User talk:Tony Sidaway

A NOTE ABOUT ARCHIVING

I don't archive this talk page any more. After acquiring well over 100 archive pages I sat down one day and asked why I was bothering. The vast majority of my edits have informative summaries, and in general my talk page edits have summaries containing significant quotes from the body of the comment, so if you want to know what I said on this page at some period in the past the best way to find it is by looking at the history. I just can't be bothered to continue churning out hundreds and hundreds of pages in user talk space to duplicate what is already in the database. --TS 14:31, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Don't

...indulge GR in his silly games. Just ignore his provocations -- most likely he hates that more than anything. The pattern is that he digs himself in deeper and deeper until he gets blocked; he wheedles an unblock out of a gullible admin by promising to do better; shapes up for a while; and gradually reverts to form. Lather, rinse, repeat. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 06:51, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm trying to get everyone to assume good faith. Acting as if GoRight were just some troll (which I do not believe is true) would not be in keeping with this aim. Like most of us he has a mixture of good points to make and stuff that is best ignored. Ignoring the former because of the latter is not an option. --TS 19:39, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Just saw this. Thank you. You have earned a few good faith "brownie points" here. --GoRight (talk) 00:37, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Provocative Editing

I'll thank you to not collapse other people's discussions on the noticeboard, [1] and [2]. Have a nice day. --GoRight (talk) 23:02, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

That's BS, Tony. Stop collapsing other people's posts. I suggest you self-revert. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:30, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Feel free to uncollapse. I'm just trying to keep the discussion from becoming unproductive. Not provocative, but bold. Happy New Year. --TS 00:18, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, I will. TheGoodLocust (talk) 00:32, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough, I will accept the WP:BOLD explanation in good faith. Happy New Year back at you. --GoRight (talk) 00:34, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Cheers. Happy editing in 2010. --TS 00:37, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

CC enforcement page talk page

Hi Tony, please note that the usual practice with this sort of thing is for a threaded discussion. See Wikipedia:General sanctions/Obama article probation/Requests for enforcement for a comparison. You'll notice that the talk page isn't used. -- ChrisO (talk) 04:45, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Okay. Sorry, it's been a long time. --TS 04:46, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

I am so out of it

All of a sudden I find article on probation tags everywhere. I didn't see such a big effort to inform editors that this debate was going on and in fact I missed it completely. When I looked at the debate it seemed to involve a very small "in-crowd" and a few hacks. This hardly seems to be a community consensus. Whilst I have never been blocked and will always respond to reason I now feel I am treading on egg shells, I can never be WP:BOLD. I think this could potentially backfire big style. This is an area where the crackpots nearly outnumber the "experts". It is NOT Barak Obama and it is not the Balkans (where nearly every editor is a crazy POV pusher anyway ;-) ). Polargeo (talk) 06:35, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Oh I think it will probably succeed. The intention is to slow down or cull the hotheads and give Wikipedia's policies a chance to work. A particular problem on the talk pages has been personal attacks and side-tracking of discussion.

The alternative to this probation is arbitration, which in cases like this is typically very, very messy and acrimonious. --TS 06:45, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I wonder if the committee will give the probation a chance to succeed. For months they've signaled that they want to beat up on those who edit the GW articles from a scientific perspective. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 06:49, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

If I thought that were true I would not edit science articles at all. The Committee does not want to drive scientifically literate editors from articles. There are some problems on the global warming articles relating to the number of people who read nonsense in a newspaper and wonder why it isn't in Wikipedia, and the number of banned editors who persistently hang around and make trouble. Once those problems are cleared up the only test to pass is to learn to cooperate in good faith with the remaining editors. --TS 07:18, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

