User talk:Ogram

Hi! I am Margo.

Primary Wikipedia interest is adding and editing articles on the Salem witch trials and Animation, especially Women Animators.

Thanks!
Heya — Great meeting you last night; I hope the event was helpful! Best of luck on the Salem witch article :) Hope to see you again at a future meetup :) Girona7 (talk) 12:19, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Stephen Nissenbaum
This is an automated message from CorenSearchBot. I have performed a web search with the contents of Stephen Nissenbaum, and it appears to include material copied directly from http://infidels.org/kiosk/author/stephen-nissenbaum-303.html.

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If substantial content is duplicated and it is not public domain or available under a compatible license, it will be deleted. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material. You may use such publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. See our copyright policy for further details. (If you own the copyright to the previously published content and wish to donate it, see Donating copyrighted materials for the procedure.) CorenSearchBot (talk) 14:40, 21 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Hello, I saw your note on the talk page of the above article. Unfortunately, we can't be sure the thumbnail bio you used at the start is actually free unless the original author can be found. It seems like a trivial thing now given the expansion you've done on this article from where it was when the bot flagged it, but we really do need all material to be confirmed as free. So if you don't mind, can you prune out or re-write a couple of the closely-paraphrased phrases flagged by the bot (quick link: ). Some of those are obviously book titles, so do not need to be reworked, but the other longer strings matched in Bold should be. Thanks for this, and thanks for creating this article!  Crow  Caw  22:20, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Copyright problem: Michaela Pavlátová
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! We welcome and appreciate your contributions, such as Michaela Pavlátová, but we regretfully cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from either web sites or printed material. This article appears to contain material copied from http://www.michaelapavlatova.com/show/), and therefore to constitute a violation of Wikipedia's copyright policies. The copyrighted text has been or will soon be deleted. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with our copyright policy. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators are liable to be blocked from editing.

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 * If a note on the original website states that re-use is permitted "under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC-BY-SA), version 3.0", or that the material is released into the public domain, or if you have strong reason to believe it is, leave a note at Talk:Michaela Pavlátová with a link to where we can find that note or your explanation of why you believe the content is free for reuse.

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Thank you, and please feel welcome to continue contributing to Wikipedia. Happy editing! Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 14:30, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry to put this here, but I want it to be very clear to you that it is not OK to copy other people's stuff from the internet and paste it into Wikipedia, even if you intend to improve it afterwards. I saw that you had done that at Stephen Nissenbaum, and did a quick check to see if you had also done it elsewhere. I'm disturbed to find that, at least in this case, you have – because that makes me wonder if you have done the same thing in many other articles. If so, your help in identifying them would be greatly appreciated, and would make it a lot easier to put things right. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 14:30, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback, Justlettersandnumbers. I try to be the best Wikipedian I can be, but obviously, I make mistakes. I'll work to create an entirely new article about Pavlátová to prevent it being deleted, and to acquire any permissions needed for copyrighted material. I appreciated your encouragement in your first addition to my talk page, actually stating "please feel welcome to continue contributing to Wikipedia," but you did not grant me the courtesy of giving me a chance to respond before you added what I perceive was reprimanding and accusative. I have been doing my best to contribute content and articles about important topics and people who are significant in their fields but which I have been surprised have no presence in Wikipedia. Isn't content the heart of the whole endeavor? I appreciate the energy you put in to policing Wikipedia for copyright infringement, but I would also ask that you be gentler, helpful, and supportive. I see from the barnstar you have been given, that you take your work on copyright infringement seriously. Although I appreciate your time, attention and care in this respect, I would like to ask how long you have been doing this. By this, I mean no disrespect or to cast aspersions on your expertise in this - it is clear to me that you are an expert - but because I wonder if there is any chance that prolonged experience doing copyright patrolling has eroded your patience, and your responses have become swifter and sharper over time than they might necessarily need to be in your first communication with an individual?

When I got the immediate bot feedback about my Nissenbaum article and the note from Crow, it should be clear from my editing history that I immediately applied myself to respond positively to the feedback - I made it original (but without personal research), cited everything with the best verifiable sources I could find, and kept the point-of-view neutral, taking into consideration that this is biographical information about a living person. I'm trying to follow the rules and make it into what I believe is a decent article, and that note really inspired me. In the case of your note, however, I felt more like I'd just gotten a whack on the wrist and an accusation that I was some sort of serial abuser. That is not helpful nor, I believe, in the spirit of Wikipedia, especially in light of the hard work I had done to remediate my most recent contribution.

