User talk:Leucosticte

- Ottava Rima (talk) 22:17, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Warning
is a link to an off-wiki site that outs a Wikipedia editor. I am requesting revision deletion for this edit, for obvious reasons. Leucosticte, you know what that entire discussion could easily lead to. Is that what you want? It will happen, you may have already done enough to cause it. Edits like what you just did will hasten the day. We've been through it all before, here, with criticism of Wikipedia and Wikipedia users. Don't use Wikiversity for that, not without clear ethical guidelines in place, and we haven't created them yet. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:50, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh, I wasn't aware that user hadn't publicly made his identity known to the community. If it outs him against his will, then by all means, revisiondelete it. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 13:58, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
 * For someone who has been editing as long as you have, you can be astonishingly naive. I only mentioned the most obvious reason for RevDel, outing.
 * Administrators do not need to search for absence of evidence, or for evidence. They can and will act based on prima facie appearance.
 * It is possible a search would turn up evidence that he has outed himself, elsewhere or somewhere on wiki. That means nothing. It's still outing if it is pointed to here. It would merely mean that the outing was true outing.
 * The other major issue is criticism of individual Wikipedia editors, based on actions there. If there is necessity here, maybe. But there was no necessity. You were already linking to a permanent version of the WP page. It was argumentative dicta that you called his changes "butchered." So what?
 * Stop the presses! Wikipedia editor edits article from his own point of view! Really? OMG! You used to write: SoFixIt. You can't personally do that, without violating ban policy, but you know people who could. SoTellThem. (I have not reviewed the history of that article. I don't like what it does to my mood.)
 * And I'm not addressing the implications of your full edit. Bottom line, you may have taken the top off of a box of cobras. Perhaps that is your idea of fun. Not mine. Maybe, eventually, we will need to deal with the snakes. Is there a mongoose in the house? --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:50, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Butchering isn't always bad. It can increase the value of a dead animal. It depends on what you wanted to use that animal for. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 14:52, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Final warning
"Final" is my opinion, I'm not an administrator. However, you again, today, created a need for revision deletion. I don't want to see you blocked here, but if you do this again, that will change my opinion. You are so intent on arguing your case, that you pull together "evidence" that can cause harm to people. In this case, you mentioned a user name, and the very user name is a hazard to the owner of it, apparently. I understand why you would mention it. However, you are insensitive to the harm that may be caused. The user you mentioned could have appealed the global lock action, and did appeal, it appears at first blush, and abandoned the appeal, very likely because of RL harm. You know who is after him, you can find it in a few seconds with Google, on an aptly-named web site (the name is self-descriptive). Those people can cause real harm, they -- or people inspired by them -- have murdered. You are playing with the life of someone whom you are supposedly advocating for. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:15, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 *  - Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 17:04, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Leucosticte, you have been warned repeatedly not to refer to other users regarding this subject. You are welcome to discuss it yourself as much as the community will tolerate, but you may not violate the privacy of other users. Any additional privacy violations will result in an indefinite edit block for the protection of the community. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 18:07, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * So, I guess if the person in question were not a former user of Wikiversity, then it would be okay to discuss the person as much as the community would tolerate? I actually was not aware that he had ever edited Wikiversity until I looked up his username just now, and saw the block log and deletion log entries. Had I known that, I might have put two and two together and realized, "Oh, posting stuff about his off-wiki activities that he hasn't himself posted on-wiki would be outing."


 * Like many norms intended to protect individuals by restraining others from doing stuff, there's the potential that it could actually hurt the interests of the user, if he doesn't want the protection. In this case, maybe the off-wiki activities of the user were used as justification for banning him on other projects, or globally. Then a policy is proposed here that suggests importing that same kind of practice to this wiki. Maybe he would want that situation discussed, and would be willing to waive his privacy rights. But of course, being blocked here, he can't indicate that he wants to waive it.


 * One could speak about it abstractly, saying "There was this one guy who..." but that's not really a best practice because then people can't verify the information, which makes it impossible to assess whether the facts put forth in support of an argument are true or presented fairly. It's an unusual situation, that brings the rule against outing into conflict with the goal of the kind of open discussion that might better clarify whether a policy idea is a good one. If people would quit trying to ban people over off-wiki behavior, then there wouldn't be any reason to bring up users' off-wiki behavior in on-wiki discussions (e.g. discussions over whether it's a good idea to ban people over off-wiki behavior).


