problem, I'm just glad I could help the article. - Stephoswalk (talk) 02:33, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Jonestown vandalism

Full marks to you for good intentions, but this edit of yours actually restored vandalism which I had reverted. Just making sure you know.
Best regards, Lonewolf BC (talk) 20:55, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry about that, it was definitely an accident. I'm still learning a lot of things about Wikipedia and I didn't realize that my edit would revert vandalism. I'm sure there's a way to check to see if recent edits on my watchlist are superceded by other edits but I haven't figured that out yet. Thanks for letting me know. - Stephoswalk (talk) 21:24, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

No worries. Since you're a novice Wikipedian, here are a few pointers which should help you, particularly in avoiding making such mistakes, but also in general:

Each edit to a Wikipedia page is recorded in the page's "history", which you can review by clicking on the "history" tab near the page-top. When reverting vandalism, it is wise to review the page's recent history. The main reason for doing so is to ensure that you catch all of the vandalism; vandalism often comes as a series of edits, sometimes even from different sources. So if you see that the most recent edit to a page is vandalism, and only undo that one edit without looking deeper, that can leave "buried" vandalism in the article, which may persist for quite some time before someone notices it. (Probably everybody makes this mistake from time to time, and I did so myself, in haste, not long ago, but do your best to avoid making it.)

In the particular instance of the Jonestown article, a look back in the history would have helped you to determine that my edit was not vandalism, but a reversion of vandalism.

Another thing is that "rvv" (as in the edit-summary of that edit of mine, "rvv to own last"), is commonly used in edit-summaries on Wikipedia as an abbreviation for "revert vandalism", so it's a good indication that the edit it summarises is legitimate. (Of course it is not an infallible indication of an edit's legitimacy, because there is nothing to stop anyone from using "rvv" as the edit-summary when the edit is not really a reversion of vandalism.)

I hope this has been helpful to you, and please do not take it as criticism. Happy editing.
-- Lonewolf BC (talk) 06:12, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

JTR

Hello again Stephanie. Please inspect The Whitechapel Murders (1888-91) and Emma Elizabeth Smith and give me your honest opinion. Feel free to amend and improve them - they are far from perfect and far from finished and I (unlike some on the wikipedia) lay no claims to omniscience or infallibility. Colin4C (talk) 20:47, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Just to add that I think one way through the thickets of mythology surrounding the strange case of JTR would be (first) to look at each of the eleven Whitechapel Murders separately. As far as I'm aware, after each of the murders was committed, the police investigated the circumstances of each one separately rather than pursuing the phantom of 'Jack the Ripper'. I mean there were intially at least eleven murder investigations rather than an overall hunt for one unidentified serial killer. And by all accounts the police did not take the supposed letters from Jack the Ripper as a factor in their investigation but thought they were fraudulent. Fortunately the structure of the wikipedia allows of seperate articles on closely related subjects so it is not necessary to foreground the mythical and speculative aspects of the case or treat the whole thing like an Agatha Christie or Inspector Morse type who-dunnit. Also trying to figure out which murders were 'canonical' Ripper murders seems to me to be mostly sheer specualation - involving us having a notion of what kind of murders and unidentified person we know nothing about is likely to commit. I think the myth that the Ripper either killed himself by jumping in the Thames or was commited to a lunatic asylum after the Kelly murder informs or misinforms those who have a fundamentalist belief that the Ripper killed no more or no less 5 individuals. My main point is that nobody knows and that we might as well admit that than pretend to knowledge we don't have. Colin4C (talk) 10:50, 3 January 2008 (UTC)