User talk:RowanElder

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Happy editing! I dream of horses ^{(Contribs) (Talk)} 18:12, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! RowanElder (talk) 18:15, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Thanks for the help on Michael Peterson (geographer) page! GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 01:28, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! RowanElder (talk) 04:19, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Guild of Copy Editors 2023 Annual Report

Guild of Copy Editors 2023 Annual Report Our 2023 Annual Report is now ready for review. Highlights: Introduction Membership news, obituary and election results Summary of Drives, Blitzes and the Requests page Closing words – Your Guild coordinators: Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Wracking. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Guild of Copy Editors April 2024 Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors April 2024 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the April 2024 newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since December. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. We extend a warm welcome to all of our new members. We wish you all happy copy-editing. Election results: In our December 2023 coordinator election, Zippybonzo stepped down as coordinator; we thank them for their service. Incumbents Dhtwiki and Miniapolis were reelected coordinators, and Wracking was newly elected coordinator, to serve through 30 June. Nominations for our mid-year Election of Coordinators will open on 1 June (UTC). Drive: 46 editors signed up for our January Backlog Elimination Drive, 32 of whom claimed at least one copy-edit. Between them, they copy-edited 289 articles totaling 626,729 words. Barnstars awarded are here. Blitz: 23 editors signed up for our February Copy Editing Blitz. 18 claimed at least one copy-edit and between them, they copy-edited 100,293 words in 32 articles. Barnstars awarded are here. Drive: 53 editors signed up for our March Backlog Elimination Drive, 34 of whom claimed at least one copy-edit. Between them, they copy-edited 300 articles totaling 587,828 words. Barnstars awarded are here. Blitz: Sign up for our April Copy Editing Blitz, which runs from 14 to 20 April. Barnstars will be awarded here. Progress report: As of 23:17, 11 April 2024 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 109 requests since 1 January 2024, and the backlog stands at 2,480 articles. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from Baffle gab1978 and your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Wracking. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Guild of Copy Editors June 2024 Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors June 2024 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the June 2024 newsletter, a quarterly-ish digest of Guild activities since April. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. Election news: Wanted: new Guild coordinators! If you value and enjoy the GOCE, why not help out behind the scenes? Nominations for our mid-year coordinator election are now open until 23:59 on 15 June (UTC). Self-nominations are welcome. Voting commences at 00:01 on 16 June and continues until 23:50 on 30 June. Results will be announced at the election page. Blitz: Nine of the fourteen editors who signed up for the April 2024 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 55,853 words comprising twenty articles. Barnstars awarded are available here. Drive: 58 editors signed up for our May 2024 Backlog Elimination Drive and 33 of those completed at least one copy edit. 251 articles and 475,952 words were copy edited. Barnstars awarded are here. Blitz: Our June 2024 Copy Editing Blitz will begin on 16 June and finish on 22 June. Barnstars awarded will be posted here. Progress report: As of 05:23, 8 June 2024 (UTC) , GOCE copyeditors have completed 161 requests since 1 January and the backlog stands at 2,779 articles. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from Baffle gab1978 and your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, Miniapolis and Wracking. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Notice of discretionary sanctions on caste and related articles

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date. You have shown interest in South Asian social groups. Due to past disruption in this topic area, the community has authorised uninvolved administrators to impose contentious topics restrictions—such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks—on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, expected standards of behaviour, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic. For additional information, please see the guidance on these sanctions. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Ekdalian (talk) 18:16, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll be careful since I don't know the ground well. This edit happened somewhat accidentally, when I was checking a spurious link from a mathematics page and I saw some easy-looking light copyediting to do on the incorrectly-linked page. RowanElder (talk) 22:36, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Guild of Copy Editors September Newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors September Newsletter Hello and welcome to the September newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since June. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below. Election news: Project coordinators play an important role in our WikiProject. Following the mid-year Election of Coordinators, we welcomed Mox Eden to the coordinator team. Dhtwiki remains as Lead Coordinator, and Miniapolis and Wracking returned as assistant coordinators. If you'd like to help out behind the scenes, please consider taking part in our December election – watchlist our ombox for updates. Information about the role of coordinators can be found here. Blitz: 13 of the 24 editors who signed up for the June 2024 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 169,404 words comprising 41 articles. Barnstars awarded are here. Drive: 38 of the 59 editors who signed up for the July 2024 Backlog Elimination Drive copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 482,133 words comprising 293 articles. Barnstars awarded are here. Blitz: 10 of the 15 editors who signed up for the August 2024 Copy Editing Blitz copy edited at least one article. Between them, they copy edited 71,294 words comprising 31 articles. Barnstars awarded are here. Drive: Sign up here to earn barnstars in our month-long, in-progress September Backlog Elimination Drive. Progress report: As of 05:14, 11 September 2024 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 233 requests since 1 January, and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 2,824 articles. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we do without you! Cheers from Baffle gab1978 and your GOCE coordinators Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Mox Eden and Wracking. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Message sent by Baffle gab1978 (talk) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:54, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Aside

Hi RowanElder,

If you want to stop editing math articles and interacting with people who do edit math articles, that is of course entirely up to you (and it would be entirely at your own initiative, since no one else has asked you to do that, as far as I can see). But it is certainly sending mixed messages to keep adding to the same conversations after saying you're going to walk away from them.

