User talk:208.38.228.17

June 2021
Hello! Welcome to Wikipedia, and thank you for your contributions. At least one of your edits on the page Sylvia Rivera, while it may have been in good faith, was difficult to distinguish from vandalism. To help other editors understand the reason for the changes, you can use an edit summary for your contributions. You can also take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Repeated blanking of sourced content, with or without an edit summary, to push a particular POV may be perceived as disruptive editing or even vandalism. - CorbieVreccan  ☊ ☼ 18:15, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Your recent editing history at Sylvia Rivera shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See the bold, revert, discuss cycle for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in you being blocked from editing&mdash;especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring&mdash;even if you do not violate the three-revert rule&mdash;should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly.''Read the sources. Your POV push is based in opinion, not the sources.'' - CorbieVreccan  ☊ ☼ 18:05, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

'''Hi! Here is my experience removing a single inaccurate sentence fragment from the wikipedia page for Sylvia Rivera,''' described to the best of my ability. I noticed that a sentence describing Sylvia Rivera's gender identity contained a list of descriptors, and in that list the same descriptor appeared twice. This seemed not only inaccurate but unnecessary and frankly, strange.

I decided to remove the sentence fragment and wrote in my edit: unnecessary, repetitive, emphasizes "gay man" over her other identities" This edit was reversed ten minutes later by an editor named Armadillopteryx, who cited it as "Unexplained content removal"

Ten hours later, I read this, felt confused and decided to try again. I assumed a good faith, natural inclination against changing anything in the article, and that, maybe, this editor had not noticed that I had explained the edit. For my second edit, I wrote: Explained, emphasizes "gay man" element of Sylvia's identity over her other identities immediately prior to stating she experienced "none of these identities as excluding the others. I hoped that the editors would notice that I had provided an explanation for my edit.

Less than five hours later, user CorbieVreccan reverted my second edit and wrote: ''blanking of sourced content. Read sources, IP.'' This seemed strange to me, because the first undoing of this revision was reverted for being "unexplained" (despite being, I think, explained) and I thought there would be at least some acknowledgment that this reversion had been incorrect or inaccurate. But I'm fairly new to editing Wikipedia and not a registered editor, and I'm not familiar with the decorum on Wikipedia. I also assume that keeping a trans person's wikipedia page from being vandalized requires a lot of frustrating work, and editors involved in it have probably gotten used to bad faith edits. I don't know a whole lot about the technicalities of Wikipedia editing but I do know that 1% or less of Wikipedia editors are trans.

I assume there is a necessary prejudice against the "blanking of sourced content" specifically in order to prevent vandalism. Without it I'm sure the work done on many articles would disappear! But I felt that this was probably reserved for bad faith and unexplained edits, which I don't believe this was.

I thought the invitation to "read the sources" was also strange because I was not at that time debating the source material, but debating what amounted to an unnecessary repetition and emphasis. But I went ahead and assumed a good faith revision on the part of CorbieVreccan and went and read the entire source, a collection of writing by and about Sylvia Rivera. I did this, and some of the content was new to me, but none of it referred to her being a gay man or contained the phrase "gay man" which is what the source was purportedly supporting. Finding this to be deeply bizarre but most likely a result of editing patterns (I assume when you see an unestablished editor removing material, you automatically ask them to read the sources out of habit, and that probably gets rid of the majority of bad faith editors)

I was surprised to find the source did not back up the information it was supposed to! I found it bewildering and a little strange but probably just an oversight. In the meantime I had added information about Sylvia Rivera's parents and answered a question on her talk page in the hopes that this would help establish myself as a good faith editor who wanted to contribute positively. But after I read the sources as suggested, I made another identical edit, this time writing: ''Hi! I've read the source listed for this and found nowhere Sylvia identifies herself as a gay man. In fact, the phrase "gay man" doesn't appear at all. Has the previous editor read the source? Thank you!'' I made this edit while traveling in a different part of the state where I live (Iowa) so it posted from a different IP address.

About a day has passed and the most recent identical revision I posted has not been reverted, and the editor CorbieVreccan has added a section to Sylvia Rivera's talk page called "Yet more on shifting identities" that states that, after reading the source material themselves, they can confirm that the blanking of the inaccurately sourced material was correct.

I also have discovered that my IP address (not the one that made the final edit, but my home IP address) has been banned from editing Wikipedia for nearly three years. All this for an edit that was deemed, in the long run, factually accurate! I can no longer contribute to Sylvia Rivera's talk page, but I can edit the talk page for this IP address.

The reason given for the ban is that I use a VPN, like a lot of people do, for casually browsing the internet. It did not occur to me that this could be against the rules of Wikipedia, especially since Wikipedia itself logs a consistent IP address. I wondered if this happened because I posted the final edit from someone else's house, with a different IP address.

All in all, as an unexperienced editor, I feel exhausted and confused. I've read a little bit of the guidelines and have seen things like "Assume good faith" and "Please don't bite the newcomers." To be honest, I feel a little bit! It has been bizarre to experience what seemed to me to be a series of bad faith (or simply not paying attention) edits that amounted to an "edit war" against me and my very small, ultimately justified edit.

I want to express here my sincere desire to contribute positively to Wikipedia, to make good faith edits, and not only help make Wikipedia more accurate, but honestly, to help make it a less hostile place for trans and gender non-conforming people and our biographies. The reaction to this small edit has been a little scary and I can see why so few trans people are editors. But I would like to help if you would have me!

Because of this, I am going to try my best to get the ban on my IP address lifted. I don't know yet how to go about doing this, or even if it was targeted at me specifically or an automatic thing because of my VPN use, which I will be sure not to use when I edit Wikipedia from now on. Any help would be appreciated. To anyone reading this, thank you for your time. Any help or advice you can give me would be greatly appreciated! I hope to be a positive contributor in this community and will try my best. 208.38.228.17 (talk) 15:37, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello and thank you for the clarification! I'm new to Wikipedia, obviously, and I appreciate the help. 208.38.228.17 (talk) 21:49, 27 June 2021 (UTC)