TaylanUB

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Hello, TaylanUB, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like Wikipedia and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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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 help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome!  - Ahunt (talk) 18:07, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Discretionary Sanctions Notification for Paraphilia and Transgender Issues

Since you have been editing in trans-related articles and opined about the topic ([1], [2]), I thought it might be best to inform you of existing discretionary sanctions surrounding the topic.

This message contains important information about an administrative situation on Wikipedia. It does not imply any misconduct regarding your own contributions to date.

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding transgender issues and paraphilia classification (e.g. hebephilia), a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.

Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you that sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.

Template:Z33 EvergreenFir (talk) 19:35, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

comments at Talk:Transphobia

Hi TaylanUB:

This is a continuation of a discussion started at Talk:Transphobia, and is in reply to your last comment of 18:59, 22 February 2017.

You've wandered into an area on Wikipedia that, just as in life, can be fairly contentious. So much so, in fact, that it is one of several topic areas that are under special rules, and I see above that an editor has already advised you of this fact.

You're still fairly new here and I didn't want you to be caught unawares. There are some things to watch out for, here. In one short post about your interests, you have already mentioned trans* issues, separatist lesbianism, and Naziism; and with respect to the exchanges you have had on other forums you have described experiencing "constant and extreme vitriol", having your opinions regarded "on equal grounds with neo-Nazism", and as a result that you are "really exhausted and permanently walking on eggshells". This could be seen by some as a red flag, although the "walking on eggshells" part could be good, if that translates into exercising caution before jumping in.

In any of these special topic areas, you may find that even making statements that seem perfectly innocent to you, such as "make things more neutral" or "they [articles about this topic] are mostly written by people on one side of the debate" or "some of my edits may offend people" may set people's teeth on edge, and you may not get the welcoming response that is due you, especially to someone relatively new.

You might consider working on other areas of interest at the outset, and staying away from areas of conflict in Wikipedia until you get your sea legs in how things work around here. Also, if you do accidentally bump into one of the many policies or guidelines and get some friendly advice about it on your Talk page, please just leave it there and reply however you see fit rather than deleting it; they're trying to help you stay within the guidelines. Once you get more experience with less controversial articles, you'll be better able to tackle the tougher ones.

If you really want to edit on trans* topics, then please consider raising the issue first on the Talk page of the article concerned, rather than editing the article directly, and wait for feedback before continuing. Hope this helps! Mathglot (talk) 01:36, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the friendly welcome. To slightly clarify where I stand: I don't intend to touch any parts of Wikipedia about (neo-)Nazism. My stance on (neo-)Nazism could be said to be that of an average young, politically left-leaning German citizen: I'm no expert on the topic and just pack it in the "generally horrendous ideologies" bag, without further interest in the topic. I mentioned that I'm one of the people who think "alt-right" to be a euphemism for neo-Nazism, which I suppose may be offensive to some people who identify with the alt-right, but either way it's not a topic I see myself touching on Wikipedia in the foreseeable future, and my interactions tend to be with people who we at least agree with on that point.

Regarding radical feminist and trans* topics, as you say, even if I formulate something rather neutrally, it can immediately raise an alarm in the minds of people who hold views extremely opposed to mine. As I want to be civil on Wikipedia, but lack the mental energy and diplomatic skills required to sugar-coat my statements in enough layers of apologetic tone so as to become completely palatable, I try to hold some emotional distance and strike a healthy balance between frankness and politeness. :-) All I expect in return is not to be treated with contempt and derision.

Oh and regarding the editor whose warnings I deleted, that was an instance of really experiencing derisive treatment (bullying, in fact), though stemming from an unrelated political issue. One of our first interactions was having my reasoning called "utter garbage" by them. After providing elaborate reasoning for my edits, they seemed more interested in trying to block my editing through use of a variety of Wikipedia rules rather than providing counter-arguments to my reasoning. (They accused me at least of: conflict of interest, personal attacks, and failing to assume good faith, two of which they have ironically done themselves.) I asked another editor for help with that situation, so hopefully it will be dealt with some way.

