User talk:Goustaff

December 2009
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Simone Kermes has been reverted. Your edit here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline from Wikipedia. The external link you added or changed is on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. I removed the following link(s): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw2cwEQ-wCs (matching the regex rule \byoutube\.com). If the external link you inserted or changed was to a media file (e.g. a sound or video file) on an external server, then note that linking to such files may be subject to Wikipedia's copyright policy and therefore probably should not be linked to. Please consider using our upload facility to upload a suitable media file. Video links are also strongly deprecated by our guidelines for external links, partly because they're useless to people with slow internet connections. If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 19:19, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for May 19
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Cheryl Studer, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Thomas Hampson (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 08:53, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Cheryl Studer article
Hello - Please discuss the changes I made to the article and that you reverted on the section I started on the talk page. ThanksSmeat75 (talk) 13:00, 10 June 2014 (UTC).


 * Ambox notice.svg This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Smeat75 (talk) 13:23, 10 June 2014 (UTC).

While we welcome most contributions to the encyclopedia, people who work for an organisation are discouraged from editing the article about that organisation. Notable people are asked not to edit their own articles or articles where they may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about ensuring their edits are verified by reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible. There's more information on this topic at Conflict of interest. -- Diannaa (talk) 19:37, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war&#32; according to the reverts you have made on Cheryl Studer. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement. Please be particularly aware, Wikipedia's policy on edit warring states: If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes; work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Please join the talk page discussion rather than reverting again. Blogs are not considered to be reliable sources. Maintenance tags should not be removed until the underlying issues have been addressed. -- Diannaa (talk) 18:45, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
 * 1) Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made; that is to say, editors are not automatically "entitled" to three reverts.
 * 2) Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

You have been blocked indefinitely from editing for persistent disruptive editing. If you think there are good reasons why you should be unblocked, you may appeal this block by adding the following text below this notice:. However, you should read the guide to appealing blocks first. Nyttend (talk) 01:33, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

I think that the present unblock request is unlikely to be accepted, but I do think that there is a good chance of an unblock if you write a rather different unblock request, so I will say some things which I hope may help you to formulate one which does stand a good chance of success. Firstly, you seem to sincerely be unaware of some of the things you have done, I have had a quick look and found a few examples. This does not attempt to be an exhaustive list, nor even a representative list, it is just a few examples to show you doing a couple of the things which you deny having done. Nor are they necessarily the best examples of what you did: they are just the first few examples I found in quickly looking through a sample of your recent edits.
 * 1) Adding peacock wording, subjective opinion, and promotional language. Here you add the words "gifted and accomplished". Here you add the word "acclaimed". Here you add the words "What follows is an all-too-brief chronology of the soprano's four decades before the public." What is "all too brief" is a matter of opinion.
 * 2) Changing maintenance tags to show future dates. Here you changed the date in a maintenance tag date from May 2014 to October 2014. October 2014 has not yet come. That may have been a mistake, but it is a very difficult mistake to understand. I have also seen a few other edits in which you changed the dates in maintenance tags without explanation.

I am not going to give examples of you linking to copyright violations, because you must be fully aware of the fact that you have frequently linked to YouTube copies of what are clearly professional recordings, for which there can be no reasonable doubt that the uploaders were not the copyright owners. Nor am I going to waste much time on straw man arguments, such as your comment about there being "no limit to the number of contributions per page per contributor", because as far as I can see nobody except you has suggested anywhere (this page, the article's talk page, the administrators' noticeboard discussion about you, etc) that that is an issue. Also, the remarks about "a person close to the artist, conflict of interest" are not really relevant, because although one or more editors indicated that they thought that might be the case, that was not given as part of the reason for the block.

You have made some acknowledgement that you were edit warring, and exhibiting ownership tendencies, which is a step forward, and if you can follow that up then I do see a good prospect for an unblock. I suggest you stand back, look at your editing history, read the comments in the AN discussion (you can see it at Administrators' noticeboard/Archive262), try to see what about your editing has been seen by others as problematic, and then post a new unblock request which focuses on those problems, and what you expect to do differently in the future to avoid such problems, rather than on how eunreasonable you think all the other people involved are. If you can do that, I think there is a fair chance for an unblock. If you have not already done so, I suggest that you read the guide to appealing blocks, because some of what it says is good advice which I think is likely to help you. Also, I strongly reccomend withdrawing your statement that you "will eventually return to Wikipedia whenever [you] make that decision", because I can see no way of reading that other than as a declaration of the intention to evade the block by using sockpuppets. I have, so far as I recall, never once seen an editor unblocked while he or she has an outstanding expression of intention of evading the block. Also, over the years i have found that the usual course of events when a blocked editor takes that line is that their sockpuppets are very quickly recognised for what they are, the sockpuppet accounts are blocked, edits they have made are mostly or even all reverted, and if they persist other steps may be taken, such as blocking IP ranges that they have used, protecting articles they have edited, etc. You will have a far better chance of being able to successfully return to editing if you acknowledge that there have been problems, and make it clear that you will try to avoid similar problems in future. You have already taken a big step in that direction by accepting that you made an "overreaction" and edit-warred. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 09:46, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Section break for convenience
Added by me, so that we don't have to scroll up almost to the top of the page just to edit this section. Nyttend (talk) 20:51, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

I swear I never changed that maintenance tag. For what reason would anyone want to do that? But if said activity shows up as if by me then it was clearly an unintended data entry error. In the last week I learned for the first time about "peacock" words and about edit wars. About the former, I see I introduced a few, unaware of the implications. But now I see why such language is discouraged as it is subjective. About the latter, at this juncture it does not matter if I am believed, but I was set up by someone more knowledgeable than I about the ins and outs of Wikipedia content editing and fell for his game, unaware that such a thing as an edit war even existed on Wikipedia or about the consequences of engaging in one. The individual achieved his goal, which was to boot me out and to discredit me. This is how this scene unraveled. About sockpuppets, I am neither technically aware of them (again, a brand new term for me) nor interested in complicating my existence on Wikipedia. Trust me. About the important sections deleted by CorporateM (e.g., opera roles, honors and awards, collaborations) I will in some future try my best to source that information to get them restored to the page. I do not know what else to say on my behalf but there you have it. Goustaff (talk) 18:25, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Cliff Notes version of how to (possibly) get unblocked: (1) agree to stop edit-warring and engaging in ownership of an article and to use the article's talk page to work out disagreements (2) agree to read and abide by our neutral point of view policies, (3) agree to read and follow our reliable sources policy. OhNo itsJamie Talk 18:36, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:07, 24 November 2015 (UTC)