 * Something has to give; it's not possible to have both of the following: (1) full and open discussions (including debate about how well such policies have worked in particular cases) about the merits of proposed policies to ban people for off-wiki behavior; and (2) a privacy policy that prohibits users' off-wiki activity from being discussed on-wiki. I guess in this case, it's the full and open discussion that will be sacrificed. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 22:34, 24 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I'm not playing this game. If you'd like to help improve Wikiversity, as interpreted by the community's perspective and standards, you are welcome to do so.  If you'd prefer to tilt at windmills, please do it elsewhere.  Thanks!  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 23:30, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't know why it is, when I point out seeming contradictions and conflicts in what people and communities say or claim to support, or ask questions to try to clarify what exactly people take issue with or why, that people think I'm playing some sort of game. It's as though having curiosity and a desire to see logical inconsistencies eliminated make one an unhelpful troublemaker. The "tilting at windmills" analogy keeps arising too; that's strange, since that would imply attacking a nonexistent problem, when in truth people have been kicked off for off-wiki behavior, which was the issue under discussion, and why the example of that user was brought up. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 23:34, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

The block
I guess if I were to follow standard procedure, I'd post an unblock request and either apologize and promise to mend my ways, or explain why my actions were acceptable. But really, what's "acceptable" is a matter of opinion (by your own Wikimedia-wide policy of "ignore all rules"). It's up to you to decide whether you think I'm a good fit for this project, based on whatever criteria you want to apply for determining what makes a good project and what helps further that goal.

I don't have a lot of edits here.[the blocking custodian] is right that I've mostly been (1) criticizing the proposed child protection policy and (2) communicating with Abd about the possibility of creating a public policy/political theory course on child liberation, which would include material on child sexual liberation, among other things (e.g. the right to work, drive, etc.). However, I haven't demonstrated much serious intent to actually create this class, because I've been trying to figure out what purpose it would serve that isn't already served by the various wiki encyclopedias out there.

There are some wikis (this might even be the norm through most of the wikisphere) where the dominant attitude is, "If there's drama, let's get rid of the guy who everyone seems to be getting upset at." If you want to get rid of me on that basis, okay. That's nothing new. There are also some wikis that say, "Right or wrong, we need to suppress any discussion that looks like pedophile advocacy, and kick people off who have a history of such advocacy." That's nothing new either; in fact, that too might be the norm across most of the wikisphere.

I think it's in both of our interests to figure out whether I'm a good fit for this wiki and take appropriate action, before more time is wasted. Recently, [the blocking custodian] has not only blocked me from everything but this talk page but also deleted some of the revisions he made to this talk page. I personally don't like to participate in wikis where people throw stuff down the memory hole without good reason (although that seems to be getting more common on Wikimedia wikis). It's destructive of people's work and harmful to the goal of accountability. The community can't judge behavior's appropriateness if it can't see the evidence.

I'm going to observe the response of the community with reference to recent events, and judge for myself whether this is a place where I'd even want to continue editing. It used to be my practice, when blocked, to come back as a sockpuppet, even when it was evident I was unwelcome. That's not really my style anymore. In fact, I'm more likely to leave a wiki even if I'm not blocked, if I get the impression that I'm going to repeatedly run into conflicts with the community because people are making up the rules as they go along. I have my own wikis, and ultimately I'm going to create a whole fleet of wikis parallel to Wikimedia's, so I'm not lacking in places to create content.

Sometimes I've been accused of wikilawyering, and people have said "You know what you did wrong" because I guess to them it was obvious. Whatever. If the community hasn't established a norm, I think it's a bad practice to severely punish someone who is the test case for what the community will tolerate (and by "the community" I mean more than one sysop). Otherwise, timidity is encouraged. (Maybe there were other test cases; I'm not sure. But those people can't be mentioned.) Maybe you think the costs of boundary-testing exceed the benefits; if so, you know what to do.

I'm not the type to err on the side of caution and worry about whether I'm going to get blocked because my opinions offend people, if I haven't engaged in any kind of personal attack or disruptive behavior. I did make a few mistakes, and push the boundaries of the rules a bit, with reference to user privacy, but that's over now; it was clarified what was expected of me, and that's not what I've been blocked for this time. So, do what you're going to do. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 12:03, 28 March 2014 (UTC)


 * It's much simpler than you might think. [The blocking custodian] did some things that are outside what we expect of custodians, but he's not the topic here, that's probably over, unless he rethinks this and unblocks you, which I don't expect. There are only two sysops active, and the other one explicitly stated that it is acceptable to study topics here,Special:Diff/1166050 and the question is how. If it's not done with caution and following ethical guidelines, it can cause disruption, and matters can pass out of local control. So ... you will need to request unblock if you want to participate. There should be no rush. What you will do, my suggestion, is agree to restrain your tendency to argue for your position, immediately and voluminously. Yes, I know, ironic for me to say that, eh? Just sit on it for a bit, as you are sitting on requesting unblock.


 * I think that some strict rule for you to follow won't work, because you are the boy who says the emperor has no clothes. Rather, the boy's parents will stop him. If they are kind parents, they will not punish him, for his error was social and he had no intent to harm. Hopefully, they will help him to learn what is acceptable in public conversation and what is not. Eventually, someone will tell the emperor.... someone with skill and tact ... and bravery.