You have highlighted an article I tried my hand at contributing a while ago, before the Nissenbaum article, which I started about a female animator because I went to an Ada Lovelace Wikipedia event to encourage more women to edit Wikipedia and to create more articles about women and topics of interest to women. I started but then got sidetracked and discouraged by the convoluted process required to get a photograph of Pavlátová approved because it was taken by a friend, not me. It's only because she's a good friend that she was willing to put up with all the rigamarole necessary, and I thought it was important enough to burrow through all the policies and procedures to try to figure out how to do that. I had some exchange in that process with someone who came across as really cranky. Frankly, after a while, I didn't hear anything, and I just gave up on it. I was surprised just now to see that it didn't get deleted after all! I also reached out to Pavlátová herself, someone I do not know personally, asking about permission to include some stills from her films that appear on her website, and she replied that it was okay to use anything at her website, but I didn't get it in the form that meets the standards for Wikipedia. What do I come away from this to tell other female Wikipedians? The first thing is that they are going to have to grow a thick skin, be prepared to get scolded, told they are doing everything wrong, their edits reversed, their articles deleted. And all before I get to ask them what they think is missing or needs improving. This is wrong, and contributes to the marginalization and departure of female editors. I'm willing to put in the effort, but I have only so much patience with the unpleasantness I routinely find here.

The heavy-handedness of patrolling well-intentioned editors is a serious issue for the Wikipedia community, I believe. Yes, there's a lot of vandalism and crap that needs attention, and I try to tend to some of that as I find it. I appreciate the bots and the meta-editors like you, who care enough to do the work you do on this enormous volume of material, apart from the content. I can't stand it when someone tells me that there's an "error" on Wikipedia, but then they don't take the time to fix it - but I think it is getting harder and harder for people with knowledge of a particular subject to get errors corrected on Wikipedia. I understand where they are coming from in just letting it go. This is a shame. It shouldn't come down to an elite set of editors. The manual of style and policies are very intimidating, and seem to grow all the time. I guess I always thought that the heart of the way Wikipedia worked was that many individual lay editors working separately could keep improving articles. I've tried to be part of a Task Force, to join with other editors on the subject of the Salem witch trials, but I have not found much collaboration there, which has been disappointing. I have started articles that obviously still need work. I need others to help out - but where are they? It's not a linear project, on a specific timeline. Maybe someone with a similar interest is just busy doing something else. I often feel like I need to back off and see what and when others will do, but I get distracted by the rest of my life. Editing Wikipedia is not my priority, but it is my responsibility to work on it when I can.

I appreciate the function of handing down deadlines regarding deletions, as a way to light a fire under editors to actually do the work and not let it just get ignored and never addressed, but such also sometimes just come across to me as punitive and arbitrary. Perhaps they need to be, considering the scale of Wikipedia? Perhaps, but are there more collaborative, creative ways to handle this? Not being at a meta-level myself, I don't see all the crap that goes by, so I am entirely ignorant on that point. I do think that asking such meta-editors as you to reflect with me -- as I am doing now (albeit long-windedly) -- on how to build the Wikipedia community positively is worthwhile. I rarely feel it is positive experience to edit anything here, but I brace myself and put up with it because I think the content and the ideals are important. But some days, I think it's not worth the trouble.

As the years go by, I see it getting harder and harder for new Wikipedians to join the community. That leads to stagnation regarding the numbers of active Wikipedians (Wikipedians), which does not serve the mission of Wikipedia well. It's supposed to be for everyone to contribute to, but in recent years, I see an increasing amount of hierarchical power, and it is not clear to this lowly editor who has an interest in a subject how those powers are achieved, and who these people are, if I only hear from them when I've transgressed somehow. I don't know everything about the manual of style and all the policies of Wikipedia, even as I know content and sources, but I'm willing to try. The trouble is that it has started to feel to me like some exclusive "club" that's difficult to be accepted by, which I also see as diametrically opposed to the initial vision. I know that it is necessary to establish gatekeepers, but that has also made it less and less welcoming of fresh talent. I swear I've thought other people would come along and HELP edit these articles to improve their content and style, and would HELP fix my mistakes, problems, and oversights, and HELP them adhere to policies, rather than swooping in to scold me for not doing everything by the book. You have just decreed that I have a week or everything I have already tried to accomplish is going to be deleted. Is there no chance of establishing a dialog about when this can be accomplished? I don't find this helpful, or in the spirit of what I believe Wikipedia and the whole Wiki-community to be, and that disappoints me. I don't have a solution, enterprise-wide. I know that reproducing copyrighted material without permission can open the Wikimedia Foundation to lawsuits from copyright holders. But what is the best way to shape the contributions of well-intentioned editors so that they don't feel marginalized and discouraged as I do today? I thought it would be a good thing to run an Edit-a-Thon at a conference later this year, because I went to a face-to-face meeting about running one, but increasingly, I'm feeling like throwing in the towel: all I have to show them right now is my battle scars.

