I am placing some of my previous writings that I feel are superseded, unimportant in current context, or just plain moldy, in /Cecropia rants and mouldy fluff archive 1 in the interests of transparency, rather than simply delete them.
Those who know how prolific I was "Back in the Day" may wonder what happened to me. Back in 2004, Jimbo had recently expressed a desire to have a class of users who could handle the administrative end of overseeing Requests for Adminship (then often inaccurately called "sysops" and actually "flipping the switch" to create a user as an Admin. The first Bureaucrats were appointed but that chore too was became a poll of the community. So I was in the early class of Elected rather than Appointed Bureaucrats,
My production was driven by my love of the encyclopedia, my joy of contribution, the feeling I was doing something important, and my engagement with many other Wikipedians.
At that Wikipedia felt very much like a project on training wheels, and it had yet to gain respect as a source. Students dared not quote Wikipedia as a source.
I had the time to do extensive work in the article space, as well as engaging the community as an Admin and a 'Crat. Part of that was because I had a going business as a Data Industry Consultant. The industry made a number of changes and gradually I was forced into semi-retirement (euphemism for underemployed/unemployed). By 2008 things became harder as I sought other work and employment If you actually believe there are laws to prevent employment discrimination against people over 40 (U.S.), try finding work in an industry, especially a tech industry, when you are 62. There are many ways to avoid hiring an older person without triggering the law. Perhaps I'll write an essay one day, but not now. Suffice to say I found a job (at much less pay) that offered medical and other benefits to sustain my family. The person who hired me overlooked the common fear that I would only be there a few years. Upshot: I've been there almost 15 years now, working full time.
Still flapping around; these newfangled Compact Fluorescents are a little less dangerous than the old Edison bulbs. -- Cheers! Cecropia ( talk) 16:12, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
I am not going to make a Mark Twain-esque comment. I am glad that (some) Wikipedians care enough to list me as a Missing Wikipedian, but I'm still around and even hoping to get back in the game before too very long. Moths are reputed to have a short lifespan, but not this one. Cheers, Cecropia ( talk) 22:37, 17 November 2012 (UTC)
I am the same old Cecropia, but currently still engaged in personal stuff that needs attention, as well as my vocations, which I find rewarding as well as necessary, eating-wise.
I am delighted the way in which Wikipedia is evolving into a real encyclpedia of depth and diversity, but I still wouldn't accept it as a primary source. ;-) Cecropia ( talk) 17:56, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
Just to update: Hello to all my Wikifriends, including those I haven't met yet. I'm kind of sad I haven't had the time to participate as I'd like to in Wikipedia in what has obviously been an exciting and productive two years. It's my desire to return when circumstances permit to resume contributing, admining, and bureaucraticing. Cheers! Cecropia ( talk) 20:44, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I am on extended Wikibreak, doing real life stuff that requires attention. I promise to have more of a presence when I'm able. Cheers, Cecropia ( talk) 13:13, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
I am still up to my proboscis in "stuff," but I hope to gradually get my wings wetter in Wikipedia with my Wikifriends. -- Cecropia ( talk) 15:52, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
Getting a bit more active this week. Gad, my user page is going to start looking like twitter. - Cecropia ( talk) 23:40, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
Someone once said that Man can live without anything but hope. I got to thinking about how I was in the stage of life where your great hopes have either been fulfilled or else withered. I still have hopes now, but they are much more modest. I am not nearly dead yet, and I may yet accomplish some of the unfulfilled dreams of my life; I still have a chance to "make a difference in the world." But if the adage about man not being able to live without hope is true, what sustains my life? Are my diminished hopes reflective of a diminished life?
I think of my children. Of my children's friends. The hope of youth. The world wide open. Their happy laughter. Even their frettings about life and love and the future; their fear of disappointments are evidence of hope. No hope; no disappointment.
Suddenly I understand why we have children. Their hope is my hope. The hope of their generation is my hope also. With children the old are directed outward instead of inward. Embracing children: my own; of others; of people I will never see or meet, means that the world does not end when I end. Their hope lives on, and in turn is passed on, to the end of time.