 * Rather, I suggest that you agree to
 * refrain from posting material here that you know will be seen as inflammatory, without following the ethical guidelines that you will help to develop. Knowledge, i.e., neutral information, can be, sometimes, inflammatory. So develop foundations first, before addressing what you know might be hot.
 * refrain from criticism of the practice of other editors on other wikis, and the policy decisions of other wikis. Notice that study of the practice of wikis may be allowed. Again, how it is done is crucial. "So and so abusively blocked X," or "So and so blocks whoever he doesn't like," is criticism. "So and so blocked X,Y, and Z" is not. It might be cherry-picked, that's another problem, but cherry-picking can be fixed by picking the rest of the cherries, and we have plenty of space here, subpages in mainspace, etc.
 * Be careful and sensitive to privacy policy.
 * Agree to stop immediately when warned, about anything, even if you are right as rain. If someone warns you to stop behavior that you think should be allowed here, wait for community confirmation of your opinion. Ask off-wiki (email) for attention if you need it. Document your stopping in response to the warning, don't argue with the warning. Once, on en.wiki, you were warned to stop a certain behavior that was probably legitimate. You wrote, "Too late, I'm done!" and posted an image of an upraised finger. That was the first time I found it necessary to intervene to get you unblocked. Leucosticte, all that was needed there was the "I'm done," part, and it could have been stated even better, "Thanks! I won't do that again unless it's explicitly permitted."
 * Consent to a short block at any custodian's discretion if the custodian is worried that you won't stop quickly enough. See Candidates for Custodianship/Standard stop agreement for a suggested agreement for probationary custodians.


 * If you agree to these, you can be unblocked, my opinion, without a forest of regulations and specific conditions. Yes, you will need to restrain yourself, and that restraint is, perhaps, the missing piece of your education, to be completed here. This is a wiki for learning by doing. Welcome, and sorry for any inconvenience. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:25, 28 March 2014 (UTC)


 * It is not necessary to "admit you were wrong," it is not necessary to grovel or make promises offensive to you. This is not Wikipedia. Don't make promises you cannot keep. Apologize if you see you harmed someone or caused them extra work, not just to get unblocked.


 * You are not banned, at least not yet, and a local ban is very, very unlikely. If you are banned, it would be a global ban, over which we have no control. I've been trying to avoid that, and so have others. It's like a Chinese finger puzzle, the harder you pull to escape, the tighter it gets. Stop pulling on it. Relax, take your time, and start to build educational resources. You could do it by IP. Don't start doing that without a collaborating user in good standing, I'll show you how, if it becomes necessary, we have done it with users who were considered globally banned, and it was part of a process that effectively lifted the ban, at least in part. We protect both academic freedom and the wikis and policy. So far. Please don't push us to the edge, we might fall.


 * Because we practice learning by doing, you are allowed to make mistakes. Just don't keep repeating them! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:42, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
 * People are aware of the situation, so I'm going to wait for them to take action, if they want to. It shouldn't be a big deal. If I really am a major, recurrent problem, I'll be blocked again soon enough. You guys can either give me another chance, or not. Think of it as being like the standard offer, but accelerated. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 23:34, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Suit yourself. Due process, Leucosticte. Since you now can edit this page, you may request unblock, and it's traditional to do it with an unblock template. You are not going to be unblocked just like that, with no agreement, or, let me put it this way: I would oppose such an unblock. I've told you what I recommend. I spent my political budget on this matter in requesting that you be given talk page access. Whatever you agree to, you may later question, it doesn't have to be written in stone. But don't agree to anything you are not willing to follow, at least for a while.
 * To be unblocked here, I agreed to stay out of site governance. After a while, it became clear to me that it was best for me to become involved again. So I left a message on the unblocking custodian's talk page, letting him know that I was now moving outside that restriction, and asking him to advise me to the contrary if he thought it improper. He hasn't responded, but he has been notified and, of course, any custodian could warn me. It would, however, raise the issue of the original block, it would take us back to that situation. And I'd appeal that block, and I think I have more resources now. It could be a mess. I am not, for example, planning on going for custodianship again. I could do it, policy allows it, but ... it would bring a certain group out of the woodwork, and I don't need the tools. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:18, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Wikiversity should unblock me for the sake of its own self-respect. People say sometimes, e.g. at Meta, that it's important to block me for the sake of Wikimedia's reputation. I would worry more about the effect on Wikimedia's reputation of blocking so many people for questionable reasons. Who, exactly, is it important to impress? Fox News and The Daily Mail? Really? Caving in to them will actually come to be regarded as a black mark on Wikimedia's record in the long run, I think.


