User:Uncle G/On having a user page

Why do you not have a user page?
I don't have a user page very probably for the same reasons that you do.

I have long held that it is a false inference that anonymity implies bad faith, on the grounds that anonymous users make thousands of good faith edits to Wikipedia every day. Indeed, I was exactly such an anonymous user for quite a while. I only became pseudonymous largely because of the convenience of not having my edits confused with other customers of my ISP.

I also similarly hold that it is a false inference to assume that someone without a user page is someone who has "been on for a week" or is "a vandal with a user name". I disprove that latter hypothesis by my existence, as do many other editors who also do not have user pages. This heuristic is faulty, and I invite those who use it to (for example) do Recent Changes patrol on Wiktionary (Wiktionary can always use more RC patrollers.), where many users even of long standing have no user pages. I further ask those people to stop requesting that the world change to match their faulty heuristic, rather than the other way around.

In an RFA discussion DropDeadGorgias put forward the rather bizarre notion that the act of not creating a page is "disruption of wikipedia to prove a point". If that were the case, then there are hundreds of millions of people not creating web pages on Wikipedia every day, all of whom are "disrupting" it. The notion that not creating something here is disruption is patently silly.

Xe also talked of "establish[ing] some unique sense of identity". But that is precisely what I'm not doing. "Uncle G" is, quite obviously, a pseudonym &mdash; just like DropDeadGorgias is &mdash; and a lack of a user page is precisely the opposite of attempting to establish an identity, as is the fact that, this page and its special circumstances aside, I use the default signature with no customization. If I wanted to "establish an identity", connecting my edits here to a real world person that you could throw tomatoes at, I would use an account in my actual name.

But like many of you I use a a pseudonym. Just as DropDeadGorgias and Jonathunder both choose not to tell you what their actual names are, so too do I. My "identity" to these WikiMedia projects is my contribution history, and can only be my contribution history. I want it to be my contribution history. (Note that Jonathunder, whilst asking at WP:RFA how other users can determine who I am, on his own user page answers that question of himself by pointing to his contribution history, a rather marked double standard.) It's the only identity that truly matters when it comes to making decisions about whether and how I can do things here. I thank both Pavel Vozenilek and jag123 for judging me upon it.

Everything else &mdash; pictures of me, an autobiography of my life, information about where I went to school and where I live, lists of my hobbies and interests &mdash; is autobiography, and by its nature self-professed. I have my own web sites out in the Big Wide World (It seems rather ironic to be referring to the World Wide Web like that, given that there is a Big Wide World outside of it, too. &#9786;), where I publish my own articles, with no Wikipedia restrictions, and could have reams of autobiography to my heart's content. I don't have such personal data on those, either. (Having been around on Internet for ... cough ... a little while now, I know not to publish such things, not on my own web sites, let alone on here.)

People know me out in the Big Wide World through my published works and what I do, not through what I merely tell them about myself. (They do know me - I've been cited here and there.) The same applies here, in the microcosms that are Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, and so forth. You know me through my editing record; which speaks more accurately than I could in any case. (The automatic record is always going to be equal to or better than any manual record.) The "face that I present" to the world from these WikiMedia projects is an article on Microsoft Pascal or a sentence in chav, and as such is entirely egoless. The "face that I present" to other Wikipedia editors within these projects is through discussions and edit histories. To see why a user page is irrelevant to that latter "face" consider that I could have the spiffiest user page in the world, and it wouldn't help improve my image if I had widespread and uniformly negative contributions elsewhere. (If you still don't get the point, go and look at the pretty user pages of some of the users that are currently banned. I'm not going to be specific, as per the provoking banned users rule, but there are several banned users whose user pages meet the criteria for adminstratorship that some have espoused over the past week.)

You may of course come to a consensus that having a user page is a requirement for administrators. In which case, I suggest that you list that requirement on Requests for adminship and Requests for adminship/Standards (which currently sport no indication whatever of such a rule or such a standard) so that we don't waste effort in the future.

Such a requirement would, of course, not be on technical grounds. There is a technical requirement that administrators have working electronic mailboxes, pointed out to me by Wiktionary:User:SemperBlotto, that I didn't fulfil. Absence of mailbox causes procedural problems, since it prevents blocked users from contacting the blocking administrator. As such, I've un-checked the "Disable e-mail from other users" checkbox in my preferences to fulfil that requirement. (As at Wiktionary, I ask you to please use User talk:Uncle G rather than electronic mail for contacting me.) Absence of a user page causes no such procedural problems.

Finally: For those who are referring to "professionalism", I simply point out that I do this as a hobby. I'm not a professional encyclopaedist. (I suspect that if I were, I'd probably be contractually prohibited from being here in the first place.)


 * 19:12, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

On 2005-04-18 Radiant! made the suggestion of creating my user page as a redirect to my contributions log. That would certainly say what I'm intending to say. Unfortunately, redirecting to special pages is currently turned off, so that doesn't work. On 2005-05-25, the Ass Pus/Pelican Shit/Bugger vandal created a user page full of Ass Pus for me at Wikinews, with the addition of "Oh dear. Uncle G is here.". I'm taking the opportunity to try a multiple WikiMedia project version of Radiant!'s Solution there.


 * 11:52, 2005 May 27 (UTC)