Wikipedia:Editor review/Wikidudeman

Wikidudeman

Wikidudeman (talk · contribs) I am User:Wikidudeman and I have been on this encyclopedia for over a year now and have about 15,000 edits. I have created several hundred articles and I have helped bring a few articles up to GA status including Anabolic steroid(soon to be FA hopefully) and Homeopathy and have as of now brought 1 article Parapsychology to FA status. I would like to be reviewed due to some comments that have been made that I am exhibiting "Ownership" of the Homeopathy article. I want to explain the background of this. I came upon the Homeopathy article a few months ago and noticed how it was in very bad shape. I had experience collaborating article rewrites (such as with the Parapsychology article) and I wanted to do this to that article. So I rewrote the article, gathered all major contributors to comment on the rewrite, discussed the rewrite for about a month until there was consensus, and then I implemented the rewrite. The article, prior to me organizing a rewrote looked like this. The article now looks like this:Homeopathy. It's currently a GA and hopefully will soon be an FA. Prior to the rewrite it was barely a B class article and had never reached GA status. Currently however as the article is improving I am encountering one or two accusations that I am exhibiting "ownership" of the article. I have civilly and repeatedly asked the users making the statements to provide clear examples and evidence, to no avail. I do not know how any of my behavior on the article or it's talk page would come anywhere near WP:OWN however I am starting this editor review to perhaps get comments from editors not involved in the article. Something like 90% of the edits to the article are not reverted by me and those that are are either vandalism or reverts where changes are made to the previous version in an attempt to reach consensus. I've never engaged in an edit war with the article and encourage all users to comment on the talk page. I would like editors not involved in that article to review my behavior on the article and perhaps offer some constructive suggestions for improvement. I will not stop editing the article however. Also I would like to take this opportunity for other editors uninvolved to review my actions on other articles as well. Thanks. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 21:01, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Reviews

• You might want to try a WP:RFC instead. The Editor review is not really for single incidents. As to the allegations of article ownership; you appear to be generally in the right although you might want to be a bit more diplomatic about it. Trying working with the good parts of people suggestions instead of just denying there worth strait away. -Icewedge 05:24, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Although I wanted to use this opportunity not only to get comments on the Ownership thing but also on my editing in general so that I could improve them. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 12:54, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

• WP:OWN has occasionally been the cry made by the editors who disagree with reliable facts and editing that improves articles. I have had this charge leveled against me for actions at Redshift, Plasma cosmology, Big Bang, and other places. A common place where ownership is argued is at Intelligent design and global warming where oftentimes users will accuse a cabal of owning the article. This is a systematic problem with Wikipedia and is not an issue with your editing. Bascially, cranks and POV-pushers who don't get their way are angry that their narrow visions are not on display by the Wikipedia community. I wouldn't let it get you down. ScienceApologist 17:50, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 23:04, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

• I think very highly of the quality of your edits on para-science pages. You have good judgment of what to include, and of what the balance should be. Now some of those with particular strong POV there are going to take offense no matter what you do or say, but it still would help to always explain yourself fully and answer all complaints and try to convince them that their possibly peculiar viewpoints are getting appropriate expression. It is usually not a good idea to start editing a page like psychokinesis and say on the start page as you begin that: "This article is horrific. " Although you are in fact well qualified to make such comments, and it was probably justified in this case, editing is a community project. That's the sort of thing which gives rise to complaints of OWN. You're not the final arbitrator of content--you are an editor like anyone else, and you can not expect to control by merely being right. (I am the more willing to say this straight out, because I tend to have similar problems. I deal with them by not editing such pages unless asked to have a look, and then going in, trying to make some specific helpful comment, and then leaving it to the editors there.) Your approach may improve the page for a time, but it will leave hard feelings. And then in a few months, the guys with the POV will be back. DGG (talk) 19:19, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I agree that calling the article's state "horrific" might not have been very constructive. I should have been more specific. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 23:04, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

• I've seen you around wikipedia. You seem to be civil and hard working. I won't really comment on the article ownership but I would let others be bold if I were you. I've had a look at your most recent edits and I don't see anywhere where you can improve, so keep it up! I also noted that you made almost 5000 edits last month; a huge amount--Phoenix 15 17:46, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your review. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 00:03, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

• You're civil, hard-working, and do pretty good work. Some aspects of your writing style could improve - you tend to over-wordiness and overuse of jargon, which means your edits usually need further work before they reach a finished state. You're good at trying to build consensus, but show occasional poor judgement in trying to rope loony and disruptive of editors to join in the consensus-building, which can be frustrating.

You do have slight problems in being a little over-proud of your work. This is well and good, but you have a tendency to use a lot of jargon and difficult terms in relatively mainstream articles, and trying to get GAs and FAs before the text is really made simple enough for general readers. This also applies to removal of tags, which can likewise be a bit rushed.

Your work, however, is inevitably well-cited. [A few challengable cites in a lengthy article do not change the overall good quality]

The over-willingness to compromise can mar otherwise good work with poor applications of WP:FRINGE. The sections of Homeopathy dealing with the history related to Hahnemann, especially before the late changes to the draft where I removed a lot of loaded language, were fairly obviously taken a little too uncritically from the homeopathic contributors. For example, the section where Hahnemann's thought processes were set out kept using loaded language something like "Hahnemann deduced that an effective remedy would cause similar symptoms to the disease." - which is not an NPOV presentation of a fringe theory, as it implicitly presents Hahnemann's conclusions as true. Actually, even after my attempted rewording fix, that section's still coming under a lot of fire, so a bit more care on that would be wise.