"Show me that map of the near east again"... - or, as a tried to clarify on the ArbCom page, the problem is that (most of) one side in this dispute is not sanctionable, as they neither care about the fate of their accounts (hey, there are always more, and it's not as if they do much with them, anyways) or the quality of the article (see the blindness with which some established editors reinstate sock edits without minimal verification). AGF is not a suicide pact, and while I could understand someone like e.g. Ed Poor, I find it quite hard to extend it to several of the current bunch. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:08, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I really don't see it that way at all. There are some good people who are very skeptical of global warming and I think they can be relied on, once they see how it works, to shape up and do the right thing. --TS 23:36, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for your adjudication of my noticeboard issue. I'm concerned that some of the incivility that previously existed will continue to arise if the issues here Talk:Art_Bell#Obama_vote, here Talk:BBC#Clarified_the_BBC.27s_Status_as_Britain.27s_Semi-Official_State_Broadcaster, here Talk:Václav_Klaus#I_Ask_Consensus_for_a_Substantial_Rewrite_of_this_A and here User_talk:Nothughthomas get no attention whatsoever. I've been moving off entries I'm interested in but in which the user in question is beginning to suddenly materialize in but anytime I move to a new entry he also shows up with the apparent single-interest purpose of debating the opposite side - regardless of what that side is - of any talk page comment I make or edit or I suggest, including liberal and demonstrably inconsistent deletes of my contributions. (please reference the Art Bell entry, specifically)

If it is best I terminate my participation in wikipedia for the benefit of the community I am willing, sadly, to do that. My only issue is that I don't think the status quo in the way the user is choosing to interact with me is exaclty a reasonable or judicial state-of-affairs with which to expect me to deal for an extended period of time in a WP:CIVIL way; trying to push someone's buttons hard and long enough will eventually produce a non-WP:CIVIL response from even the most tempered individual. I'm at a loss at what to do since my attempts to disengage are seeming without fruition as any new entry to which I move the same thing occurs. Would appreciate any counsel or guidance you can provide. (And if it's I should leave, I will accept that in the spirit it's given, too.)

I absolutely welcome any issues an admin has with me raising them with me. As it is, however, the treatment I'm getting from this contributor is becoming increasingly aggressive. I want to assume AGF but the pattern here is of pushing buttons in an attempt to get me to "trip up." This may disrupt the wikipedia experience for other contributors.

Kind thanks - Nothughthomas (talk) 11:28, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

The best advice I can give you is to read the behavioral guideline "Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point". I think your interactions all show a tendency towards parodying the stance of other editors. Anywhere else, this kind of juvenile behavior may be tolerated, but on Wikipedia it is recognised as particularly destructive of the atmosphere of trust we must have in order to produce our best work.

As an illustration, I'll take your behavior on Fars News Agency and BBC. At 15:59 on 29th December, you edited Fars News Agency, in which the BBC, CNN and Reuters were cited as referring to FNA as Iran's "semi-official news agency." You took the reference to the BBC, and added the description "the UK's semi-official news agency." A minute later you added a similar description of the BBC to the BBC article. It is very difficult to see that as a good faith edit, because of the progression from "BBC calls FNA a semi-official news agency of Iran" to "BBC is a semi-official news agency of the UK". I can give other examples but that is one that I noticed most recently. Such editing on Wikipedia is very rare and sticks out like a sore thumb, and it raises suspicions. You have not acted to quell those suspicions through your interactions with others--rather the reverse.

So, drop the posturing, stop making a song and dance about people writing on your talk page, and try to recognise that you are interacting with human beings who have feelings and who will not react well to somebody they suspect of behaving dishonestly and engaging in parody. --TS 12:01, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. The edit in question was a good faith edit. Given the almost complete absence of participation in the Fars entry it would be difficult to suggest I was trying to make a WP:POINT in a dead entry. When another user reverted that edit I accepted the undo and let it lay.

And I have feelings, too. How can you reconcile these discussions as they way to treat a human being?

1- Talk:BBC#Clarified_the_BBC.27s_Status_as_Britain.27s_Semi-Official_State_Broadcaster 2- Talk:Art_Bell#Obama_vote 3- Talk:Václav_Klaus&action=edit&section=10 4 -User_talk:Nothughthomas

How is it acceptable to have one user essentially enjoy "carte blanche" to follow me from entry to entry with the sole purpose of challenging any position I take - regardless of what it is? Do you know what a complete piece of shit this makes me feel like? I'm sorry for using a 4-letter word but I don't think anyone really appreciates how destructive this is when another user is let "off the chain" to "go after" someone. If there's demonstrable cause to ban me then do it. Please don't just let another user terrorize me until I quit as a "backdoor ban."

Best Regards - Nothughthomas (talk) 12:06, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Quick Note

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know I'm going on an extended wikibreak to let the anger deflate. Vaclav_Klaus is far too important of an entry to jeopardize on a single user's personal issues with me he's acting out across five entries concurrently. Before I left I wanted to drop you a quick note to thank you for your responsiveness, even if we may have disagreed. I hope to see you when I return. Best Regards -- Nothughthomas (talk) 13:08, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Error?

