User talk:Snit333

don't panic but CFK is now in the wiki-oubliette

You may have noticed Communists for Kerry turned into a redlink, but no worries, I have asked for it to be restored, please see User_talk:RoySmith#request_for_WP:REFUND_x3 for progress on that front.

I will continue to work on Draft:Oleg Atbashian, and with our recent efforts I believe we are coming close to achieving WP:GOLDENRULE for that biographical article, which will of course contain Draft:Oleg Atbashian#Communists for Kerry as well as Draft:Oleg Atbashian#The People's Cube.

Although this is a discouraging moment (for beginners on wikipedia -- you become immune to wiki-tradegy after awhille when you realize it is all just electrons), please do not lose heart. I have enjoyed working with you thus far, and would like to complete our work, and get Draft:Oleg Atbashian turned into a bluelink in mainspace. Best, 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:04, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Canada.com Strikes Back

Snit333, if you don't mind, can you please email Martin, and ask his MMMM/DD/YYYY date of birth? We only have an estimate per WP:CALC. He may also have suggestions for improving his John Martin (British Columbia politician) article, if you feel like helping him with that, and I am also available for such improvement-efforts. Additional sources or content-suggestions are very much welcome from the subject of the biography-article, but per WP:BLP/WP:PSCOI it is strongly recommended that John keep his distance from actually *editing* his own article, or even worse, having any of his staffers or campaign volunteers edit in his stead. Too much risk of perceived non-neutrality, which violated wikipedia pillar number deux. Best to just stick to making suggestions on Talk:John Martin (British Columbia politician), and then if necessary, repeating the request using WP:TEAHOUSE if nobody answers the article-talkpage-message within a week or so.

Snit333, if you want to put the article John Martin (British Columbia politician) onto your WP:WATCHLIST, that would also help, in case it gets vandalized or otherwise degraded/debalanced. As an elected provincial legislator, John automatically achieves WP:N per WP:NPOL#1... "Politicians...members or former members... provincial legislature" ... so there is little risk of WP:DELETION ... but fortunately or unfortunately, please explain to John that:

anybody can edit wikipedia and I do mean anybody
because he ran as a conservative the wilder fans of his liberal opponents will vandalize his wikipedia biography
because he is now a member of the liberal party the wilder fans of the conservative party will also vandalize his wikipedia biography
because he was a professor disgruntled former students -- and really just students ANYWHERE mad at teachers EVERYWHERE -- will guaranteed for certain vandalize his wikipedia biography
and last but definitely not least, because he is a criminologist and taught RCMP cops
plus likely very soon, his TPC op-ed, although it would not be mentioned within the body-prose of John Martin (British Columbia politician) because of WP:ABOUTSELF and WP:UNDUE (his professional bibliography in criminology might be mentioned in the BLP article though... if he has publications that show up with double-digit cite-counts in scholar.google.com then please ask him to provide us the list of titles/publishers/dates), but the opinion piece on TPC can be cited in Draft:Oleg Atbashian as published opinion of bluelinked university-professor-and-later-provincial-legislator, methinks.[1]

So in addition to getting vandalized by disgruntled Canadians, per explanation above, it is fairly certain that wikipedia's article about John will also get some vandalism from disgruntled communists living south of the 48th parallel. Wikipedia's group of anti-vandalism volunteers are overwhelmed with work, and therefore at some point... for at least a brief amount of time and in the worst case for over a decade... the correct and neutral body-prose I have added to expand John Martin (British Columbia politician) will be overwritten at some point, with something FALSE like "...is a Canadian voyeur who eats raw kittens three meals a day..." or worse. Sometimes 'fame' in the encyclopedic sense is a curse, in other words.