I'm going to have to say this, I suppose: You can be a little too formal on talk page discussions. You sometimes seem to be being so careful and measured in your speech that it can come across as a bit defensive. Now, those who know you understand that you're just a bit fastidious and careful, but to people who don't know you, it can come off as defensive and detatched. I'm not sure there's much you can do about this, but I think it's probably the main reason you have a lot of conflicts with the more emotional editors.

Well, anyway, any offense was certainly not intended. Hope that helps! Vanished user ^talk 16:00, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments Adam. I generally try to get all editors involved in discussions on an articles talk page regardless of their beliefs about the article. It's true that I am also very careful in my words, this is to preserve clarity and to ensure that talk pages don't descend into message board type debates about the actual topic opposed to how to best write the article in question. Generally I only have troubles with editors who want no part in consensus building and only want to push POV and ignore all attempts to reach consensus or discussions such as notes on talk pages or via E-mail, etc. I will try to seem less detached on talk pages however I think a level of detachment is always good as getting too emotionally involved into articles is never good. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 16:06, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Aye, I wouldn't change too much - you have had surprising success at building consensus. But you have occasionally gave disruptive editors a few too many chances and encouragement, which can annoy the editors actually working to improve the article. As for detachment - some is good, but I'm a bit worried that one reason you get attacked so much is that you keep your feelings so close that people not used to your writing style might not know when they're hurting your feelings, and so on, and so see the lack of response as reason to escalate their abuse of you to try and get a response, and... Well... you can see why that's not good. Vanished user ^talk 16:41, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I don't get hurt feelings on Wikipedia. I generally dislike insults or accusations purely because they aren't productive. I try to make that clear with some editors who use accusations or insults without ever giving details or examples. As for giving editors chances, I generally give everyone a chance to try to work things out, regardless of their viewpoints. However there's only so far I'll go as I'm not native. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 16:47, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

• Based on what I have seen of your contributions in the difficult recent discussions about Homeopathy, I much appreciate the civility and reasonableness of your approach. As Vanished user suggests above, this doesn't work with everyone, but I'm sure that can also be said about other styles of discussion. For what it's worth, I think you are doing very well. Wanderer57 03:54, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments! I was just about to archive this Editor review but I decided not to. I am glad that I didn't, I will allow it to go the full 30 days. I agree with you that no matter how reasonable and polite someone is, some editors simply are oblivious to it and will be unaffected by it, however I can do nothing more than my best. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 04:23, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

• I've never looked at your mainspace edits closely, what I've seen of them are reasonable (I am reluctant to say good because we rarely overlap in expertise and I don't feel qualified to comment on substance). Your talk page contributions are somewhat baffling, sometimes incredibly pithy, sometimes abrupt to the point of harshness (I'm thinking of the Image:Nbodybuilder.jpg incidents specifically), to enthusiastic and friendly. Finding out that English was not your native language was an 'aha' moment - you might not realize all the nuances your messages contain, explaining the sometimes overly-cautious language and variability in tone. Still, if you can assist in building consensus on not one, but at least three contested pages (homeopathy, parapsychology and steroiods), I don't think your ability to communicate in English is hindering you. Dealing with POV pushers is hard, and you are nowhere near as intemperate as some editors I've seen. I say good job. One thing you might want to watch is replying to every single commment as during your RFA - it's not always necessary and it does have an impact on how you are viewed. Some see it as harmless, justified and valid, others as apologetic; probably depending on if they like you or not :) Also, thanking everyone for their comment/reply, it looks odd - more of an opinion than any reason to change things if you are more comfortable with it. WLU 15:19, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

• I thought that it was unprofessional and unnecessary to bring a complaint to the administrator's notice board about the user-page of a user with whom you have had several disagreements over article content. Especially when that complaint had little substance. I said as much, in that debate, but I feel that this should be mentioned here too. futurebird 15:28, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

So the fact that I had a content disagreement with the editor 8 months ago means that I can't ask for comments about the users disruptive userpage, which BTW has caused the userpage in question to be changed and fully protected due to the inappropriate content? As far as the complaint being without substance, several editors disagreed and the page has since been changed by an administrator and fully protected from editing due to the user adding the material back after several warnings. No, I don't believe for a second that I was in the wrong when I asked for input on the userpage. The fact that I've had content disagreements with the editor several months ago should have no relevance to whether or not I can discuss the inappropriate content of the users page. Wikidudeman ^(talk) 01:48, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

• I just noticed this page. Frankly, I am stunned that a non-native English speaker does as well as you do. I have trouble enough with the language, and I am a native speaker. You do seem to handle yourself well in very difficult situations, something a lot of us, including me, have trouble with. Granted, I have really only seen you around one particular page, but I do think that you probably are among the most reasonable, open-minded, and objective editors on that page. Given your being a non-native speaker, I can easily say that it would make a lot of sense not to judge any comments you may have made too harshly, as the various nuances of English are hard enough for us native speakers to understand. Frankly, if you wanted to go for an adminship, I'd be proud to be able to sponsor you. John Carter 23:55, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Comments

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Questions

1. Of your contributions to Wikipedia, are there any about which you are particularly pleased, and why?

   I am very proud of my contributions to the Anabolic steroid, Parapsychology article as well as the Homeopathy article. These are just a few however that I am proud of.

3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or do you feel other users have caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

   I do get involved in conflicts frequently (usually involving myself so that I can resolve them) however I always follow procedure when attempting to resolve disputes. Current "conflicts"(Conflict:disagreement between me and other editor(s)) I am involved in would be the one mentioned above as well as Race and ancient Egypt and perhaps Black Supremacy(seems to have just ended). Both are content disputes and seem to be progressing well.