 * It's really a question of, Do you guys want to be regarded as the kind of project that lets people like [the blocking sysop] run amok, doing this kind of stuff without being stopped? I would think it would tend to detract from the site's reputation as having a governance system that works well, at least in certain circles. Whether you care about those circles is up to you.


 * For the past few days, I've been at Liberty Liberty. Today, Child Protective Services whistleblower Carlos Morales gave a speech in which he said that he would rather hang out with child abusers than some of the people he used to work with at CPS, because he lost so much respect for them when he observed the behavior they engaged in supposedly for the good of the children.


 * The only special qualifications required of a CPS worker are that he have a bachelor's degree in anything (e.g. music) and a couple months of training. Yet they think they are equipped to judge what is an unfit home for a child to live in. He talked about how some of them made fun of the mothers who cried when they were taking away their children. Carlos signed up because he wanted to help children, but eventually they started telling him that he wasn't cut out to be a CPS investigator; he just didn't fit in with the culture. Sometimes that can be a badge of honor.


 * Nietzsche wrote, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." What have the self-appointed child protectors become? Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 00:30, 29 March 2014 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict with above)I think you want us to unblock you because the block was "Wrong." Leucosticte, in spite of all your experience, there are some things you never understood. Give a custodian here reason to consider that the block is unnecessary, and you are likely to be unblocked. You are not being punished. Take your time. There is no rush.


 * Now, as to the newer comment, I'm giving up. You've been asked to not debate the topic, until appropriate context is established, if it can be established. You are debating the topic, above.


 * Yes, you have not yet agreed to not debate the topic. However, I'd think you'd know this: if you are blocked for debating a topic in a manner considered unacceptable, and you continue to debate the topic on your talk page, you can expect talk page access to be revoked. Talk page access was restored so that you may request unblock, not to allow you to continue debate.


 * It's not that you are wrong. Right or wrong have nothing to do with this.


 * Just stop! Consider what I wrote. Do it or don't. You could help develop educational resources on your favorite topics, subject to ethical guidelines which you can help develop. Or you can debate and argue and try to convince us how horrible all those people are. Here on your talk page. Until someone gets tired of seeing it in Recent Changes and shuts you down. --Abd
 * I pretty much decided I'm too cool for Wikiversity; they proved themselves unworthy of my presence. The same applies to Meta-Wiki; I'm too cool for them as well. They can't handle it. That's why I'm going to severely limit my activities there when I come back, relative to the former extent of those activities; my greatness is like a blazing furnace of wonderfulness that is too bright for them to stare directly at, so they feel like they have to shield themselves from it by whatever means possible. I understand that that's what this block is about. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 19:39, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The cool thing about stories, i.e., interpretations, is that we make them up. If that story makes your life work, that's great! Unfortunately, we don't have a Template:Block me, I'm too cool for this place! I apologize for our limited selection.
 * If it stops serving you, and if you later choose to pitch in here, I think you know how to use Template:Unblock. Good luck with that blazing furnace of wonderfulness. Watch out you don't burn your toast. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 01:59, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
 * That's the thing; I'm kinda like King Midas except with fire instead of gold. If your pilot light goes out and you need someone to get it started again, let me know. Then again, maybe you use an electric stove; personally, I like having a stove that lights up immediately rather than having to slowly heat up an element. Plus the gas stove better satisfies my pyromaniac tendencies. I'm actually reconsidering whether to call it a blazing furnace of wonderfulness; "awesomeness" might be more appropriate for a MediaWiki programmer.


 * But enough about me; hopefully later today there'll be news as to whether Inclumedia's prospective co-founder will be coming on board. This of course could help pave the way for the creation of Incluversity, where we will deal harshly with sysops who misuse their powers. The greatest severity offense will be unjustifiably deleting revisions and articles; a high severity offense would be blocking user talk pages and email without justification; and a moderate severity offense would be unjustified blocking in general. Also, more specific kinds of blocking might be implemented; see 63425.


 * This prospective co-founder is a person interested in deprecating arbitrary distinctions that limit individuals' options, and who has had a few clashes, noted in local newspapers, with government officials who attempted to enforce segregation and to apply labels to her to which she has repeatedly objected. Some people have said that we have so much in common we could almost be twins, although thus far she's never been blocked from Wikipedia, that I know of, nor has any major arrests on record. Anyway, as far as the new Inclumedia collaboration is concerned, all that remains is to get approval from the two investors who will be providing the resources; one of those already approved the arrangement, and the other we'll talk to this evening, probably. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 16:06, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Good luck with your project. When you are ready, ask about linking to it. Don't just add the link.
 * If you need to send email to anyone, you may send it to me, you have my direct address, and I'll forward it if I assess it as not being a problem, or let you know. I haven't seen you abuse email, and I'd attempt to get your email unblocked here if it really made a difference. We make compromises, Leucosticte, to avoid unnecessary disruption. You have email on other projects, so it's not really necessary for anyone who is set up for email elsewhere. -- Abd (discuss • contribs) 17:13, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Unblock request
Abd provided good suggestions above that should be addressed in order to have your unblock request considered. To remain unblocked, your activities would need to provide a net positive effect for Wikiversity as determined by the community. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:55, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * You could always unblock me and then reblock me if anything bad happens. I don't anticipate that it will. More likely, those who care about the pages I edit will tend to regard my contributions as a net positive, and others will be mostly indifferent., care to weigh in? Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 17:22, 1 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Again, Abd provided good suggestions above that should be addressed in order to have your unblock request considered. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 20:58, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I wrote, above, and am highlighting below:
 * ... I suggest that you agree to


