User talk:Nina marks

Michael S. Thompson Activist Beekeeper

was born in Springfield, MO on February 26, 1948.

Thompson grew up in Wichita, Kansas[7] where his home was built in a development where 12 feet of topsoil had been excavated, and the edge of his yard was a plateau of corn fields. As a gifted, queer child, he was protected by wise women figures who recognized his keen intelligence. He became a beekeeper when he was 12 years old, after his parents bought him a beehive.[8][9] Thompson went to Chicago to attend the National Democratic Convention of 1968, and was politicized by the state and police brutality he witnessed in Grant Park against students and protestors. Influenced by Genet, the Black Panther Party, and the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, he began photographing his gardens and beekeeping practice while working at, and eventually managing the gift store at the Art Institute of Chicago, where, in turn, he met and began to collect the drawings and paintings of the homeless outsider artist, Lee Godie, who regularly occupied the marble steps of the Chicago Art Institute selling her art. As a member of the radical gay arts scene in the 1970's- 1990's, Thompson began beekeeping in Chicago in 1974.[7] In 1975, he put a beehive on his roof in Chicago and was surprised at the amount of honey his urban beekeeping produced.[7]

Beginning in 1979, Thompson ran Urban Paradise Landscaping, which specialized in native and edible tree installations, gardens and Midwestern and prairie habitat restoration, while consulting, managing hives and capturing swarms for beekeepers, including municipal clients such as the City of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, and later, Lurie Gardens. He was active in AIDS awareness and support for imprisoned queer, Black and brown peoples, and radical activist causes including the Slow Foods Movement and community organizing and garden installations for food self-sufficiency. He also served on the Hothouse/CIPEX and New Art Examiner boards of directors, and mentored artist and filmmaker Sadie Benning, among many young queer artists and food activists.

In 1990, Thompson became partnered with Robert Ford, who founded and published the radical Black queer zine "Thing" from 1989-1993, until Ford's death from AIDS in 1993.[10]

In the early 2000's, Thompson was a consultant for the Illinois Department of Corrections, bringing beekeeping classes to inmates. Several of his formerly incarcerated students have continued in beekeeping upon release from incarceration. In the summer of 2004, Thompson worked with two other beekeepers to start the Chicago Honey Co-op,[11] which is dedicated to provide healthy food, passing down bee-keeping knowledge, and employing the formerly incarcerated.[9][12]

In January 2013, Thompson held his first urban beekeeping class that was open to the public at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.[13] Thompson is an organic beekeeper and urban farmer who consistently worked for biodiveristy and multiculture in his adopted city of Chicago, IL.

(rough draft)

Welcome!
Hello, Nina marks, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of your recent edits to the page Michael S. Thompson did not conform to Wikipedia's verifiability policy, and may have been removed. Wikipedia articles should refer only to facts and interpretations verified in reliable, reputable print or online sources or in other reliable media. Always provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed. Wikipedia also has a related policy against including original research in articles.

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need personal help ask me on my talk page, or. Again, welcome. Magnolia677 (talk) 18:06, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Help me!
Please help me with... I have been working with Michael S. Thompson all morning on this wiki-- personal interview today, there was an issue with a flag, saying there was no proof of his contributions to the zine Thing. This has been corrected though clarifications in the entry. We are also going to provide a link to the issue to which he contributed. he's looking for that. But I couldn't see how to fix the code for the error flag to go away. More concerning than this though is the fact that I am sure there used to be Robert Ford and Thing magazine entries on wikipedia, and they are no longer showing up. I am quite alarmed by the erasure of radical queer culture from this platform...Nina marks (talk) 18:23, 2 January 2021 (UTC) Nina marks (talk) 18:23, 2 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has a policy about original research. Perhaps after your interview is published in a reliable source, some other editor may wish to add parts of it to the Michael S. Thompson article. I hope this helps. Magnolia677 (talk) 20:10, 2 January 2021 (UTC)
 * To address another part of your concern, I can assure you that there is no intentional policy to scrub radical queer culture from Wikipedia. There is an ongoing effort to scrub un- or poorly documented material from Wikipedia. Allowing material that cannot be verified independently by readers leads to a situation where readers have to depend on Wikipedia's editors' reliability – and that's been ruled out by the community. So anything you wish to add to Wikipedia that comes solely from your interview with the subject is not going to be allowed.
 * These rules have been getting more stringent as time goes on, in part because of some elaborate hoaxes that have been perpetrated on the platform. And depending on "mainstream" press as our most reliable source leads to a variety of systematic biases that the community struggles with.  — jmcgnh (talk) (contribs) 22:41, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

January 2021
Hello Nina marks. The nature of your edits, such as the one you made to Michael S. Thompson, gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, but you have not complied with Wikipedia's mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. Paid advocacy is a category of conflict of interest (COI) editing that involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Undisclosed paid advocacy is prohibited by our policies on neutral point of view and what Wikipedia is not, and is an especially serious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a "black hat" practice akin to black-hat search-engine optimization.

Paid advocates are very strongly discouraged from direct article editing, and should instead propose changes on the talk page of the article in question if an article exists. If the article does not exist, paid advocates are extremely strongly discouraged from attempting to write an article at all. At best, any proposed article creation should be submitted through the articles for creation process, rather than directly.

Regardless, if you are receiving or expect to receive compensation for your edits, broadly construed, you are  required by the Wikimedia Terms of Use to disclose your employer, client and affiliation. You can post such a mandatory disclosure to your user page at User:Nina marks. The template Paid can be used for this purpose – e.g. in the form:. If I am mistaken – you are not being directly or indirectly compensated for your edits – please state that in response to this message. Otherwise, please provide the required disclosure. In either case, do not edit further until you answer this message. Magnolia677 (talk) 19:53, 2 January 2021 (UTC)