User talk:Quarterdeckgeneral

Welcome Quarterdeckgeneral! Now that you've joined Wikipedia, there are users!

Hello, Quarterdeckgeneral. Welcome to Wikipedia and thank you for your contributions! I'm MrX, one of the other editors here, and I hope you decide to stay and help contribute to this amazing repository of knowledge. Alternatively, leave me a message at my talk page or type  here on your talk page, and someone will try to help. Remember to always sign your posts on talk pages. You can do this either by clicking on the button on the edit toolbar or by typing four tildes   at the end of your post. This will automatically insert your signature, a link to this (your talk) page, and a timestamp. The best way to learn about something is to experience it. Explore, learn, contribute, and don't forget to have some fun! To get some practice editing you can use a sandbox. You can [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Mypage/sandbox&action=edit&preload=Template:User_Sandbox/preload create your own private sandbox] for use any time. Perfect for working on bigger projects. Then for easy access in the future, you can put  on your userpage.

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What are the true motives behind making changes?
Some twenty years ago, I started researching the life of Maj. Gen. William "Bull" Nelson and that led to the publication of The Notorious Bull Nelson: Murdered Civil War General by Southern Illinois University Press in 2011. That also led to posting a Wikipedia entry on Nelson. The primary reason behind that effort was to eliminate the plethora of bad information about Nelson and try to set the record straight. There is a general consensus that goal was accomplished and from time to time the wiki entry is checked to see what changes and or improvements have been made.

My primary reason for changing the opening paragraph on November 1,2014 was to correct the mistaken idea that Jefferson C. Davis volunteered to serve under Nelson and assist him. That is patently wrong and I suggest that if the evidence in my biography of Nelson is not satisfactory then check the definitive biography Jefferson Davis in Blue by Gordon Whitney and Nat Hughes. The use of "murder" is not subjective and that was investigated at length with a great many people before making a part of the title. On simple fact remains, Davis took the life of his superior officer by firing a bullet into his heart.

It had been hoped the someone other than myself would add appropriate documentation to the entire article, and since that has not happened, the other motive was to start adding citations throughout the piece. The elimination of my rewrite removed two citations. I have put it back and written this message trusting that a sensible resolution can be achieved. Quarterdeckgeneral (talk) 17:30, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, you also removed content that probably should have been kept, and the lead starts off with a sentence fragment, as the bolded term is supposed to be part of the first sentence. Also, normally these discussions normally belong on the article's talk page.  Stevie is the man!  Talk • Work 18:00, 2 November 2014 (UTC)


 * That would be here. Britmax (talk) 09:18, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

November 2014
Hello, I'm WyattAlex. I wanted to let you know that I undid one or more of your recent contributions to William "Bull" Nelson because it did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks! WyattAlex (talk) 02:32, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

"Bull" Nelson: This is not a biography and its lack of documentation speaks to that fact.
Self appointed gurus saw that my good intentions met with failure and I can only hope that someone with a sense of public responsibility will quarantine this article and find a way to properly fix it. Quarterdeckgeneral (talk) 16:39, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

William "Bull" Nelson

 * Hello Quarterdeckgeneral. Please use my talk page to make following discussion easier. Thanks. Using a colon before text increases the indentation, indicating a response to less indented text above it.  WyattAlex (talk) 20:39, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

General "Bull" Nelson
Since no-one seems to know what you wish to see happen here, if I were you I would explain it all very clearly on the talk page of the article. Unless you are the only IP noted in the history list you have not discussed the matter on this page before. Britmax (talk) 09:53, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

quick note
i just saw this and saw that you have retired in a huff. Just want to say a few things in case you are still looking at your account.

First, I suggest you read WP:EXPERT - lots of helpful advice for you.