You have not asked for my advice, but since you obviously have the potential to be a constructive math editor (and we need more of those), I am going to offer it to you anyhow: you should disengage from the specific conversations that are making you feel bad (and perhaps all of Wikipedia) for a couple of days. Have a pleasant weekend, maybe go for a hike or something. Then come back and re-engage, trying to keep in mind that people can disagree with you about whether a particular edit is an improvement without it being personal.

If you'd like to talk more, I'd be happy to do that, in a couple of days. --JBL (talk) 00:22, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for the offer and advice, though I said nothing about intending to walk away from the conversations, just the article editing for the project, so I'm not sure why the message is mixed. I'd consider it pretty rude of me to just walk away without an explanation because people have strong feelings about this stuff and I respect those strong feelings. It's clearly lonely work and I'm making it a little lonelier by going, which is rough and I'm sorry to be doing that to people clearly motivated to be making the world a better place (and making it better especially for poor and isolated kids, in a way that's close to my heart). I thought it was important to say why I was leaving, i.e., the project was unwelcoming, and to give a sense of why. I intend to keep following that through unless you really think that's the wrong idea.

I'm kind of unhappy about the particular past frustrations here and there, for sure, but I'm not taking it personally. Honestly that's actually part of the problem! The impersonality isn't welcoming, it would have been a relief to have had more to take personally. I'm emotionally fine, and I'm trying to be a good citizen by "seeing something and saying something." Most people seem to just do "quiet quitting" here on Wikipedia but I don't think that's kind so it's not what I'm doing.

Re advice, for what it's worth, I've asked math Wikiproject participants for general advice many times and I was generally happy to get advice except when it involved people impolitely jumping to conclusions about who I was or why I was doing what I was doing. Please consider yourself asked and welcomed to give advice. RowanElder (talk) 00:43, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

Hey, I've had a good weekend but I did find time to look over your recent history, and I'm no longer interested in your advice. The insulting jump you made in assuming I was quitting over a single edit war doesn't seem atypical of your behavior elsewhere. You jump to pretty insulting accusations pretty quickly. I think maybe for someone who has real trouble with their temper, the advice to go cool off for a few days does make really good sense. However, that was not my problem and I don't think you'll have much insight into my problem.

Thanks for the effort, but I recommend some self-work before giving more people advice. RowanElder (talk) 01:29, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Generally, I'm just going to stop counting on Wikipedia to have any functional policing of good faith, politeness, or welcoming. Unhappily, the majority of regulars appear too deranged to see themselves clearly enough to do that sort of work effectively (especially when deranged by resignation). [edit: "Deranged" means "wildly miscalibrated." Stuff like "there are smells that have been around so long that the regulars can't smell them anymore, so they look semi-crazy, like they're 'denying the obvious,' even though there's good reason for it." Ways that regulars seem generally resigned to just take for granted that they can't do anything about usual and known unwelcoming behavior. This is a sad thing to be reminded of I'm sure, but it's not obviously unfair to me and it's not just meant as an insult or bad faith. It's more or less what I see described in WP:BITE, which I was helpfully made aware of a couple days ago.] RowanElder (talk) 01:35, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

I would strongly recommend you avoid insulting other Wikipedians, even on your own talk page. –jacobolus (t) 02:29, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't see how to call what I just said an insult given what else doesn't get policed here. I didn't name any names re "deranged" and the rest seemed par for the course that I've been experiencing. RowanElder (talk) 02:32, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

This is a rough place, we all have to learn to have a thick skin, no? RowanElder (talk) 02:37, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Here are a few quick things I find more insulting than what I just said, by which I am trying to calibrate my thicker skin and better understanding of what is and is not an insult on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Principal_component_analysis&diff=prev&oldid=1253762693

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard&diff=prev&oldid=1253769997

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:WhatamIdoing&diff=prev&oldid=1253764987 RowanElder (talk) 03:00, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

And for good measure, for any readers "stalking a talk page," here is what JBL had sent me elsewhere shortly before opening this topic here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics&diff=prev&oldid=1253397779

No one said a thing about this in support of my contention that this crossed a line, there, so I am inferring that it met the Wikipedia standard for politeness and assuming good faith. Until proven otherwise (i.e., until at least one Wikipedian agrees with me explicitly and directly that this sort of thing does not meet that standard), it will be the standard I expect and follow while I edit Wikipedia. RowanElder (talk) 15:31, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

I guess I am at a loss about what you are trying to accomplish here (in this thread or on WT:WPM). I made a mildly acerbic characterization of your behavior, thought better of it, and removed it before you or anyone else responded. Most people I know understand withdrawing an acerbic remark to be a concilliatory gesture; even moreso when the person making the remark does so on their own initiative. (There is of course no need to respond, but if you do I suggest you follow jacobolus's advice, since your comments about me here are way over the line; making some of them more broadly about "the majority of regulars" does not actually bring them inside community norms, believe it or not.) --JBL (talk) 23:31, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

(1) Regarding WT:WPM: I decided I felt unwelcome editing math articles and I decided to say so as I left instead of ghosting. I wanted to create a short window to talk about it for any who cared. I didn't want to play any games about being convinced to stay: my lines got crossed and I decided I'm out. In saying something, I did expect to be jumped on in the way your acerbic comment jumped on me and I did in fact appreciate your conciliatory gesture of deleting, so I didn't immediately mind that too much. I wasn't angry, though I was mildly stung.