Again, thanks for the welcome! TaylanUB (talk) 19:06, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

You're welcome. Couldn't quite discern whether you are a German citizen, or just holding opinions like one, but either way, if you speak German (or other languages) you might consider using the {{Babel}} template on your user page. For an example, see my user page, or if you want to see a really amazing one, check out this one. Mathglot (talk) 08:23, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Collaborative editing, and dealing with opposition

Hi again, TaylanUB. I see that some of your edits are generating some reverts and some Talk page opposition. I hope this is not discouraging you, as I haven't seen you around, lately. It takes a while to get the hang of things around here, and just like in real life, sometimes you'll run into some opposition, which may or may not be justified. If you're interested in talking about any of this, feel free to ping me here; just reply with the text {{ping|Mathglot}} somewhere in your comment. We welcome your contributions, so I hope you'll stick around. 02:17, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Notice of Edit warring noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.6.59.134 (talk • contribs) 16:33, December 2, 2017 (UTC)

It was 3 edits over a 25 hour span (and I didn't even know about the rule), but go on, let the admins see how much your bias blinds you. *sigh* TaylanUB (talk) 16:57, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Feminist views on transgender and transsexual people

Hi Taylan, I think you can develop into a really good and valuable editor, and I don't want to see that path derailed by something like this, but there may be some real risk of that so I wanted to offer some words which I hope will be helpful.

Regarding the image from Imgur that you discussed at Talk:Feminist views on transgender and transsexual people that purports to be a screenshot of a conversation among trans activists about how to manipulate Wikipedia, and your reply there. I just wanted to add these words, which I hope will be useful and of some comfort.

Please don't let this depress you, and please don't become a zombie as you said there. If you want to get angry, get angry at unknown persons of unknown motivation, who may be trying to manipulate you, me, and others interested in the topic by posting unverifiable images that anyone could create in 30 minutes with the proper graphics tool. This could just as easily be a false flag operation created by radical feminists to whoop their supporters into a frenzy of super-vigilance tending towards paranoia and over-compensating with biased editing, as it could be a "real" conversation—whatever that means in this case—but the point is, we just don't know, and it shouldn't influence the way we edit the article, either in one sense, or the other. Does that make sense?

Much of your post dealt with what might or might not be happening off-wiki, and what their opinions and motivations might be. Try not to get sucked into that. The purpose of an article talk page is to discuss how to improve the article, so try to stick to that as much as possible. You can discuss the behavior of editors that you believe may not be adhering to Wikipedia policies on their User talk page, and if that doesn't work, raise a topic at ANI.

With regard to the article in question and other related articles, a calm attitude, an assumption of good faith on the part of other editors who may hold different opinions than you, and adherence to normal Wikipedia standards of verifiability and citation of reliable sources is the best strategy here, and is completely sufficient to keep this article on the right track; what happens off-wiki needn't concern us. Don't give such trolls the satisfaction of rebroadcasting their "conversation" and trumpeting their strategy to inflame even more people than it reached on whatever image board you found it.

If anyone lets themself be manipulated into departing from normal Wikipedia policies and guidelines, then they will be the loser, and so will the article and Wikipedia generally. I urge you to take a deep breath, assume someone out there is trying to manipulate your emotions, and then go back to discussing at the article talk page per normal discussion standards. If you feel this has affected your ability to edit this article objectively and with a neutral point of view, then I urge you to step back for a bit. This is not some kind of high-stakes war that will be lost if User:TaylanUB is not on the battlements every day at the crack of dawn. Let somebody else deal with it for a while. Sometimes the simple act of disengaging for a bit and working on something else, or even avoiding Wikipedia altogether can be the best strategy.

