User talk:Os

Welcome!

Hello, Os, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! →Raul654 23:12, 18 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

About your user page

Hello Os -

I got your message and, since this will more likely "ping" you than if I reply on my talk page, I'll respond here. During the period of November to about February, we had a very large number of accounts hijacked by a vandal. While some of these events were very serious (there were a few admin accounts involved), most of them were simply users, many of whom hadn't participated in several years. Careful review of the episodes identified that most of the hijacked accounts included links to certain social media sites whose user and password databases have been compromised and posted on black-hat websites. As a pre-emptive measure, I and a few other admins triaged the user pages that included links to personal accounts on those sites; those with users who had edited recently, we left messages asking them to ensure they had a unique Wikimedia password; those who hadn't edited in several years, we either deleted the userpage if it had only a little bit of content or consisted mostly of external links (such as yours), or edited and revision-deleted if there was a lot of content. We also discovered a lot of spam pages during this review, and of course deleted them outright as spam. The key was to try to impair the vandal's ability to match up Wikipedia accounts with the compromised accounts from other sites; on the whole, it has largely been successful, since the cycle of account hijacks seems to have been broken. (If your account had been hijacked, you would have been completely locked out of this account, and it would have been challenging to regain control of it.)

If you would like, I would be happy to email you the content of the page at the time it was deleted; it was mostly links to external sites specific to several bands. I hope perhaps you'll consider returning to editing. All the best, Risker (talk) 04:49, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Risker, yes. My gmail.com address username is the decimal representation of the first six significant figures of the sine of half of a right angle. I can also be reached as webmaster @ at the domain of the music link of the second music project listed in my user page circa 2005. Or, run "bf@bf.hf.rh.bet" through a rot13 coder. I'm actually most interested in the Userfy'd pages (fear of .Z.E.R.O. and Darker D.O.W.N. I think?) underneath my userpage, as other band members besides myself had made some contributions to those, but the contents of my userpage would be nice as well (which at least an old version of is available at http://web.archive.org/web/20051215000000/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Os and just links to University of Delaware, Wikipedia, Google, Download.com, and a couple domains I own (though I let the registration on one of them lapse for a while when I had no server to host it, so I'm not sure what it was pointing at in the meantime), thus I'm not sure what social media sites you mean, unless perhaps I had added more links to my userpage later? Maybe I linked to my Facebook or my Slashdot account, but I can't really think of anywhere else I would have linked to... Hmm). I guess this teaches me to log in and do things here more often, but editing/contributing has become so complicated that the time investment needed to ensure additions/changes comply with all the policies is probably more than my schedule can usually handle; I guess that just comes with the territory of an open encyclopedia, though. I know regular editors/contributors generally have a good understanding of the policies and acceptable sources without having to look them up all of the time, but the time investment to become a regular editor/contributor would be far, far greater, so I think that's off the table for me unless I win the lottery and retire from my jobs, lol. os (talk) 16:10, 12 Jun 2020 (UTC)

Risker, I saw a notification that I had a Wikipedia email sent from you. I don't see any option to view Wikipedia Email on the site, so I assume that is a reference to emails sent by Wikipedia to the address on file. It appears that my email address which was on file was not working (it's a very, very ancient one), so I updated it to a working one. (I do believe I had updated it before but had not gotten a confirmation email, so I guess the previous update never took. This update appears to have worked, though.) Would you be able to re-send that? Thank you, and sorry for the trouble. os (talk) 18:17, 14 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Re-sent. Hope this one is successful. Thanks for letting me know. Risker (talk) 00:04, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization Policy Questions

I had been thinking more about a projectbox talkpage section I had started (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Neopaganism#Capitalization_of_Pagan%2C_Paganism%2C_Witch%2C_and_Witchcraft%3F now moved to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Neopaganism/Archive_1#Capitalization_of_Pagan,_Paganism,_Witch,_and_Witchcraft? ), and I found the MOS/CAPS article. So after reading through some of it, I wanted to ask about whether #Religions,_deities,_philosophies,_doctrines,_and_their_adherents should be better explained. My ponderings basically concern when Witchcraft, Witch, and Paganism should be capitalized like Christianity and Christian (even though all of those things are broad categories which don't refer to any specific or official religion). So I was trying to find clarity in MOS/CAPS and couldn't really get it. The policy / exceptionpolicy for religion and sect names seems to be partly based on tradition and common use, partly based on what can be interpreted as proper nouns (a topic which can be hairy and subject to interpretation and arguing), and partly based on unnamed/unclear distinctions about what is an official group (e.g. Catholicism has a central authority) as well as what religion category names derive from a became-proper-by-usage noun whose etymology is actually a common noun (e.g. "Christianity" comes from a translation of a word for "anointed"). I know there was already a disagreement at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Modern_Paganism (including acronymized profanity being hurled and Pagans being accused of trying to non-neutrally push their PoV by requesting their religion category-name be capitalized like Christianity is capitalized), but I am guessing that decision doesn't really apply outside of that one article. So I wanted to ask about the capitalization, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to actually ask on Talk:MOSCAPS. It's all... very confusing. os (talk) 06:23, 8 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination of Michael Krasnow for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Michael Krasnow is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michael Krasnow until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.

... discospinster _talk 14:05, 11 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]