Which is why it helps to have some wikipedians with usernames WP:WATCHLIST the article, to revert such nonsense -- anons like myself have no watchlist-feature available, but I figured I would ask you Snit333, while I was asking whether you wanted to help fix the D.O.B. factoid in the biography via emailing. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 14:26, 21 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

47.222, I can provide the email address. But, based on his previous terse responses I prefer to stay away from involvement in developing John Martin (British Columbia politician). Snit333 (talk) 19:53, 21 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Nah, best not to reveal his email here on wikipedia, he will just get spammed. (Bad people, as well as good people, can see what happens on-wiki.) No worries about updating John Martin (British Columbia politician) in that case -- if Martin really wants his D.O.B. corrected he can just leave a note at Talk:John Martin (British Columbia politician) saying what the proper value is. Or it can just stay approximate for another year or another decade, WP:TIND. And for the same reason, no need to get yourself into potential hot water by repeatedly emailing a BC legislator-and-criminologist ;-) 47.222.203.135 (talk) 18:53, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

side comment, on thinking like a resident of 2077

You wrote... "once the Oleg Atbashian mainspace is fully established, it will provide an anchor point for developing the TPC and CFK components" ... which is correct, in the sense that once Draft:Oleg Atbashian is mainspaced properly per the wiki-policies it cannot be deleted again for failing WP:N or WP:GOLDENRULE. But to be 100% clear, just because we succeed in converting Oleg Atbashian into a bluelink, and writing a half-dozen impeccably sourced sentences about CFK at Draft:Oleg_Atbashian#Communists_for_Kerry and a smaller amount of sentences (less coverage) at Draft:Oleg Atbashian#The_People's_Cube, does not suddenly mean that all the deleted content can then be pasted back in. That would be a WP:COATRACK violation, and should not be done.

The main *reason* all that the stuff was deleted before, in fact, was because most of the content was unsourced WP:OR and in a few cases WP:PROMO such as linking to TPC which sells products. All that noise buried the good refs like the Pluto Files in mounds of non-wikipedia-policy-compliant stuff. We are currently in the midst of a forced WP:TNT effort, to rewrite the content properly, sticking to the sources like glue. I think we now have a good chance (better than 65/35 but not too much better than that at the moment) of getting into mainspace and staying there, this time.

But although WP:NOTTEMPORARY prevents the notability-related deletions, there is such a thing as WP:IAR deletions, of articles that are constantly getting used to promote t-shirt sales, or constantly getting WP:OR material which involves slander or libel of living humans, and similar such problems. So it is important that everybody understand, who cares about Oleg/CFK/TPC/etc... once the article is written properly, it needs to *remain* proper, as I've been showing you folks.

That said, once WP:GOLDENRULE is achieved, there is some limited amount of self-sourced boring factoids (like date-of-birth for Oleg and first-launch-of-TPC and other such factual historical details) that can be inserted using WP:ABOUTSELF type sources (www.CommunistsForKerry.com and also www.ThePeoplesCube.com), but that does not mean wikipedia will suddenly become a mouthpiece for TPC positions. Quite the opposite, in general wikipedia tries to reflect the positions of the "neutral press" in a global sense, which means as TPC receives more mainstream coverage, the wikipedia content will be more negative.

At least for some folks, there will be a strong urge to Defend The Honour of the TPC project, by deleting e.g. some 2018 screed published by WaPo in WaPo saying that TPC is not funny and never was. But this urge must be sternly resisted! I think you probably understand all this, since you've been around wikipedia for a few years, but I'd appreciate it if you helped me make sure that Atbashian and Powderday understand this clearly, and more importantly, that the three of you try and communicate this zeitgeist to the not-yet-active-as-wikipedian-participants folks at TPC.

Because there *is* going to be bad press-coverage of TPC in wikipedia, in years to come, and it's important not to try and whitewash that badmouthing away. It is against wikipedia-policy, for one thing. But after all, we want future generations to be able to look back at the AfD discussions, to know what wikipedian-innards were like, a few decades from now, right? Similarly, we want future generations to be able to look back at the *mainspace* version of controversial articles, like Oleg Atbashian is undoubtedly going to be, and see what 'Reliable' sources ... in the 2017 meaning of that word ... actually SAID about Oleg/CFK/TPC.