If you are feeling overwhelmed on how to engage in article content disputes in a calm and effective manner, please check out the Wikipedia policy on dispute resolution. There are some ideas there on what to do and what not to do, and links to other project pages that may be of help. And you can always contact me on my talk page anytime, or ask an admin for help by posting a question here on your Talk page, and adding {{HelpMe}} to your comment. Hope this helps, Mathglot (talk) 08:38, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi Mathglot, I'm not impressed at all by your suggestion that this might be a "false flag" operation, that somebody is trying to manipulate "my emotions" (rather than Wikipedia articles), or that this topic would somehow make me unable to remain neutral, when the attitude of the people in the screenshots is perfectly congruent with how anti-feminist trans activists have behaved over the years both outside of Wikipedia, and within Wikipedia wherein I've been called a "hateful bigot" and my contributions repeatedly deleted by appealing to wrong applications or interpretations of Wikipedian rules, for nothing else than adding factual and extremely well-covered content regarding a physical assault against a feminist by transgender activists. If you really mean to be helpful, I would expect you to acknowledge the massive bias that is happening in transgender-related Wikipedia articles and try to do something about that. You should prioritize that over being friendly to me if you want to improve Wikipedia, because I alone am not going to be able to counter a mob of biased editors who are keeping trans-related articles under control. For instance, where were you when citations of The Guardian, The Times, and New Statesman were removed and replaced with opinion pieces from "The Queerness" and "PlanetTransgender" to claim that the assault was not really an assault? I appreciate that you are trying to be helpful from a technical point of view, but I'm afraid that so far I don't see you helping to improve Wikipedia's content on these topics much. TaylanUB (talk) 14:52, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi Taylan, I'm sorry you feel that way. I guess I was unclear in my point about the image: I'm not making any claim about its provenance one way or another, only that we have no idea what the source of it was, it could be from anybody for any reason, we just don't know. The point is, that it doesn't matter, and it should have exactly zero effect on how we go about improving the article, as it only serves to stir up emotions and encourage people to hunker down and take a battleground mentality onto the article talk pages, instead of calmly discussing how to improve the article and the encyclopedia.

In an atmosphere like that, tempers can flare. Nevertheless, no one has the right to call you or anyone a "hateful bigot", and you don't have to put up with that. This is clearly a personal attack and you can and should call them out for that kind of behavior on their user talk page, citing the fundamental principle of civility. The policy page has a section on how to engage a user who has been uncivil, or to report them for possible sanctions if they won't stop.

At the same time, talking about "a mob of biased editors" simply is not helpful; if that term appeared on an article talk page it would be like throwing a grenade into an area that is already tense (that's one reason it is under discretionary sanctions). Editors may be biased (some would say all editors are), but there is no foul until bias has made its way into an article in the form of content that contravenes one of the policies, such as the core principle of maintaining a neutral point of view.

I know you're aware of that, and have been trying to counter non-neutral content, as you mentioned with respect to someone removing the Guardian and other reliable sources in favor of what may be blogs or other sources of questionable reliability. In that case, you should feel free to revert a bold change like that with a neutrally worded edit summary citing WP:BRD, and inviting them to discuss their desired change on the Talk page. In general, when you have a content dispute with other editors, the goal is to seek consensus on the article talk page, and you can check out WP:Dispute resolution for some methods for how to go about that. Besides being the right way to go about it per the guidelines, it's also more effective way to counter bias than making free-floating comments about it, which may simply inflame others and not lead to improvements in the article. (As to "where was I" when all this was going on: everyone here is a volunteer; I volunteer in numerous topic areas on Wikipedia, including French history, words, World War II, Catalonia, translation, Cuba, Deafness, biographies, Hungary, medieval history, and others. And I even have a life outside Wikipedia, mirabile dictu. There's no obligation to edit, and never any reason to reproach someone for not making an improvement that you think is warranted.)