Tony, what do you mean by this? GoRight has been warned not to make any more vexatious claims. He's not been banned from anything as far as I know. Or did I miss something? -- ChrisO (talk) 19:52, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

It was an unfortunate use of words on my part. --TS 23:34, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

On references re. Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear

I note the swift obliteration of references on the Wikipedia page for the late Dr. Crichton's controversial novel, State of Fear and wonder why such should have been undertaken. The Deming article from the Journal of Scientific Exploration is particularly pertinent in providing a perspective balancing the almost universal hostility of the AGW hypothesis' supporters, whose hymns of hatred against Dr. Crichton have been unremitting since the publication of this novel. I can't say that I'm pleased to see the reference to the Slate review removed as well, inasmuch as readers are not well-served by being deprived of the opportunity to see what was said about the work in one of the most popular online sources of opinion at the time of its appearance in print. Moreover, given the environment in which Dr. Crichton offered his speech at the National Press Club in January 2005, the pertinence of that speech to State of Fear is undeniable, and censoring a reference to it from the page on this novel while retaining Al Gore's very indirect comment so prominently is pretty damned strange. 71.251.140.124 (talk) 20:24, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I just tidied up the external links section, per the External links guideline. I deliberately listed the removed links on the talk page so that they could easily be redeployed in expanding the article. I strongly urge you to do so. --TS 23:33, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Are you going to keep your word? To forestall further WP:edit warring, any editor who adds or removes contested material from this article without first attaining consensus here may be blocked from editing. To be clear: any edit which another editor has reverted in whole or in part is contested. --TS 23:07, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

At the moment you appear to be tidying up a change which has no consensus? --mark nutley (talk) 23:16, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Please address your complaint to the person who performed the problematic edit. If his edit was against consensus (which I find improbable, frankly) then he should be warned or directly sanctioned. My edits were simply formatting, grammar and spelling corrections. --TS 23:27, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I did address in to the problematic editor, he promtly deleted my question without answering it.

Might i ask what you find improbable? that he had consensus or he acted against it? mark nutley (talk) 00:12, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

As far as I can tell you're referring to this edit by William M. Connolley. This is what he did:

• Change section title to focus on the error
• Remove redundant reference to use of non peer-reviewed sources.

Plus...well, er, that's it. That's the whole of his edit. The section in question in Connolley's revision still says AR4 contains an error and still says that non-peer reviewed sources were cited, against IPCC's rules.

Where's the problem? The probation doesn't stop editors making sensible edits without first asking for permission. --TS 00:28, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

There is a fine distinction to be made between "editing without consensus" and "editing against consensus". WMC was editing without consensus. Agreed? --GoRight (talk) 01:28, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

I think you're being rather imaginative in your interpretation of the probation. You'll be saying next that he edited "unilaterally". Connolley's edit seems reasonable to me because it doesn't reverse the content over which we have a disagreement. Like any edit it can itself be modified and there's no need for anybody to seek consensus first, as long as it isn't edit warring over inclusion of that content. --TS 01:43, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for being too terse. I was responding to "If his edit was against consensus (which I find improbable, frankly) ..." for Mark's benefit (i.e. so that your comment was more understandable), not making a claim regarding the probation. --GoRight (talk) 01:51, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. I thought you were addressing me. --TS 04:38, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Hey

Hey Tony,

Even though I thought I had a pretty good grasp of WP:AN, it might be that I'm misunderstanding how things have changed... which is a bit ironic as it was my brain child :-)

I guess I'm a bit confused because I thought that something like the following Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Block of User:Saldezza should be on ANI... am I missing something? - Tbsdy lives (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) ^talk 08:08, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

I've got a rule that helps me to work out which one I want to post on. If there's already a huge drama unfolding there's no harm in posting to WP:ANI. If there's no drama and I don't want there to be any drama, I post on WP:AN. In this case Fisherqueen had performed a block that I thought it might be helpful for an admin to review, so I first got her agreement and then posted on WP:AN to quietly solicit assistance.

This probably doesn't correspond to the normal way of things (my impression is that nearly everybody posts anything and everything on WP:ANI). It's certainly unlikely to be in keeping with your original conception (I seem to recall you conceived of it after you or somebody else got told off for posting the same message on lots of admins' user talk pages). But I think it makes a kind of sense.