 * refrain from posting material here that you know will be seen as inflammatory, without following the ethical guidelines that you will help to develop. Knowledge, i.e., neutral information, can be, sometimes, inflammatory. So develop foundations first, before addressing what you know might be hot.
 * refrain from criticism of the practice of other editors on other wikis, and the policy decisions of other wikis. Notice that study of the practice of wikis may be allowed. Again, how it is done is crucial. "So and so abusively blocked X," or "So and so blocks whoever he doesn't like," is criticism. "So and so blocked X,Y, and Z" is not. It might be cherry-picked, that's another problem, but cherry-picking can be fixed by picking the rest of the cherries, and we have plenty of space here, subpages in mainspace, etc.
 * Be careful and sensitive to privacy policy.
 * Agree to stop immediately when warned, about anything, even if you are right as rain. If someone warns you to stop behavior that you think should be allowed here, wait for community confirmation of your opinion. Ask off-wiki (email) for attention if you need it. Document your stopping in response to the warning, don't argue with the warning. Once, on en.wiki, you were warned to stop a certain behavior that was probably legitimate. You wrote, "Too late, I'm done!" and posted an image of an upraised finger. That was the first time I found it necessary to intervene to get you unblocked. Leucosticte, all that was needed there was the "I'm done," part, and it could have been stated even better, "Thanks! I won't do that again unless it's explicitly permitted."
 * Consent to a short block at any custodian's discretion if the custodian is worried that you won't stop quickly enough. See Candidates for Custodianship/Standard stop agreement for a suggested agreement for probationary custodians.


 * These are actually simple, and, really, all users should, I'd wish, agree to these, though wishes aren't horses. Agree to the above, and I'll predict you will be unblocked promptly. I will testify that you honor agreements you have made. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 01:12, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree to the first four of those, although with regard to the fourth, I hope that won't be interpreted to mean that I also should stop even discussing whether the warning is right as rain, as long as the discussion is done in a civil way that doesn't endlessly beat dead horses. With regard to the fifth, my consent isn't really needed for a block, since it can be imposed unilaterally. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 11:01, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, Leucosticte, always an argument, eh? Okay, maybe this is superior, because it demonstrates that you aren't just going to say "Yes" so you can be unblocked. One down, four to go.
 * Refrain from interwiki criticism. This is important to the preservation of Wikiversity from disruption; a large fraction of historical WV disruption was over this. If someone is attacked here, they may respond. This can distract from the collaborative generation of learning resources and learning-by-doing, the mission of Wikiversity. "Criticism" is distinguished from "description." For a relatively detailed description of Wikipedia activity, see User:Abd/Wikipedia/List of self-reverted edits. This is really a special case of avoiding inflammatory edits.
 * Privacy policy. Avoid presenting information here that can readily lead to exposure of the real-life identity of an editor, absent the person's consent. Among other things, this can then take up an administrator's time to revision delete, which can also cause collateral damage.
 * Stop when warned. If the warning says "Do not discuss X," do not discuss X on-wiki, and only with consenting users off-wiki, as by email. This does cover arguing the point as to whether or not discussion of X is legitimate on-wiki. This is a variation on the first item, X is presumably considered inflammatory by the one warning. I did not limit this to warnings by administrators. What this does, however, is to allow an admin to consider a warning by another user as being enough warning to allow a block when violated. So stop when warned, period, and then, if it matters to you, consult off-wiki, with those you trust and who are willing to support you, at least with advice. To remind you, this is similar to Objection to Consideration of the Question. That's an undebatable motion, right?
 * Consent to block. The practical meaning of this is that you will not object to such a block. "Short block" is an important part of this. It is a block of not more than one day. With such a short block, you will not bother with an unblock template. If you follow the other agreements, this contingency is quite unlikely.


