— Wikipedian ♂ — | ||||
Name | Kevin | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
Born | Long, Long Ago | |||
Name in real life | 3rd Claw of Tsathoggua | |||
Pronouns | He/Him | |||
Country | United States | |||
Current location | Florida | |||
Languages | English (I also speak American) | |||
Time zone | UTC | |||
Ethnicity | Beige | |||
Race | Inclusionist | |||
Height | 175 cm (5' 9") | |||
Weight | Lots and Lots | |||
Sexuality | Happy | |||
Personality type | Gadfly | |||
Alignment | Neutral Good | |||
Family and friends | ||||
Marital status | Married | |||
Spouse | 1 | |||
Girlfriend | 0 | |||
Boyfriend | 0 | |||
Children | 0 | |||
Pets | Dachshunds | |||
Education and employment | ||||
Occupation | Whatever I'm Told | |||
Education | A Smidgeon | |||
Hobbies, favourites and beliefs | ||||
Hobbies | Writing | |||
Religion | Opposed | |||
Politics | Disgusted | |||
Aliases | Evil Kevin Monster | |||
Books | All of Them | |||
Music | Old | |||
Interests | ||||
Truth; SCOTUS jurisprudence; Discworld, Myriad aspects of religions and irreligion, including their history and origins; Meme contagion theory; and the infinite stupidity of the Florida Man of which I am now one. | ||||
Account statistics | ||||
Joined | 15 April 2005 | |||
First edit | 09 January 2005 | |||
Userboxes | ||||
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Kevin/Last1in is on a break for a while. Wikipedia is dear to me; I get too involved and it's not healthy. When I get into editing, it is actively painful to watch decisions made and supported by experienced editors that are simply anathema to the early ideals of this amazing resource.
Welcome to my vanity page! I'm a
Business analyst and
process reengineering specialist whatever Outlook tells me to be on any given day (today was Product Owner) living in
Florida. I am an unrepentant grammar freak and a hopeless technophile -- I have more phone numbers and e-mail addresses than many small companies.
IMHO, Wikipedia is the perfect blend of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Encyclopedia Galactica and I feel it may be the single greatest achievement (so far) in the Internet Age.
Here are some tags you are likely to see in my talk or Vfd posts:
"Tag Bombing": WP:TAGBOMB. This is the most scurrilous plague to attack the corpus of Wikipedia since the Jesus Wars. If you don't agree with something, edit the bleeping article! If you lose, adding [Citation Needed] to every bleeping sentence should get you banned for life. [Some years later, adding 'and for all future incarnations as well'.] Honestly.
[[WP:TAGBOMB]] & {{More citations needed section|date=Mmm 20yy}}
Not Wikifiable: nn & nv - Not Wikifiable: [[WP:NPOV|nn]] & [[Wikipedia:Verifiability|nv]]
NPOV - [[WP:NPOV|NPOV]]
advocacy - [[WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a soapbox|advocacy]]
verifiability - [[Wikipedia:Verifiability|verifiability]]
citation, please - [[Wikipedia:Cite sources|citation, please]]
prove it - [[Wikipedia:Cite sources#When there is a factual dispute|prove it]]
reliable - [[Wikipedia:Reliable sources#Some definitions|reliable]]
take it outside - [[WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a battleground|take it outside]]
Wikinfinity - [[WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia|Wikinfinity]]
uncensored - [[WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of minors|uncensored]]
I think everyone has a set of precepts and prejudices that shape their actions, and (if they are both honest and intelligent, in other words a "flip-flopper") those "inner rules" evolve over time. Here are a few of my Wiki-related opinions. Yeah, I know that each is heretical in Wiki, but these are my opinions. That does not mean that I cannot work objectively within the policies and guidelines of this community, only that I would prefer to see the community evolve. And yeah, I'll probably change them as I get more experience, looking back and thinking, did I ever really believe that nonsense?
Importance tests are antithetical to the core concept of Wiki. Applying these tests will, by definition, apply an irreversible POV to the entire project. When we, the readers and editors of Wikipedia, start to cull things that we have never heard of, we are purposefully putting blinkers on. Wikipedia is not supposed to be a collection of knowledge useful to computer literati, it is supposed to be a collection of knowledge useful to everyone. Using tests like Google hits to determine value is equivalent to a Christian Fundamentalists using the Bible to pass judgment on current events. Exclusionists (and Deletionists) are the Wiki equivalent of the Amish (with apologies, since no insult is intended toward the Amish). I believe that there are three and only three rules to decide whether a subject merits an article in Wikipedia:
I feel that the exclusion of neologisms is the single worst rule in Wiki. Neologism was a neologism not that long ago and terms like blog, Wikify, the Web, and VoIP are neologisms today. I would suggest that, instead of trying to Latinify (my neologism for killing off a living language) English, we apply a different rule: Can the meaning and context of the term be accurately encompassed by another, preexisting term? Using that rule, my Latinify would fail, while terms like VoIP would survive.
WP:FICT conflicts directly with WP:NOT. I see no rational reason to exclude fictional characters based on their relevance outside their milieu. Many cult films, books, and fads include characters that are unique and striking enough to have encyclopedic articles written about them.
I am not convinced that objective truth exists. I do not believe in black and white, only in really dark grey and really light gray with the kajillion shades in between. The same with right and wrong, good and evil, or any other polar constants outside of mathematics. We can strive to be good, moral, right-thinking people, but to achieve that is an unrealistic goal. I believe the same is true in Wiki: We can strive for perfection; all we will get is accuracy. We should still try, but we should be much more lenient with those who fall short of our own (purely subjective and arbitrary) thresholds.