There was no immediate need for action but I wanted admins to look at Fisherqueen's block and make sure it was kosher--mainly for her benefit going forward in future. Had I posted it on WP:ANI, that page being what it is, it would have been more likely to have attracted untoward attention, or even to have been seen as a big accusation against her for poor adminning--which I definitely don't believe to be the case. --TS 08:28, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Whoa... that's way back in the day. Yeah, I think that's what happened because I was trying to alert a few admins (well, actually a lot of admins - possibly the whole list?) and I got blocked for it (I have a feeling that WP:CANVAS was created because of that incident... oops?) but the intention was in the right place so I decided to centralize the discussion on a noticeboard. And thus I made Wikipedia history - something I crow about gently every now and then :-) That and creating the {{fact}} (or now {{citation needed}} tag). Someone else (I now forget who) split the original noticeboard into the general noticeboard and incidents noticeboard, which I thought was a pretty good idea at the time. There you are, a bit of wikihistory. But yeah, I just wanted to see if things had evolved since I went into retirement... at least, now that I'm back on Wikipedia again! - Tbsdy lives (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) ^talk 13:24, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes that's the way I remembered it--in fact I did not so long ago go fishing in your old block log to see if I could corroborate my personal recollection of how the administrators' noticeboard got started, but your block log, while interesting and anomalous in itself, didn't contain any block obviously related to this. I'm relieved to hear that my memory really isn't that bad. --TS 13:59, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Deletion

LucAleria (talk) 16:00, 4 January 2010 (UTC) LucAleriaLucAleria (talk) 16:00, 4 January 2010 (UTC) I do not understand why you deleted my contribution. I prove everything I added by relevant links so that everybody van have a personnal opinion. I just try to explain why climate change still faces debate and skepticism

I couldn't make any sense of much of it (is your first language something other than English) but I would have tried to improve it but for one thing: it seems to be an opinion piece. I have also started a discussion thread on the matter so other opinions may be heard and we will make a decision (and please do participate in this, your opinion and contributions are welcome). --TS 22:15, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Global warming/FAQ

Might I prevail upon you to discuss wording and necessity before making significant edits to the FAQ, as here? The point is a good one that our articles need to reflect the reliability-weighted totality of sources, but prior discussion or notification (my apologies if this occurred and I missed it) might have staved off that little edit war. It would also have established the necessity or not to add yet another question to the FAQ, and the wording could have been hammered out at talk rather than through edit summaries. You might also consider the words of the wise and powerful MastCell: Rather than "is this paper a reliable source", a better question to ask is: how have experts in the field synthesized this sort of literature?. - 2/0 (cont.) 23:21, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, good thoughts. Q22 didn't appear out of nowhere, though; typically if the same arguments are recycled in different contexts I add an item to the FAQ, and this is what happened here. What edit war? --TS 23:49, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

By the way I see you refer to "discussion or notification". Of course I would have been very silly to just write a FAQ question without writing about it on the talk page. See this announcement on the article talk page at around 22:00 on 30 December. Note the context, too. I can probably dig out the earlier discussions for you, showing that this is a fairly regular event on the talk page of that article. --TS 00:28, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Yep, I just missed it or forgot about it, as the point is one that comes up semi-regularly in my own editing of science articles and did not look likely to spur controversy. Sorry about that, and thank you for digging out that link for me - I have been trying to get our climate change articles back into a normal editing mentality, and it really helps when everything is discussed.

Talk:Global warming#FAQ A22 edit war. I am talking with TMLutas at my talkpage, as they seem to be interpreting A22 as indicating that minority viewpoints should be omitted from articles rather than that we should avoid recentism and weight for the relevant academic community to tell us how to weight particular results. - 2/0 (cont.) 07:53, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I appreciate TMLutas's view. My feeling is that he thinks Wikipedia is sweeping important new developments under the carpet. This kind of thing probably turns up on medical articles all the time whenever somebody makes a press release about an interesting medical trial result. In the case of global warming it's exacerbated by the fact that the blogosphere feeds on contrary results, and on contrarian interpretations of non-contrary results. Yeah, everybody wants to start a revolution in climate science. --TS 08:08, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