 * However, these voluntary restrictions are just that: voluntary. If you agree to them, you may withdraw them with full integrity by giving reasonable notice (I'd say at least a week) to the unblocking administrator, or to WV:RCA if that admin is inactive, that you are retracting an agreement that was a basis for unblock. Frankly, though, these agreements are just good user behavior here and everywhere in the WMF family of wikis. Further, w:WP:IAR does apply here as well as everywhere on the planet. Use caution! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 12:29, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Objection to consideration of the question is an undebatable motion, but it's harder to pass than the motion to postpone indefinitely, which basically seeks to accomplish the same thing, except with debate allowed. Either way, you avoid explicitly voting the main motion up or down. There's a different voting threshold for those two motions (objection to consideration and postpone indefinitely) for a reason.


 * I don't know why they don't just say "Here's the minimum you need to agree to, to get unblocked." Maybe it would have taken too much time. Or maybe you'd already adequately summed up the minimum. The situation is ambiguous. But if this is that minimum, then I agree to it. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 13:34, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
 * There is no "they." There is just "us."
 * You may counter-offer, of course! But my prediction of unblock then is not solidly based, and, personally, I worry. You are making it difficult, when it could be easy. I did not say "this is the minimum," because I have no authority to set the minimum. There is no formal policy or guideline that actually controls. (There is WV:Blocking policy.)
 * A conditional agreement is not an agreement. Agree, don't agree, or counter-offer (a form of not agreeing.)
 * Yes, Objection to Consideration is different than Postpone Indefinitely, and I was incorrect in that Objection *does not require a second.* It is summary process. And so is wiki process, generally, on these matters. Objection does require a two-thirds immediate vote.
 * Your agreement to the proposed conditions is not an agreement that you were properly blocked. Rather, the proposed agreement was designed to address all possible reasonable concerns, based on your prior behavior, to make the unblock as uncontroversial as possible. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:23, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Okay, I've revised my unblock request reason. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 21:59, 2 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, well, he didn't agree to the specifics, but ... it may be enough. Dave, please consider this. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:27, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Abd. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 03:32, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Rhonda Britten
Wikiversity avoids biographies as stand-alone resources, especially BLPs. Can of worms. However, obviously, from Landmark Education, we can have articles on some method or approach for personal growth. Landmark may be sufficiently notable to have its own topic here, though the company is now Landmark Worldwide. There might be a resource studying such things, and there are many that might be covered. Consider a university. Would there be a course on "Rhonda Britten"? I don't think so.

However, could a psychology department, or a sociology department, have a course on this kind of activity? That would then cover her approach? If so, what would the university course be called?

Then, underneath that resource, as a subpage, could be the Rhonda Britten page you created, only renamed, probably, to Fearless Living. Wikipedia has a redirect from Fearless Loving to her bio, which is weird, since Fearless Living, the actual name of the "Institute," has no redirect.

"Life coaching" occurs to me, but I'd want to look around. I dislike doing piles of page moves before having some relatively settled consensus.

There is a minor problem, that the wikipedia link you lead with is dead. I'll address that and fix it. Thanks for contributing to Wikiversity! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:36, 7 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Ugh. Ah, well, small problem, easily fixed. The university would even less have a course called "Rhonda Britten terminology." Rather, suppose we settle on a top-level name of Life coaching as a resource covering the various methodologies out there. (That is *not necessarily ideal, this is just an example.*) The page might then be Life coaching/Fearless Living/Terminology. The Life coaching page would refer to Fearless Living as one among various methods. The Fearless Living page, if we created it today, would be a stub that only holds a link to the relevant Wikipedia article(s), possibly a Fearless Living web site, and the Terminology page.