You'll get a different answer from different admins. Wikipolicy is that page protection is bad, so that pages should be protected only when absolutely necessary (to stop immediate vandalism or a major revert war) and/or when requested to do so by editors on both sides of a disagreement in an article who want a "time out" to work out differences.
Unprotection is even more of an art, much more so than bureaucracy, which is pretty dull except when there is a heated disagreement. My opinion is:
IMO, you will rarely go wrong as an admin if, before you take a possibly disputed action, you are confident you can defend it as though you were actually being paid to do this. ;-)
The question was raised: If an admin tells an editor that he must stop a certain behavior or be blocked from editing, and the editor does not stop the behavior, must the admin block him or her?
Here are the articles I began, best as I can figure out. I've tried to avoid stubs and redirects—i.e., these were started with at least some useful content, sometimes a lot, and sometimes I added to the articles later.
I have slowly begun adding articles that I didn't start but have written from stubs, marked with * or have significantly rewritten or added to, marked with a †.
Full disclosure: I cribbed these from Sam Spade. Thanks, Sam!
I'm fascinated by Wiki's ability to become a storehouse of knowledgeable arcana that usually receives short shrift in other encyclopedias. If arcana aren't exactly the bricks of the house of knowledge, they're at least the pebbles in the mortar.
I find this a wonderful experiment in establishing a free, useful resource for the wide world. Even edit wars and an overall bias that may be seen in certain articles can be useful for future scholars and historians (since the edit history is all archived) to see what arguments were raging at a given point in time and to try to assess the positions and biases of the (often faceless) protagonists for one view or another.
Some of personal curiosities for the future of Wikis include:
If anyone has thoughts on these issues, please place them in my Talk, not here.
I've been writing or editing on a wide if odd mix of subjects of interest, including (in no particular order) Great Expectations, Egg Creams, Coney Island Creek, Anti-Semitism, Autism, Freedomland U.S.A., Dog catcher, Jukes and Kallikaks, Multiple-unit train control, Good (accounting), L. Sprague de Camp, Terrorism, Law of land warfare, Vietnam war, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Shining, Kristallnacht, Red herring, Yellow ribbon, Asymmetric warfare, Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Illegal combatant, Autistic savant, Political subdivisions of New York State, War crime, Wesley Clark, George W. Bush, Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, New York subway, Fulton Fish Market, General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy, Malbone Street Wreck, Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, and others I'm too lazy to think of at the moment.
I have a POV about certain subjects which I try to be open about; no point really, people usually see through users who make obviously partisan changes under rubrics such as "the article is too big," "this belongs somewhere else," and my favorite: "I don't have a POV, everybody else has a POV." :) But I have been writing for a long time (my first paid article was written for the long-extinct New York Journal-American) and I make an effort for my edits and contributions to be NPOV or to balance existing POV, to be accurate and, if controversial, to be well-documented. At any rate, I stand behind the integrity of anything I write.
Since I'm pushing social security age, I've worn a lot of hats in my lifetime. The only more or less common thread that's moved in and out of my life is programming and computers. When I began in the trade, COBOL and Fortran were the thing, and loading your program meant begging a cranky Univac not to chew your punch cards. Now I'm very next Tuesday with Linux and web services and all. Learning UNIX back when was a big help and I'm a Novell CNE, which I guess is also kind of dinosaurish now.
But I've also been:
Politically, my family was liberal/socialist. I was a lifetime Democrat, but dropped my registration in 1998 and am now officially an Independent. I am a 50-year plus labor union member and former union steward. I have libertarian leanings but am too libertarian to join that or any other party any more. I retain my liberal belief in the basic goodness of humans but also feel that people sometimes poison their minds when they adhere to groups instead of seeing others as individuals.
I have been involved in advocacy and public speaking on various topics across the political spectrum. I am the father of an autistic child and am interested in the science, education, and social treatment of those with different and altered abilities.
I'm afraid some of these are necessarily quite heavily paraphrased, where I don't have access to the original quote. Presented in no particular order.
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
—Francis William Bourdillon
And only if my own true love was waiting
and if I could hear her heart a'softly pounding
Only if she were lying by me
could I rest in my bed once again
—Bob Dylan, "Tomorrow is a Long Time"
I am placing some of my previous writings that I feel are superseded, unimportant in current context, or just plain moldy, in /Cecropia rants and mouldy fluff archive 1 in the interests of transparency, rather than simply delete them.
