User talk:Amelia9mm

Blocked
I have blocked this as a disruptive single purpose account. Guy (Help!) 19:55, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

I have looked over you past edit history and it appears to me that you have been blocked in error. I am contacting the blocking admin to discuss the situation. Please be patient. Trusilver 16:34, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, Trusilver. I look forward to a resolution of this perplexing matter. Amelia Amelia9mm

Unjustified block
In my opinion, this block was unjustified. I have raised this matter at the following thread on the administrators' noticeboard. Please see: Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. Hopefully this will be sorted out soon. Carcharoth (talk) 00:02, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your attention to this matter, Carcharoth. I hope it gets resolved soon. I'm perplexed by it all. (Amelia9mm)

Could someone help explain this statement about a legal action? What is that about? I don't know anything about any legal action. What am I purported to have done? (Amelia9mm)

Unblocked (and response)
The situation is a complex one, but on review it seems that you were linked to it by accident rather than by design. There is indeed a huge problem at the Oxford Round Table article, and the Wikimedia Foundation have been notified of some issues with relation to it. On reviewing your edits, you edited the article twice but both were minor, and you did not participate at the Articles for Deletion debate, so I'm happy to unblock.

One minor thing - on reviewing a few of your other edits, I would advise reading reliable sources and biography of living persons. It's vitally important given Wikipedia's Top 10 status that we be responsible and ethical in our reporting on living-persons topics. The best way to do this is to always use reliable sources - eg peer reviewed sources or newspapers of record. If you have any questions regarding that, feel free to ask on my talk page. Orderinchaos 02:21, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Welcome
Welcome!

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Hi Amelia, here is a welcome template with some useful links. If you really want to find out what happened, see Oxford Round Table and Articles for deletion/Oxford Round Table. Orderinchaos was quite right to point out that some of your edits involved BLP (Biographies of living people) issues. Have a look at your contributions list (either the link at top right, or Special:Contributions/Amelia9mm), and look at the contributions you made to Tom Boonen and Erik Zabel. The latter article has the history of the doping confession well linked to reliable sources. Orderinchaos removed what you had added to the Tom Boonen article as not being from a reliable source. Given the short period of the alleged relationship, it wouldn't be a major part of the article anyway. I suggest you disuss this with Orderinchaos if you still feel it should be mentioned in the article, but do read Biographies of living people first. But the most important thing is not to let this unfortunate incident put you off editing Wikipedia. Keep reading and learning and see what else takes your interest. For example, the reference in Passenger pigeon to "mast food" looks interesting. I think it was a reference to the food the pigeons ate. For example: The passenger pigeon was most common in deciduous forests especially those containing mast bearing trees such as beech, oak and American chestnut. But the article doesn't mention this at all, and the current sentence refers to passenger pigeons as being mast food themselves! Why not have a look and see if you can improve that article? Carcharoth (talk) 06:28, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Apologies
Please accept my apologies for sweeping you up in the Oxford Round Table single-purpose account / sockpuppet farm. As you will see from Requests for checkuser/Case/Drstones, there were a lot of problematic individuals involved, but that is not an excuse. Again, apologies. Guy (Help!) 12:19, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Follow-up (Sporadicals, SPAs, Sleeper Socks)
Would you be interested in commenting on this? It would be very helpful to gain insights into why some accounts only edit sporadically. Carcharoth (talk) 16:22, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Carcharoth, I suspect you'll find that most folks are "sporatic" because they haven't quite got the hang of the detail of editing (syntax-wise, etc.) and they have very busy lives outside of the internet.

The incident in which I was blocked along with a large group of others, is almost entirely comprised of academics (virtually all PhDs in a variety of fields teaching at major U.S. universities), most of whom are busy publishing their own research. These aren't youngsters with nothing else to do with their time, nor are they hard-core wiki-supporters who spend time here for the cause, they are just highly educated folks who have an interest in a particular topic or several and they come here just for that topic or those topics.

I don't think that is all that unusual for wiki users, is it? If they are made welcome, they might stay around and begin to contribute more substantially.

When I realized I was blocked, I was trying to update some information on the page about my hometown. No one had told me I was blocked nor had any (understandable) explanation been given. So, since I had to fumble around to figure out how to request an unblock and it was at first categorically denied, you can imagine why I might not have bothered to return. This sort of thing is probably true for many others. If you want busy intelligent folks to partake of the wiki and to contribute, they need to be made welcome, not blocked or banned in droves.

I'm still not even sure if I should be replying to this here or on your talk page or on the page you linked above [see, more confusion about how the wiki world works], or if you'll see this at all. I guess I'll wait a bit and see. :o)

For most new users, wikipedia and its "administration" and lingo [What is a sleepersock?] are like being in a maze with no idea what the maze looks like and no idea if it's worthwhile to bother finding out. Thus, many are just sporadic users who come looking for information on a topic and see they can contribute a bit, and do that and not much else. Amelia9mm (talk) 20:21, 10 February 2008 (UTC)


 * A "sleeper sock" is an account that is created, but not used right away. Certain articles on Wikipedia are prone to vandalism and are "semi-protected", which limits editing to established users (registered users who have been registered for more than a couple of days). If a user is blocked, he or she will not be able to edit a semi-protected article under their IP address, and a newly registered username would be prevented from editing for a few days as well. Creating an account and holding it in reserve until needed is a sleeper sock; the name is derived from the concepts of sleeper agent and sock puppet. Hope that answers your question.  Horologium  (talk) 21:07, 10 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi Amelia. Thanks for the reply - it really does clear up a lot of things - they might seem obvious to you, but it is amazing how easy it is for the "hardcore" Wikipedia editors to forget things like this when "battling" against sockpuppets right left and centre. Yes, there is hint of sarcasm there, but tinged with a bit of sadness as well. Anyway, don't worry about finding your way to that ANI thread, I can quote you there myself. It is actually very simple, just click the link and look for the section edit button, and then add something to the thread. But as you say, learning the ropes takes time. Carcharoth (talk) 23:23, 10 February 2008 (UTC)