 * Wikipedia decided on a flat structure, which then created a host of problems to be solved there. Wikipedians looking at Wikiversity often see, first, the level of disorder that still is common here, and dismiss Wikiversity as impossible, a total mess.
 * Pages were created here in mainspace just as pages were created on Wikipedia, one page per topic, no matter how non-notable the topic might be. And because original research was allowed and there was no notability requirement, a lot of fluff was created. Much of it was truly useless and that is being speedied.
 * But we have a page on How to build a pykrete bong. Drives Wikipedians nuts. That page survived RFD here. However, it should probably be moved to subspace, under some How-to resource. It is currently in Category:Drugs, which may not be terribly appropriate. After all, it's not about a drug.
 * One topic at a time. We may never completely clean up mainspace, because categorization is not perfect and can be somewhat arbitrary, but the extent to which it is cleaned up, to that extent Wikiversity becomes more accessible. What I have found is that appropriate categorization of resources, which can include moves to user space for the least appropriate material, will almost always avoid deletion. Exceptions are rare.
 * Further, being able to create what, on Wikipedia, might be POV forks allows us to avoid revert warring, if some serious dispute arises over how to present a topic. Fine! You present yours and I'll present mine, and may the reader decide which is better. Maybe both are, together. And the comparison is educational. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 22:57, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikiversity structure
I see that you created a terminology subpage for a book. Some thoughts:
 * The page above is an essay created by User:Nobody60 who has created a lot of essays but tends to not identify them or attribute them as such. That creates a long-term neutrality problem, but we are patient. If you look about, you will see how his essays have been, often, moved down to subpages in mainspace, or to his user space, perhaps, I forget.
 * Creating terminology pages could be highly educational for you. And helpful to others.
 * You created the Terminology page as a subpage of a nonexistent page supra, titled with the book. Probably best to go ahead and keep a link in the chain, it can prevent pages from getting lost. I did this.
 * Any autoconfirmed user may move a page and attached talk page together, but to move a more complex page structure as a unit takes custodian tools.
 * I stated that I preferred to avoid moving pages until there was some consensus. That is because repeated moves create double redirects, which are broken, and cleaning up the useless intermediate redirs takes up custodian time. Dave is of good cheer, though, he will very likely whack those intermediate redirs in a minute. Sometimes Sidelight sees the speedy deletion templates them and helps, too. I have handled the redirects. I left a redirect at Rhonda Britten and the attached Talk page, for now, pointing to the present name of the page you created. All the other redirs have a deletion request on them.
 * I'm also, however, assertive about cleaning up Wikiversity. It's important for the future of this place. So sometimes I just move stuff first and ask questions later.
 * The essay on the book, which you edited and so did I, may not accurately present the content of the book. The language was clumsy, non-academic in tone. That's okay, though we prefer academic tone here, when possible, but possibly misrepresenting the content of the book is not okay. If you have the book, that would be something to look at. If the essay becomes one, explicitly, and the statements are then attributed as his personal interpretation of the message of the book, it's okay as well, he does not have to be right. And then someone can criticize the essay....
 * It's all good, then. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:20, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
 * If that essay is intended to be a summary of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, it comes up short. Nowhere in that book is there a list of the 20 rules the essay sets forth, and some of those might even be contrary to Gottman's views and advice. Gottman is all about rejecting relationship advice that's based on opinions rather than research, since much of it is ineffective at improving relationships. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 00:35, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Indeed, I suspected so. So what do we do about it? I'd urge thinking about this. Nils (Nobody60), on the one hand, has his rights, but, on the other, I'll assert that he's cooperative. L., I know your pet project is a massively inclusive encyclopedia, so you can consider this training in preparation for that, in an easier environment. After all, Wikiversity is for "learning by doing." --Abd (discuss • contribs) 03:18, 8 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I'll probably just ignore the page, rather than try to fix it. However, I recommend getting a copy of that Gottman book. It's profound. I also have his book, Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child; you might find that book more immediately relevant than I do, with regard to opportunities to practice the principles, but I did see fit to write a ChildWiki article on it, on my localhost. His basic philosophy with regard to caring about children's feelings is more enlightened, I think, than what one sees in a lot of mainstream books. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 03:35, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Proofs for the existence of God
You wrote, in place where it was irrelevancy piled on marginal relevance:
 * His Qu'ran code might be more fodder for that list I gave you earlier.

I don't recall seeing it before. However, those lists are fascinating, in a way. What is being proven? What is "God"? I used to travel to schools and talk about Islam. I remember a student one time who got up and said, "There is no God." I said, "what God is there that is not?" "Your God," he said. Bold kid. I said, "The God that you don't believe in, I don't believe in either." He was speechless. It had simply never occurred to him that there might be thinking beyond his narrow concepts.

I more or less don't define God, but if I must, I define God as "Reality." The Lesswrong crowd a big deal of my use of capital R for Reality. I.e., my assignment of significance to it. Okay, I plead guilty. I assign significance to Reality. Now, do they?

I am taking a stand that there is a Moon, that our pointing is to something Real. I am not making claims about what that actually is. I strongly suspect that it is humanly unknowable. So, those atheists go through all the arguments for the existence of God, and find that all of them are non-sequiturs. Of course they are! But so too would be all the arguments for the existence of Reality.

So they spent all that time collecting 667 arguments for the existence of God. And, no, the Rashad Khalifa proof wasn't there. They only handle Christian non-arguments. They are apparently Christian atheists. The page is really a big joke, of course. However, they have a link to a page: "For real proofs of the nonexistence of any god, see "Why Atheism?"

They are quite confused. They make the common point that atheism "is just the lack of belief in any gods." They do this to avoid the need for any proof, in fact: "Atheists can simply say that the existence of any god hasn't been reliably proven." Yet, in linking to the page, they betray their real belief: that there is no god, and that they have proof. Which they don't. Basically, what they have done is to provide naive ideas about God, and ridicule them. Their "proofs" are just as funny or funnier as those they put up on the other side. Let me summarize a few:

1. Ten "good Christians" praying could not thereby stop a coin from falling if I drop it. Therefore there is no God.

(This is a beautiful one. This is stated as a gedanken experiment, but it's one that they assume they know the answer to, what would actually happen. They have not actually tried the experiment, they are simply assuming the result. In fact, running this experiment could be somewhere between difficult and impossible. Could you get "ten Good Christians" to actually pray to stop a coin falling that some idiot drops? Sincere prayers? The kind that a Good Christian might actually expect a God to answer? And how does it come that the existence of God turns on the ability of some set of idiots stupid enough to pray like that, earnestly staking their entire faith on the result, to influence a coin drop? Hello?)