Those who know how prolific I was "Back in the Day" may wonder what happened to me. Back in 2004, Jimbo had recently expressed a desire to have a class of users who could handle the administrative end of overseeing Requests for Adminship (then often inaccurately called "sysops" and actually "flipping the switch" to create a user as an Admin. The first Bureaucrats were appointed but that chore too was became a poll of the community. So I was in the early class of Elected rather than Appointed Bureaucrats,
My production was driven by my love of the encyclopedia, my joy of contribution, the feeling I was doing something important, and my engagement with many other Wikipedians.
At that Wikipedia felt very much like a project on training wheels, and it had yet to gain respect as a source. Students dared not quote Wikipedia as a source.
I had the time to do extensive work in the article space, as well as engaging the community as an Admin and a 'Crat. Part of that was because I had a going business as a Data Industry Consultant. The industry made a number of changes and gradually I was forced into semi-retirement (euphemism for underemployed/unemployed). By 2008 things became harder as I sought other work and employment If you actually believe there are laws to prevent employment discrimination against people over 40 (U.S.), try finding work in an industry, especially a tech industry, when you are 62. There are many ways to avoid hiring an older person without triggering the law. Perhaps I'll write an essay one day, but not now. Suffice to say I found a job (at much less pay) that offered medical and other benefits to sustain my family. The person who hired me overlooked the common fear that I would only be there a few years. Upshot: I've been there almost 15 years now, working full time.
Still flapping around; these newfangled Compact Fluorescents are a little less dangerous than the old Edison bulbs. -- Cheers! Cecropia ( talk) 16:12, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
I am not going to make a Mark Twain-esque comment. I am glad that (some) Wikipedians care enough to list me as a Missing Wikipedian, but I'm still around and even hoping to get back in the game before too very long. Moths are reputed to have a short lifespan, but not this one. Cheers, Cecropia ( talk) 22:37, 17 November 2012 (UTC)
I am the same old Cecropia, but currently still engaged in personal stuff that needs attention, as well as my vocations, which I find rewarding as well as necessary, eating-wise.
I am delighted the way in which Wikipedia is evolving into a real encyclpedia of depth and diversity, but I still wouldn't accept it as a primary source. ;-) Cecropia ( talk) 17:56, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
Just to update: Hello to all my Wikifriends, including those I haven't met yet. I'm kind of sad I haven't had the time to participate as I'd like to in Wikipedia in what has obviously been an exciting and productive two years. It's my desire to return when circumstances permit to resume contributing, admining, and bureaucraticing. Cheers! Cecropia ( talk) 20:44, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I am on extended Wikibreak, doing real life stuff that requires attention. I promise to have more of a presence when I'm able. Cheers, Cecropia ( talk) 13:13, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
I am still up to my proboscis in "stuff," but I hope to gradually get my wings wetter in Wikipedia with my Wikifriends. -- Cecropia ( talk) 15:52, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
Getting a bit more active this week. Gad, my user page is going to start looking like twitter. - Cecropia ( talk) 23:40, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
Someone once said that Man can live without anything but hope. I got to thinking about how I was in the stage of life where your great hopes have either been fulfilled or else withered. I still have hopes now, but they are much more modest. I am not nearly dead yet, and I may yet accomplish some of the unfulfilled dreams of my life; I still have a chance to "make a difference in the world." But if the adage about man not being able to live without hope is true, what sustains my life? Are my diminished hopes reflective of a diminished life?
I think of my children. Of my children's friends. The hope of youth. The world wide open. Their happy laughter. Even their frettings about life and love and the future; their fear of disappointments are evidence of hope. No hope; no disappointment.
Suddenly I understand why we have children. Their hope is my hope. The hope of their generation is my hope also. With children the old are directed outward instead of inward. Embracing children: my own; of others; of people I will never see or meet, means that the world does not end when I end. Their hope lives on, and in turn is passed on, to the end of time.