There seems to be an appalling lack of understanding about NPOV. Having a neutral point of view is not an antonym of having any point of view at all; they are opposites but congruencies. The objective is not to remove all points of view, since that is impossible if humans are allowed to edit something. Instead, the idea is to ensure that the POV from which the article is written is neutral, both in essence and in voice.
A superb example is any article even tangentially related to Christianity. You cannot approach the Gospels or Jesus without a point of view. If you approach it with scientific dispassion, you are accused of atheism. If you approach it from outside of DWEEC'ness*, you are either a heretic, an apostate, a cultist or part'a one'a them thar Eastern hoards. I have not seen anyone (with the possible exceptions of Deepdelver and H.) who approach it from inside a mainstream western faith and are still able to divorce themselves from the biased and devoutly bent POV of his or her own religion.
So how do we fix it? We cannot possibly make sure every viewpoint is represented, because you'd have approximately 5 billion sections, one for every person on Earth. If you summarize, you either disenfranchise or favour dozens of competing views. IMHO, we should give up on absolutism and write articles that give a comprehensive sense on what people agree on and break out the various sects into POV forks. Unfortunately, certain fanatics and zealots (and I use both words advisedly with specific editors in mind) know The One and Only Truth, and categorically refuse to allow such compromise. If their sacred text (or personal vision, or Godphone) tells them X is Y, then the article on Y damn well better start with the phrase, "Y is no more than X and anything to the contrary is superstition and heresy." If not, they'll put it there just to start the revert war, since the retaliator is almost always blamed. I had one tell me recently that zhe didn't start a revert war because zhe didn't revert anything; zhe just added something that zhe knew would provoke just such a reaction.
My vote? No adherent to any religion should be allowed to edit a page about that religion, except to remove incorrect information. We would end up with short, concise, accurate articles that are incapable of proselytising. We can never get there, though, because those motivated to bend Wiki to suit their own ambitions and reflect their own worldview are far more dedicated and machinatious than those of us who wish to preserve neutrality. The same should hold true of any structured worldview: politics, sex, nationalities, ad nauseum.
The reality? People who care about a neutral point of view simply have to attempt to strip as much advocacy as possible from articles, for as long as we can take the heat. If a phrase or sentence or word is sermonizing, delete it entirely with the POV tag. If it gets reverted, take it immediately to the talk page. We will lose this battle; it is difficult to stand for neutrality and harmony because it is so much easier to get people enflamed by real or imagined slights on The One Great Truth. All we can do is try, and sigh deeply. Kevin/Last1in 21:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Much like in the "real world", there is a stream of unending wars over articles about Jesus and Christianity in Wikipedia. Luckily, there is (so far) less bloodshed. Apostates and heretics with dangerous ideas (like neutrality, common sense and the equality of all faiths) are only pilloried in words.
I have done a lot of study in comparative religion, and in Christianity, the Bible, the Apocrypha and related issues in particular. However, I rarely edit the articles themselves due to the wars. Due to the fanaticism of many adherents to Jesus-related faiths, I do not think that we will see NPOV articles in my lifetime. I get passionate, though, when the POV gets so blatant as to reflect on the credibility of Wikipedia itself. That's when I will take up the Cross or the Crescent or the Staff and wade in on the talk pages.
Okay, fine, I give up! I took a three-month Wikibreak from the Jesus Wars. I went back today only to find the EXACT SAME mess, with the same edit wars and inane circular arguments. Not only do I feel that an NPOV article will never be achieved, I see no reason to continue trying. I think we should create a label along the lines of "This subject is hopelessly mired in controversy, and the worldview silos of different groups makes a truly encyclopaedic article impossible. Do the best you can to make it better, but there is no lifeguard in this particular pool."
SNIDE WARNING: The following comments may seem less objective (or polite) than my normal standards. I feel really, really bad about that.
In writing a story, I found I needed info about chain (how metal chain is made, what "gauge" means when applied to chain, etc.). If I'm lucky, you just clicked that link and ended up at the disambiguation page for chain which I would term a REambiguation page. The objective of disambiguation is to lead people to appropriate articles; that page leads you to other disam pages, many of which lead back to Chain. It is the start of a Wikimaze.
You see, every hardware store I've been in sells something called "chain". It is made up of oblong "links", usually of metal but sometimes of PVC, that are (appropriately) linked together to form a chain that can be used for, like, everything. This disamb will take you to Connection, which has a link for Chain, back where you started. It also has a link for Link, which amusingly enough does NOT mention chains in the hardware-store sense at all, but only about chain as a measurement and link as a sub-measurement thereof.
Over the past two hours, I have searched in vain for chain. I was beginning to doubt that "Chain" really meant what I thought, until I went to Anchor, where what-I-think-of-as-chain appears everywhere. On the Chain page, there are links about "chains" of stores (using the examples of "hotel chain", "restaurant chain" etc.) - I'm seriously tempted to add "Hardware Store Chain" (the place you get that-whatchamacallit-stuff-I-think-of-as-chain) just out of sheer perversity. I can't however, make any valuable contribution or try to fix it, since I STILL CAN'T FIND CHAINS! Kevin/Last1in 02:37, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
This
user is a member of the
Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians.
The motto of the AIW is conservata veritate, which translates to "with the preserved truth". |
Currently featuring a rewrite of the intro for Religion in ancient Rome