Personally I'm optimistic about the long-term future, and I think that sentient beings will look back at the 2017-era history of TPC in 2077, and laugh increduously, at how wrongheaded their ancestors were. I myself look back sixty years ago, and six hundred years ago, and laugh... which makes me humble, because as technologically-driven improvements push society towards an exponential S-curve, we are going to advance in *six* years just as far as our ancestors generations ago advanced in *sixty* years... which is exhilirating albeit sometimes a bit scary. So I don't think that looking back in time sixty years at 2017, from the vantage-point of 2077, will be like looking back in time at 1957 is for us... I think it will be like looking back at 1417 is for us.

2077 will awesome.

But in the short term I'm exceedingly pessimistic: I can pretty much guarantee that the TPC article will be filled with WP:SOURCES publishing very mean rude things about TPC and Oleg and so on, during the next five year or ten year timeframe. Maybe even 20 years or 40 years, depending on humanity's luck overall. That's how wikipedia is set up: we reflect the world as it is, which is to say how the news media and how academia say it is, when things are done according to the wiki-policies. Perhaps reading some Joseph Heller or some George Orwell will help keep things in perspective? Or you can always go with Farenheit 451 which I particularly enjoy. But my personal advice, is to think long-term, and keep those denizens of 2077 in mind, and how they will perceive the society of 2017, when they look back at us :-) 47.222.203.135 (talk) 18:48, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

47.222, It's becoming abundantly clear that monitoring and properly maintaining a Wikipedia article over time could prove daunting to say the least. Also, it can be more than a little time consuming. As for me, I've reached the ripe old age of 74 and am not confident in my ability to monitor articles much further into the future - certainly not till 2077! :-) --Snit333 (talk) 03:14, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

since we are starting to think about mainspace

Best to start getting our ducks in a row. Please read the WP:PSCOI helpdocs, and then please create User:Snit333, and put a note right there in your userpage, that you are friends with the real-life Oleg. Then over at Draft_talk:Oleg_Atbashian, please add a personalized version of Template:connected_contributor at the top. If you don't understand the syntax of that thing, just drop me a note on my usertalkpage and I'll try to get you straightened out.

Once you get yourself aka User:Snit333 compliant with all the wikipedia-policies enforced with religious zeal by the wikipedia-COI-patrollers in mainspace (draftspace is an exception but we need to start getting ready), the other wikipedians that are connected through friendship or similar to the real-world Oleg or the real-world TPC can follow your lead.

Anybody that is *financially* compensated via the TPC website or via a legal *work* relationship (employee/coworker/partner/spouse/similar) hired by Oleg, will instead be using the far-more-stringent Template:connected_contributor_(paid) thing. This is usually reserved for folks that are editing a page about the rock-band they are the producer/manager/promoter of, or folks which edit the wikipedia-article of the corporation that they work for, in real-life (and thus also WP:COI-style are financially-conflicted-with-respect-to, here on wikipedia).

But in the case of TPC, which is mostly about political activism but also does have some fundraising and book-selling emphasis (toy all-red-cubes and tee-shirts with catchy slogans and copies of oleg's book and such), I believe we are okay to just use the Template:connected contributor things for everybody that is a contributor to slash member of the website. If at some point TPC has paid interns, paid marketing professionals, or even a paid PR firm, the best approach is NOT to ever let those people edit wikipedia. They will just get into hot water! Better to have volunteers that care about TPC and know about TPC helping at Talk:Oleg Atbashian (plus asking for help at WP:TEAHOUSE or on WP:IRC if no non-COI-wikipedian responds on article-talk within a week of a request). Those people need Template:connected contributor, because they care, but they don't need Template:connected contributor (paid) unless they ARE being paid. WP:PSCOI explains some of that sort of stuff, but you can also see the original for which that is a corollary, over at WP:TRIFECTA part number one (stay neutral). Let me know if you need help understanding any of this gobblety-goo, but it will be better to get the userpages created/annotated, and the connected-contrib-things installed, sooner rather than later. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 18:48, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

47.222, I've posted the disclaimer note at User:Snit333. However, based on my very limited connection to Oleg I'm not sure how/if Template:connected_contributor applies. Please have a look at my statement at User:Snit333 and advise. --Snit333 (talk) 02:45, 24 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]