You'll get a different answer from different admins. Wikipolicy is that page protection is bad, so that pages should be protected only when absolutely necessary (to stop immediate vandalism or a major revert war) and/or when requested to do so by editors on both sides of a disagreement in an article who want a "time out" to work out differences.
Unprotection is even more of an art, much more so than bureaucracy, which is pretty dull except when there is a heated disagreement. My opinion is:
IMO, you will rarely go wrong as an admin if, before you take a possibly disputed action, you are confident you can defend it as though you were actually being paid to do this. ;-)
The question was raised: If an admin tells an editor that he must stop a certain behavior or be blocked from editing, and the editor does not stop the behavior, must the admin block him or her?
Here are the articles I began, best as I can figure out. I've tried to avoid stubs and redirects—i.e., these were started with at least some useful content, sometimes a lot, and sometimes I added to the articles later.
I have slowly begun adding articles that I didn't start but have written from stubs, marked with * or have significantly rewritten or added to, marked with a †.
Full disclosure: I cribbed these from Sam Spade. Thanks, Sam!
I'm fascinated by Wiki's ability to become a storehouse of knowledgeable arcana that usually receives short shrift in other encyclopedias. If arcana aren't exactly the bricks of the house of knowledge, they're at least the pebbles in the mortar.
I find this a wonderful experiment in establishing a free, useful resource for the wide world. Even edit wars and an overall bias that may be seen in certain articles can be useful for future scholars and historians (since the edit history is all archived) to see what arguments were raging at a given point in time and to try to assess the positions and biases of the (often faceless) protagonists for one view or another.
Some of personal curiosities for the future of Wikis include:
If anyone has thoughts on these issues, please place them in my Talk, not here.
I've been writing or editing on a wide if odd mix of subjects of interest, including (in no particular order) Great Expectations, Egg Creams, Coney Island Creek, Anti-Semitism, Autism, Freedomland U.S.A., Dog catcher, Jukes and Kallikaks, Multiple-unit train control, Good (accounting), L. Sprague de Camp, Terrorism, Law of land warfare, Vietnam war, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Shining, Kristallnacht, Red herring, Yellow ribbon, Asymmetric warfare, Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Illegal combatant, Autistic savant, Political subdivisions of New York State, War crime, Wesley Clark, George W. Bush, Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, New York subway, Fulton Fish Market, General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy, Malbone Street Wreck, Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, and others I'm too lazy to think of at the moment.
I have a POV about certain subjects which I try to be open about; no point really, people usually see through users who make obviously partisan changes under rubrics such as "the article is too big," "this belongs somewhere else," and my favorite: "I don't have a POV, everybody else has a POV." :) But I have been writing for a long time (my first paid article was written for the long-extinct New York Journal-American) and I make an effort for my edits and contributions to be NPOV or to balance existing POV, to be accurate and, if controversial, to be well-documented. At any rate, I stand behind the integrity of anything I write.
Since I'm pushing social security age, I've worn a lot of hats in my lifetime. The only more or less common thread that's moved in and out of my life is programming and computers. When I began in the trade, COBOL and Fortran were the thing, and loading your program meant begging a cranky Univac not to chew your punch cards. Now I'm very next Tuesday with Linux and web services and all. Learning UNIX back when was a big help and I'm a Novell CNE, which I guess is also kind of dinosaurish now.
But I've also been:
Politically, my family was liberal/socialist. I was a lifetime Democrat, but dropped my registration in 1998 and am now officially an Independent. I am a 50-year plus labor union member and former union steward. I have libertarian leanings but am too libertarian to join that or any other party any more. I retain my liberal belief in the basic goodness of humans but also feel that people sometimes poison their minds when they adhere to groups instead of seeing others as individuals.
I have been involved in advocacy and public speaking on various topics across the political spectrum. I am the father of an autistic child and am interested in the science, education, and social treatment of those with different and altered abilities.
I'm afraid some of these are necessarily quite heavily paraphrased, where I don't have access to the original quote. Presented in no particular order.
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
—Francis William Bourdillon
And only if my own true love was waiting
and if I could hear her heart a'softly pounding
Only if she were lying by me
could I rest in my bed once again
—Bob Dylan, "Tomorrow is a Long Time"