(2) After reading some more things around the encyclopedia, particularly your post history, I realized that I had no intuition for the line of civility that is being held on Wikipedia. My experience hadn't felt civil to that point, and your recent post history seemed especially uncivil to me. I fully own this is likely a "me problem" from Wikipedia regulars' perspective, and indeed, in response to a version of this concern about "the civility so far" on WT:WPM, I was told by jacobolus that wiki editing required a thick skin. I thus tried -- apparently against policy, though I didn't know then that "don't take the bait" and "become the unbaitable editor" were policy that pretty explicitly discourage what I was doing -- to engage more like I was being engaged. I've reconsidered that after seeing the official policies.

I genuinely aimed at a line of "acerbic but not uncivil" but the problem in the first place is that I have no insight into the local standards for civility (the default already seemed very uncivil to me), so even trying to aim at a line like that or to learn the line by active negotiation of it was evidently a mistake. Initially I aimed to match your "mildly acerbic" (which seemed to include provocative things like sarcastically groaning about others' actively stirring up drama and conflict in the diffs I linked above, though again: I don't understand it and I'm not trying to cast an aspersion, there, your comment may be perfectly civil in some sophisticated snarky way; I'm not making an attack but crying out for anyone to explain to me what the actual line is since what I am seeing is /extremely/ confusing to me). Again: I reconsidered this after learning the official policies.

(3) I have realized I was in the wrong on (2) by policy, but then I have no idea how to square those policies with what I see actually prevailing on the encyclopedia generally. Realizing that no promising approaches for figuring out the local standards look feasible for me in the short term, I decided to just become a ghost editor for now. Whatever the policies around civility and incivility there are here, whatever the common knowledge about "enforcement and nonenforcement" and "which bait or personal attacks get recognized as such and which don't," I've personally found this totally unintuitive and kafkaesque as a newcomer. I'm just not going to pretend I'm welcome anymore.

(4) On Wikipedia generally, I am just mostly trying to figure out how to channel the energy I would otherwise put into a crossword habit more prosocially, without having too many negative interactions. RowanElder (talk) 02:13, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

I see I accidentally used the word "just" above where it doesn't belong, a minor bad habit I have broken better in speech than in online text. I also have a few other secondary goals I am pursuing. I'm generally interested in learning about Wikipedia's behind-the-scenes, for instance, since it's become an important institution, and I've learned more that has been interesting to my friends and family more quickly than I expected. RowanElder (talk) 02:30, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

In appreciation

		The Copyeditor's Barnstar
		For your work improving Jin dynasty (1115–1234). Hope you enjoy your next weeks of editing more than the last one. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:18, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! I'll be doing my best. RowanElder (talk) 16:29, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Senussi

Thanks for your edits; I altered some because it's in BritEng and because we only link something once. I read your comments about Wiki being unwelcoming, which I had not known, so welcome to Wiki, the milhist section in particular ;O) If you are unsure about anything, I'll try to help and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history is very useful. Regards Keith-264 (talk) 16:23, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, I'll look at your edits to learn from my mistakes. And yeah, I'll change the bio soon. I'm learning the warning signs to avoid the issues I was having, and generally I am appreciating that history areas on Wikipedia have been more welcoming / easier to figure out how to contribute to. RowanElder (talk) 16:47, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

I have learned since becoming an editor in 2006 that the admins are (with some noble exceptions) a law unto themselves, who treat dissent as insubordination rather than an opportunity for them to account for themselves. If you have tangled with generic managers in real life you will know what I mean. I keep away from articles that advert to the US empire and its Satrapies, the BBC and anything to do with Palestine. I find that articles on medicine are usually reliable but mired in DocSpeak, a characteristic of many science articles too. History articles tend to reflect the sources that the editor is familiar with so are usually OK but have not always incorporated current thinking. As for grammar and syntax, I write according to the 1978 O-level English Language curriculum and am generally regarded as antediluvian. ;O) Keith-264 (talk) 17:33, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I know well what you mean, and as a sometimes-manager myself, I tend to be both more sympathetic to and more sensitive to the behavior than usual! It can be a nasty rut to fall into for all parties concerned, but it is genuinely difficult to keep clear of it. Finding one's own comfortable niche does seem to be the way to go here and I'm continuing to work at it. RowanElder (talk) 00:05, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

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