From Luc Aleria

I am always opened to see my text and my English improved. I have explained why I considered it was not an opinion. Dealing with communication matters, this paragraph can be argued. Fo this reason, I provide different external links supporting the added information. Besides, dealing with Robert Kandel example, an IPCC expert, I think such an example desserves a better dissemination than deletion: the list of references put in his book and the foreword by Pachauri give some sound scientific credit. Then, if you wany to tell me it is not 100% objective, yes, but even in science, you find many things that are not 100% obective nor accepted as such. At least it tries to be based on sound data and tries to answer the question: why is there still a debate and how to make it progress. Read the book.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by LucAleria (talk • contribs) 09:17, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I've commented on the talk page that I don't mind if it's put back and cleaned up. --TS 09:19, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Plain wrong

Tony, I think you owe me an apology. Please see [3]. -- ChrisO (talk) 00:42, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I really fucked up royally there. Again my sincere apologies. --TS 00:56, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:General sanctions/Climate change probation/Requests for enforcement#Comments by others about the request concerning Psb777

Hi there Tony. You've just commented on the Psb777 enforcement request stating that ChrisO filed the enforcement - if you look at the top, you'll see that it was in fact Viriditas that filed the request. Hope that information helps. Regards, Ryan Postlethwaite (talk) 00:42, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I screwed up badly there. I've apologised and willl make some liberal strike-outs. --TS 00:53, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I presumed it was just a mistake - easily done but I thought you'd want to know. Thanks for taking the time to sort it out. Ryan Postlethwaite (talk) 00:55, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

ESR is a Climate Change article?

• Eric S. Raymond (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

I think that stretches it. His recent dumbassiness about global warming is an insignificant detail with no coverage (that I can find) beyond his blog. His notability comes from his writings on Open Source. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 01:21, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

There has been a very recent content dispute about whether, and in what words, to include a blog-sourced description of his views on global warming. The way I see it, this is an example of a content war expanding far beyond its normal range. Because the climate change probation is behavioral in nature, and the dispute there is about climate change (broadly construed) I chose to add the probation. See also my comment on the talk. If you see it as a step too far please do remove it from the probation. --TS 01:28, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

The example of Wikipedia talk:British Isles Terminology task force/Specific Examples suggests that the enforcement provisions should follow the editors. I have no opinion as to whether the talkpage should be tagged as long as anyone who begins edit warring over climate change related material is informed of the probation. - 2/0 (cont.) 08:02, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, after I tagged the article I informed the four most recent editors of the article (excluding myself, of course). --TS 08:13, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Balance across articles

Tony, I appreciate that you and several others are against inclusion of that claim on Pachauri, but really, this would not even be an argument on a skeptic page; it would be included without hesitation, and I've personally seen it. Now you've witnessed it on Plimer, where removal of anything is met with resistance, even Monbiot's claim that he won the debate! In reality, by the standard being applied on Pachauri, the entire Monbiot section should go as well as a large chunk of the rest of that section.

I am perfectly fine with keeping this material out of Pachauri's bio, but it has to be balanced in other articles. There are probably a dozen skeptic BLPs I've been involved in where this same general group of editors has edit-warred to include much more dubious material, and I've gone along with it as long as the source was good. Weight never came up, notability never came up, it was purely sourcing. Now, if we're going to harden the standard here, we must revisit all those other bios and clean up significant amounts of negative material. It starts with Plimer, where most of the criticism section needs to go, per weight and notability. Then there's the others. I can think of Fred Singer and William M. Gray right off the top of my head. Singer has had very borderline-weight claims on his involvement with smoking and global warming - those would have to go. I believe Gray has criticism from a former colleague sourced to a single paragraph in a profile, that would need to go too. There is probably close to hundreds of critical claims in at least a dozen BLPs that would be affected by a more strict application of weight, and there would be much wrangling and probably an arbcom case to resolve it.

Now, contrast all that drama to simply including a short, impeccably sourced paragraph including a claim and a denial. Tell me, is suppressing reliably-sourced criticisms of AGW proponents worth going through and scrubbing dozens of skeptic BLPs? Really, keeping these reliably sourced items is the right thing to do here, and I much prefer that. But if it comes down to suppressing any mention of the Pachauri accusation, then we need to revisit all those skeptic bios. In that eventuality, I hope you would support that effort to bring proper weight into effect on the skeptics pages as you have here.

ATren (talk) 15:25, 8 January 2010 (UTC)