Second, you are new here and you don't understand the way Wikipedia works. Yes you are a clearly a subject expert on Bull Nelson, but you are an absolute novice at Wikipedia. Maybe hard to swallow, but there it is. If you really want to get involved, it turns out that Wikipedia is a pretty complex place. Being an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit" means that over the years, Wikipedia has developed lots of policies and guidelines (PAG) to help provide a "body of law" as it were, that form a foundation for rational discussion. Without that foundation, this place would be a wild west - a truly ugly place. But with the foundation, there are ways to rationally work things out - if, and only if, all the parties involved accept that foundation and work within it. One of the hardest things for new people, is to understand not only that this foundation exists, but what its letter and spirit is. (I keep emphasizing the spirit, because too often people fall prey to what we call "wikilawyering")  The more I have learned about how things are set up here - not just the letter of PAG and the various drama boards and administrative tools, but their spirit -  the more impressed I have become at how, well ... beautiful this place is. It takes time to learn both the spirit and the letter of PAG, and to really get aligned with Wikipedia's mission to crowdsource a reliable, NPOV source of information for the public (as "reliable" and "NPOV" are defined in PAG!).

There are also kind of cultural things. For instance, it is a really bad idea to make a massive change to an article all in one go, as you apparently tried to do in the BLPN posting you made, that I linked to above. That kind of thing tends to not go well, in a community enterprise. There is always an interesting tension in Wikipedia between individual editors being bold - which is the sole means by which anything happens here - and our foundational principle of working in a community by consensus. Surely you can see that? If you keep both of those fundamental principles in mind, many things here make a lot more sense. So if you do a big rewrite, you can implement that in several ways. You can do it bit bit, in many individual edits, that other editors can respond to individually. Or, you can post the revision in a sandbox and post a link to it on the article Talk page and have people review and comment on it, and only when there is consensus, the whole thing can be posted. Or you can propose a new outline on the talk page and try to get consensus to restructure articles. All kinds of things like that - all of which allow for boldness and which get the community of editors working on an article, working together.

Anyway, I do hope realize that you have a lot to learn, and that you have patience with yourself and the community, and you slow down and learn. There are lots of people here who are happy to teach, if you open up and listen and ask authentic questions, not rhetorical ones. You could become a very, very valuable contributor. And really, good luck. Jytdog (talk) 23:01, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

For Jytdog
I respect your advice on my being a novice at Wikipedia. It does take time to learn the letter and spirit of PAG and perhaps more importantly, the "cultural things." What tipped the scale in this case was the amount of time (and patience) that was given to developing a documented update to the article and having that work vanish completely because it appeared to someone else that I was engaged in wholesale mischief. Sadly, the Nelson article is incorrect and very poorly documented that negates the enormous amount work that was originally done to create it. The amount of investment that is still required to become more than a novice at Wikipedia prompted my decision to retire at age 73. What time I have left should be devoted to finishing other projects that have suffered from my giving way too much attention to lost causes. All the best!
 * as you will! i don't understand exactly why you are upset. but in any case, life is made of time and we all need to use it wisely - it's really all we have. i respect your decision to spend yours elsewhere.  good luck to you. Jytdog (talk) 17:20, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
Hi, You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:28, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Signpost exit poll
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The questionnaire
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Detailed Instructions: you are welcome to answer these questions via usertalk (easiest), or via email (for a modicum of privacy). Processing of responses will be performed in batches of ten, prior to publication in the Signpost. GamerPro64 will be processing the email-based answers, and will strive to maintain the privacy of your answers (as well as your email address and the associated IP address typically found in the email-headers), though of course as a volunteer effort, we cannot legally guarantee that GamerPro64 will have a system free from computer virii, we cannot legally guarantee that GamerPro64 will resist hypothetical bribes offered by the KGB/NSA/MI6 to reveal your secrets, and we cannot legally guarantee that GamerPro64 will make no mistakes. If you choose to answer on-wiki, your answers will be visible to other Wikipedians. If you choose to answer via email, your answers will be sent unencrypted over the internet, and we will do our best to protect your privacy, but unencrypted email is inherently an improper mechanism for doing so. Sorry! :-) We do promise to try hard, not to make any mistakes, in the processing and presentation of your answers. If you have any questions or concerns, you may contact column-editor GamerPro64, copy-editor 75.108.94.227, or copy-editor Ryk72.  Thanks for reading, and thanks for helping Wikipedia.  GamerPro64  14:39, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
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