User talk:CanK9

Easter Rising
Why do you keep doing this? The sentence is already clearly and comprehensively referenced. The added reference half-way through the sentence is unsightly and unnecessary. It also cites a non-notable Kindle book that has had no reviews in the usual places. Please stop. It is disruptive. Scolaire (talk) 09:33, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that if Bowen-Colthurst is mentioned in the article, some readers might like to find out more about him. Unfortunately, other sources cited in the article  are not nearly as comprehensive  on Colthurst's 1916 activities (or on his life in general) as "A Terrible Duty". [Bacon's book has 177 footnotes by the way]. Regarding your comment on reviews, I think the print media generally ignores ebooks, though I notice that the April 24 Vancouver Province gives the book a favourable mention. Cheers. CanK9 (talk) 21:19, 24 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Yes, but then you'd have to have a footnote when Eoin MacNeill is mentioned, and John Devoy and Tom Kelly and Trinity College and County Galway and anything else that "some readers might like to find out more about". So you'd end up with hundreds of footnotes and most of them not pertaining to what the article is saying. It's just not as useful as you think it is. I don't think the print media "generally ignores" ebooks, rather that if a book was good enough to merit a review in the usual places it would have found a print publisher. 117 footnotes is not a big deal; some books have that number per chapter.
 * By the way, can you please learn to indent your posts on talk pages. When replying to somebody, just type a colon at the beginning, or if they already have colons, type one colon more than them. Scolaire (talk) 09:29, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Scolaire, That's 177, not 117 footnotes. And sorry about the failure to indent.CanK9 (talk) 03:06, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Reply to your message
CanK, thanks for your kind message on my User Talk page. I was going to leave a brief reply on your own Talk page, but I see from the previous message here that Scolaire has been at you, and I hope you don't mind if I add a word concerning him.

I edited Irish history pages for the first time during Easter Week of this year, basically because the story of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington really grabbed me. Through Sheehy-Skeffington, however, I opened up a window into the very hostile environment of the pages related to the history of Irish independence from England. It so happened that within days of my making extensive edits to the Sheehy-Skeffington page, Scolaire took issue with my work in a manner that seemed to me disruptive and possibly politically-biased. I began to spar with him on several other related pages, including Francis Vane. I got very fed up with Scolaire's attitude and I then posted "warnings" about him on a number of other Irish history pages. He then lodged a complaint against me on the Administrators' Noticeboard. There I made the claim that Scolaire was doing too much cutting of other peoples' work, and some administrators asked me for evidence of this. I then asked for permission to post new messages to the Irish pages, so as to solicit comments from other editors about Scolaire, by way of evidence. In return for this, my account was blocked for two days. (!)

So I then set to work documenting Scolaire's pattern of controlling and ultra-scrupulous edits. A couple of weeks later I lodged a complaint against him on the Administrators' Noticeboard (now archived here). For a week or more I then responded several times a day to attacks against me by Scolaire's supporters, whom he must have contacted outside of Wikipedia somehow. At first I thought they were administrators, but this turned out not to be the case, and in fact, no administrator ever commented on the complaint. However, believe it or not, the lack of administrator response triggered such outrage in Scolaire that he decided to quit Wikipedia! (His User contributions page gives his last edit as having occurred on May 4: a comment to the Administrators' Noticeboard discussion, with the edit summary: "close if you like, I'm gone".)

CanK, you seem like a very well-intentioned person, so I imagine you may feel bad about what happened. I know that you have in the past thanked Scolaire for his contributions. I believe as well that Scolaire was sometimes a force for good on Wikipedia, at least within the Irish context. He sometimes stood up for factual accuracy in the face of very crazy and politically biased editors. But I wouldn't feel too sorry for Scolaire, because I have the feeling that somebody who has made ten to fifteen edits a day to Wikipedia for the last ten years, and ¾ of these to Irish pages, is not really going to quit. Probably he is going to start up again under a new user name. ... In any case, I want you to know that I had no intention of forcing him to quit Wikipedia - my intention was only to make sure that other editors knew he had a history of being authoritarian and coercive. Normally people wouldn't know this about him, because he had a habit of deleting any comments critical of him, both from article talk pages and from his own talk page.

Best wishes to you. - Wwallacee (talk) 10:33, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. I very much appreciated your note.CanK9 (talk) 03:41, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Skeffington commission report
CanK, I replied to your note on my own talk page. Cheers, -Wwallacee (talk) 09:48, 17 June 2017 (UTC)