2. Aristotle was wrong about heavier objects falling faster. Aristotle was long considered a great philosopher. Therefore there is no God.

3. Giordiano Bruno was brutally murdered by the Church. Therefore there is no God.

4. Millions of heretics have been killed. Therefore there is no God.

5. The argument from ignorance is defective. Therefore there is no God.

(This is also really cool, it's an argument from ignorance.)

6. We understand how lightning works. Therefore there is no God.

7. A whole series of arguments for the existence of God are defective. Therefore there is no God.

8. The universe does not seem to have been made for us, and it's really really big and we are really, really small. Therefore there is no God.

9. There is lots of evidence for evolution. Therefore there is no God.

10. Feelings of love are created in the body by hormones. Therefore there is no God.

11. The Bible contradicts itself. Therefore there is no God.

12. There are anti-gay verses in the Bible. Therefore there is no God.

13. There is more than one religion. Therefore there is no God.

That's a nice number to stop on. I did not completely read the page, it was one ridiculous non-sequitur after the other. Okay, I was unfair. They did not actually say "therefore there is no God." That I supplied by appending the alleged purpose of the page.

Toward the bottom, they actually come to something. It is not a proof of the nonexistence of God, but it actually stands on a par with some of the best arguments *for* the existence of God. They call it the "joy of atheism." And there we come to the crux. They mention that Buddhism is not theist. The fact is that they don't have a clue what God means to a lot of people. What they are rejecting are their ideas of other people's ideas. They seem completely unaware of the problem. But in the Joy of Atheism, they point to something that has some depth. Joy. Beauty. Wonder. A theist will talk about the Glory of God. So they call it something different. So what?

They think that God is male, that's one of the things they assert. No. That's peculiarly Christian, pretty much. It's confused by the pronouns used in, say, the Qur'an. Arabic has no neutral pronoun, every pronoun is "gendered," but the gender does not necessarily indicate a sexual maleness. For example, the Sun is female and the Moon is male. Don't ask me why! So where we would say "it," Arabic will say some equivalent of he or she. We do the same, sometimes. And we call Fate by "she," "That's all she wrote," because "it"s don't write, probably. The Qur'an refers to our creation from a "single soul," and from her her mate. You won't see it translated that way, but it's the Arabic. The word for soul, "nafs" is feminine. Very clearly, in Islamic theology, and setting aside some heretics, God has no gender, is not a person or man or human being at all. God has no limited form, no limitation of any kind, is utterly transcendent. One of the ways I put it is that any conception we have of God is not God. All these things are so for Reality, and Reality is one of the names of God in Arabic. (al-Haqq, also translated as "the truth.")

For me, "God" refers to even more than the circle of Don't Know Don't Know in Landmark. It is the edgeless hypersphere of reality itself, beyond time. Another name for God, from the saying of the Prophet, is Time.

I've always been fascinated by how Einstein came to his conceptions, it was by imagining that he was light. For light, there is no time. The entire history of the universe happens at once. And, of course, ancient concept, God is light. (Ibn Arabi glosses "light" as "knowledge," however, in interpreting the verse "God is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth." So, to him, God is the knowledge of everything, or the knowing of everything, which is, in my view, efficiently stored in reality itself. Why have two things, the object and the knowledge of the object. Messy. Inefficient!

Yes, Awe and Wonder. If people have that, they are Believers, and it matters little what they call themselves. And that is a message that I found in the Qur'an, many years ago, and that's why I call myself a Muslim. If one looks at the formal definition, someone who accepts the Qur'an as a "message from God," is, by definition, a Muslim. That's it. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 01:41, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Mentioned
You were mentioned Request_custodian_action. Thanks. - Sidelight12 Talk 01:31, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
 * - Sidelight12 Talk 22:21, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Unblock request

 * Unblocked, as noted above. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 02:46, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Custodians blocking custodians
There is a very good reason for the ability. It could even extend to allowing probationary custodians to block permanent custodians. The problem is a probationary custodian unblocking themselves and ignoring the block reason. So we might consider setting up a special user group, probationary custodians, with no ability to unblock themselves, but ... simpler might just be that if a probationary custodian wheel-wars with a permanent one, immediate desysop on request. That may be where we go. It just needs to be clear policy, to be pointed to by stewards, and we need to discriminate between permanent and probationary custodians, so the user groups might be distinct. We might also set up that a local 'crat can remove probationary custodian rights without going to meta. We should think about this. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:42, 17 October 2014 (UTC)