I have obviously gone on far too long in this reply. I'm sure it is out of the pent-up frustration I have with this whole business, and because you chose to engage me personally in a way that only added to that frustration. You didn't know anything about me when you first wrote to me. Now you know a little more. I seriously would appreciate hearing back from you. Tell me more about that enormous layer that is invisible to me. Don't just send me to pages to read. Human contact and respectful dialogue count. Ogram (talk) 23:45, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Margo, I'll try to be very brief:
 * I accept your reproach, and apologise for the sharpness of my tone
 * I agree with almost all you say about Wikipedia, its rules and the difficulties facing editors here
 * I too try to do the best I can here
 * The Pavlátová article is at no risk of deletion, it just needs some rewriting
 * I'd be prepared to try to help fix the problem with the permission for the stills, if I can
 * I hope that you can understand how your edit summary there, "okay to use", gave the impression that you don't understand, or don't care about, our copyright policies
 * I'd be most grateful if you would confirm that you do fully understand that copying material into Wikipedia from elsewhere is, in almost every case, not permissible
 * I encourage you not to give up, the project is valuable and worthwhile despite the frustrations.
 * Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 09:57, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Justlettersandnumbers, for reading all of that and for your response. I do understand copyright, but I think that when I found small basic bits about these people - their publicity blurbs - I have assumed this copying was "fair use" as a place to start an article, and that it has been my mistake to do so. I need to wait until I have worked past that particular verbiage, off-line, and have located solid sources for the information - and more - and craft it myself before posting it. This really is my goal in the entire effort: to make a solid article. I think I did a reasonably good job getting the Nissenbaum article into shape. I want to go back and add more about his other work, but it is of less significance than his work on the witchcraft materials. This next week or so is very busy for me because I am giving several lectures, but this is not far from my thoughts.

I have also been working on finding and sourcing 19th century illustrations of the Salem witchcraft trials on the Wikimedia Commons. I've been scouring old histories and other things I've found at Archive.org from the 1800s and extracting the images. I've done this partly to make these images available, but also because I wanted them to be properly cited - people find them anyway, but then don't know who drew them and when, so I thought that was a good thing to do.

Another thing I am working on has been to create an SVG map of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, based on publicly available GIS data from the USGS, and lots of old maps from 19th century town histories. My goal is to craft a map of the towns as they existed in 1692. Would this be something you think I could put at the Commons? I ask because it's really taking a lot of personal research, and I'm not sure if that would be okay. My goal is to put it into the public domain so other people can use it freely. I've also got a lot to learn about making SVG files from Illustrator - I tried posting a current map of New Hampshire as SVG that I had produced from GIS data, and even though it looked fine in Illustrator, it fell apart when I loaded it up on the Commons. I know there are some forums where I could ask for help, but I just haven't been able to find the time to do that, having spent so much time already getting it into vector format. Someone had done a really nice one for Massachusetts, I wanted to have one for my home state, too.

Anyway, thank you for your reply. I would like to get to getting the stills from Pavlatova's films into the article. At this point, I don't know where to start as far as forms that are needed. She told me to get her whatever it is that's necessary, and she would get her producer to take care of it. I got so bogged down by trying to get the picture by a friend approved, I dropped the ball. Any help you could give me about what to send, how to get it through the O*** (I forget the acronym), would be most appreciated!

Ogram (talk) 02:58, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your Support! We Did it!


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Survey about How Historical Knowledge is Produced on Wikipedia
Hi Ogram,

I am Petros Apostolopoulos, a Ph.D. candidate in Public History at North Carolina State University. My Ph.D. project examines how historical knowledge is produced on Wikipedia. If you are interested in participating in my research study by offering your own experience of writing about history on Wikipedia, you can click on this link https://ncsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9z4wmR1cIp0qBH8. There are minimal risks involved in this research.

If you have any questions, please let me know. Petros Apostolopoulos, paposto@ncsu.edu Apolo1991 (talk) 16:43, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Reminder: Survey about History on Wikipedia
Hi Ogram,

I am Petros Apostolopoulos, a Ph.D. candidate in Public History at North Carolina State University. My Ph.D. project examines how historical knowledge is produced on Wikipedia. If you are interested in participating in my research study by offering your own experience of writing about history on Wikipedia, you can click on this link https://ncsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9z4wmR1cIp0qBH8. There are minimal risks involved in this research.

If you have any questions, please let me know. Petros Apostolopoulos, paposto@ncsu.edu Apolo1991 (talk) 17:07, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

I think I already did this, in response to your first request. Ogram (talk) 17:23, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

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