User talk:PPatBoyd

Sup bro
You may be interested to know that I've obtained a copy of the original Gen[M]ay article, in the hopes that it can be properly sourced and someday undeleted. It's currently residing in my sandbox if you'd like to take a look. Any contributions that you can make to it would be appreciated! —Lantoka ( talk 21:32, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

The text that Saxifrage deleted...
... can be found here. —Lantoka ( talk 03:29, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Re: your email
Since it doesn't contain anything private, I'm going to quote your email here for context:
 * Hey Saxifrage, want to say up front thanks for listening to my drivel, which I'm sure seems pretty pointless and ignorant. I'd hope you'd bear with me a bit though, cause I don't know wikipedia as well as you do, and all I'm going for is the reinstatement of one article :-D
 * You mentioned the places that'd be worth posting in to try and work to get our page reinstated. You first mentioned Talk:Genmay, which would've been a much better place for my to post my speech, but it turns out as Lantoka posted that it was deleted and blocked from recreation.
 * You advised picking a specific admin to ask a specific question, and leaving a question on their talk page. As far as I can see this is the next best place for me to chat and discuss the genmay article, whether it should exist or not. You didn't appreciate it on your talk page though, so I'm unsure that anyone else would either, and am inclined to believe that it would continue to be deleted as you deleted it.
 * Entering the discussion on notability, well, I'm not sure it belongs there. Notability is a judgment call as well all know, best done by those familiar with the subjects, and I was trying to produce comparative evidence in support of genmay having an article.  I don't have any great arguments about how to determine notability, and you guys probably have that down, I just have comparisons and evidence that I was hoping to support our cause.  Dreaded Walrus commented that 4chan is indeed notable.  I looked at their wiki and the information they have, compared it to the history and uses of genmay, and found little difference, and tried to show this.  I don't really think that spamming the notability discussion to get an article reinstated will go anywhere, besides get me pointed to go elsewhere.
 * You offered the Village Pump, though I'm not sure they'd care.I don't believe the issue belongs to a large group to discuss, if they'd even discuss it, becuse the village pump looks like it's a place for very general, very generic discussions. We have a very pointed discussion.  Actions were taken by admins/moderators/whatever that we are contesting, and our discussion lies with them and on the topic of their judgment.  This would be you and those other admins/moderators involved, and the village pump would just be a place where the discussion would just be spam.
 * The last place you offered was the help desk, which I would figure to be as useless as the village pump, for the same reason.
 * So Sax, where's the right place? I am confused by some of the moves by wiki admins, and this last telling me to go elsewhere has me similarly confused.  Have any ideas? :-)
 * Thanks again.

My talk page is the right place to ask me a question, so you don't need to use the Wikipedia email system for those. :)

Anyway, I do see your point. Normally I'd say deletion review is the place to earnestly discuss the merits of the deletion or arguments for its undeletion, but the abuse of that forum by others means that opening a new review so soon is likely to get shut down quickly. (That's not particular to this Genmay incident—reopening a review or making a new nomination of any kind soon after one finished is usually seen as a waste of time since mass opinion doesn't change fast enough for it to matter. However, it's also possible that someone will see it as trolling and shut it down for that reason too, so chances right now are not good.) The rest are too general or too specific to one admin, you're right, so those aren't really very good suggestions on my part.

Wikipedia talk:Notability would still be a first good stop to learn about how notability is applied here—it's much less subjective than you think, since nearly-objective measures have long since been codified and written down. (That's where WP:WEB comes from.) I've tried to teach people from Genmay about what's needed and how to evaluate sources in a way that's relevant to Wikipedia, but unsurprisingly they don't trust that I'm not talking out of my ass out of spite or a grudge.

One good place to discuss the article centrally is at the Talk page of the sandbox Lantoka has set up for the copy of the article he's got: User talk:Lantoka/Sandbox2. The obvious problem with that is that few experienced users who can advise and correct people about the policy and guidelines involved will be there. I'd offer to do that, but the problem of trusting my advice is still there. Failing experienced users' help, the hard way is to ask at the relevant pages. The trouble with that is that getting a good grasp of the interactions of the web of policies that governs Wikipedia is actually a pretty hard thing to do quickly. It takes most users a while of listening, watching, editing (and getting corrected), discussing, and so forth at multiple article before they get a good working understanding of Wikipedia. (The worst good-faith troublemakers I run into are those who work in a very limited area of the encyclopedia. They get a skewed view of how Wikipedia works from the few other editors they interact with, who also might be working in a walled garden and be similarly un- or misinformed.)

It sounds like Rizla is going to be pursuing this again in the future. One possibility is to embrace the time it takes to get familiar with the workings of the place, and go edit and interact at a bunch of articles. Avoiding edit wars would be a good idea if you do that, because those suck up a lot of attention and tend to contain people who aren't useful for learning about Wikipedia from because they're not working within the spirit of the system. That's a kind of "become one of us" option that mightn't work for you thought.

Another option is to ask for a mentor. This is an experienced user who has a good track record and is not only experienced with how to get stuff done well at Wikipedia, but is also experienced at not getting personally involved with the subjects their wards are asking advice about. They'd be able to guide you and everyone else who wants to work on Lantoka's sandboxed copy. Actually, having thought of this, I'd highly recommend it.

Here's a quick note from me on the strategy you mention now, which you can disregard if you like, but I have to try in good conscience. The comparative method won't work, or at the very least will convince people of a different conclusion than you're looking for. The trouble with saying that Genmay is as notable as 4chan is that Genmay's notability (and so, the ability of editors to find material that satisfies Verifiability with which to write a Genmay article) is independent of 4chan's. If the reality is that there are no good sources for Genmay and 4chan is as notable, then what happens is that 4chan will get deleted, not that Genmay will get an article. In the end, the fate of the Genmay article is independent of the fate of 4chan. It just might be scrutiny of 4chan's article as a result of this fiasco will result in it being deleted, but then that would be on it's merits alone too. The state of affairs at Wikipedia is that we have a lot of articles that don't belong, but it takes time for them to get noticed and investigated to the point where they actually get removed.

I hope some of this has been helpful. If you have any more specific questions that you think I can answer, don't hesitate to ask them on my Talk page. I was a bit too quick to remove what you wrote before because it, for one, wasn't actually addressed to me, and for two seemed like just more of the same faux-polite trolling like what RandomUser99 was doing. For that last misjudgement on my part I'm sorry, and I'll take it as a reminder to assume good faith. I don't think my fellow admins will think it was out of line of me considering this mess, but I do try to hold myself to a higher standard than just "good enough". Cheers. — Saxifrage ✎ 06:23, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

How to sign
FYI, to sign stuff you use four tildes in a row like this: ~ JoshuaZ 06:42, 17 November 2006 (UTC)