I hope you consider contributing to the encyclopedia for a while in another topic area of interest to you. You'll gain good experience, which will be useful to you later in improving articles relating to this subject area with less Sturm und Drang than you've been experiencing here. If you decide to stick it out in this topic area, try to remain informed about guidelines and policies regarding editing controversial topics, the etiquette regarding interaction with other editors with respect to dispute resolution, and especially how all of these are affected by editing articles in a topic area subject to discretionary sanctions. Hope this helps, Mathglot (talk) 22:46, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Can you please provide a {{Diff}} of where citations of The Guardian et al. were replaced with opinion pieces? That should be fixed. Mathglot (talk) 21:25, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

Thank you for your work on articles relating to radical feminism and transphobia. I saw those screenshots as well and it got me back on Wikipedia.The obvious bias on those and other articles is a real issue. What you're doing is great and I appreciate your edits!

Woodsy lesfem (talk) 16:55, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Adding quotations with named references

You asked somewhere how to use different quotations with named reference. First, to back up a minute: different quotations often occur on different pages of the same book, so probably you first want to know how to do that, i.e., specify a named reference again with a different page number. There are several solutions, and they work whether or not you are using the (recommended) {{cite}} series of templates. The simplest is to use the {{rp}} template. E.g., {{rp|27–29}} (or, {{rp|page=27–29}}, same thing). A more efficient way is with {{sfn}}, but that's only advisable if the article is already using short footnotes, or if you're the first to add one, as guidelines frown on mixing different styles of referencing.

Back to your question: once you've got the issue of referencing different pages with named refs down, how do you indicate a different quotation? I've struggled with this before, and there's no ideal solution.

• You can embed the quotation in a separate ref right after the named reference, so either:
  • <ref name="Lincoln-1863" /><ref>"Four score and seven years ago..." —A. Lincoln, Gettysburg, Nov. 9, 1863</ref> I'd throw in a little suffix identifier if you do it this way, because you never know with other editors coming in after you, whether the two references might get separated, and if the quotation ends up by itself, somehow, you want someone to be able to rescue it and restore the context, and the suffix helps with that.
  • Or, name the quotation reference as well: <ref name="Lincoln-1863" /><ref name="Lincoln-1863-quote-Gettysburg">Four score...</ref>. In this method, the <ref> tag carries around the id as metadata, but you don't see it in the footnote itself, whereas in the previous method, you do.)
• You can also embed the quotation in an explantory footnote, using {{efn}}: <ref name="Lincoln-1863" />{{Efn|"Four score and seven years ago..." —A. Lincoln, Gettysburg, Nov. 9, 1863}}. When using notes, you need to add a ==Notes== section at the bottom to contain them, just like ==References==, and use the {{Notelist}} template (analogous to {{Reflist}} ) to visualize them.
• The last way I know of is to use the |q= param of the {{rp}} template. See the documentation for details. HTH, Mathglot (talk) 00:02, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi Mathglot, thanks for the detailed explanation! I wonder whether it would be acceptable to misuse the {{rp}} syntax for non-book citations, like this? I'm unsure though; it clutters the text with the superscripted word "quote" and needs to be hovered over to display (also making it impractical to use a shorter word than "quote" as hovering might get difficult for users with a small font and/or who are clumsy with the mouse). In any case there doesn't seem to be a very clean way to do it. Oh well. Taylan (talk) 20:50, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

I'm probably guilty of "misusing" different templates and things already, but it's not advisable to do that. You can always just use a home-brew^[hyphen?] solution for some things, though I wouldn't do that for a quotation, which seems to deserve better treatment that a tool-tip pop-up. Also, tool-tips have a maximum length, and a long quote might get truncated. Mathglot (talk) 21:17, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Figured out a modification of the {{efn}} method which I think is cool as far as linking the quotes back to the source; check out Mexican Legion of Honor, and let me know what you think. Mathglot (talk) 11:45, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Notes

References

Some baklava for you!

Great to see another wiki writer questioning the bias SheWhoSees (talk) 19:52, 2 January 2018 (UTC)