User talk:John Carter

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This user is no longer very active on Wikipedia.

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Hope to see you join! Harej (talk) 20:48, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar

Thank you for your kind comments about my Quality improvement efforts to Wikipedia, at my appeal request to work on Quality improvement for an article I'd previously brought to WP:GA quality, Typewriter in the Sky. You didn't have to go over there and put yourself on the line like that and comment on my behalf, but you did anyways, and I thank you for it. I'll continue to strive to better Wikipedia by engaging in the Quality improvement process, and bring articles to WP:GA and WP:FA quality. I'll work with my mentor The Rambling Man and do my best to learn from his example and guidance. Thank you, — Cirt (talk) 23:48, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

Cirt, believe me when I say that you don't have much that you need to learn from anyone around here, and I sincerely hope that the Arbs come to realize that soon. Your contributions are some of the most consistently impressive we have around here, and it is an honor to be able to help out in a small way someone who has done as much as you have, over as long as you have been here, and still has the spirit and drive to improve this site that you have. John Carter (talk) 18:14, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, John Carter. I hope, in time, your views regarding my Quality improvement efforts will be shared by more editors within our Wikipedia community. Hopefully someday. :) But for now, I'll go back to attempting to improve the articles that I can — to higher levels of quality including WP:GA and WP:FA. If you've got any advice on how to bring about the change in perspective you wish for, above, John Carter, I'd appreciate it. — Cirt (talk) 19:09, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

A year ago, you were recipient no. 1068 of
Precious, a prize of QAI!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:29, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom reform proposal

Just thinking here. Maybe one way to revise things might be to create an umbrella entity, perhaps a Dispute Resolution Committee, which might be eligible for election.

At least in my eyes, one of the big reasons for the problems of the ArbCom last year was that both User:Newyorkbrad and User:Kirill Lokshin were gone, and there were no immediately obvious replacements for them. User:Doug Weller and User:DGG, the two members of the board who would at least strike me as being the leading candidates for the sage positions vacated by those two, were both new that year, and, given the greatly reduced number of cases lately, it took a while for them to know the ropes and the others to learn how they work. The reduced caseload and possible/probable loss of institutional memory with the loss of old hands could well have been one of the big problems then.

I know a hell of a lot less about MedCom and other entities, but I think maybe one way to ensure that we don't lose the institutional memory aspect might be to create a DRC from which the arbs for any individual case can be drawn. Granted, I don't expect Brad to want to join every case after retirement, God knows I wouldn't want to, but it could very easily be very beneficial for the other members of the committee to have access to him for a particular case, maybe even in a "rotating chair" or something like that.

So, as a sort of proposal, have elections every year to elect a largish number of members of DRC or similar. Say, for instance, 60 members. All qualified editors are welcome to sign a predetermined number of petitions for candidates, up to and including "draft" petitions, and those which get sufficient signatures are on the ballot. Then, allow each qualified editor to vote, preferably for only a smaller number of candidates, for instance 30. The top 60 votegetters are determined, and then those 60 individuals cast the final, deciding, public votes for who are the 12 individuals on the "standing" ArbCom, MedCom, ArbCom clerks, AE enforcers, and the like. I figure only about half of those 60 would actually get "standing" positions, which is really what I would want. This would give the bottom 30 finishers a chance to maybe take one a case or two to see if they really want to do that. preferably with the help of an old hand, and maybe more actively seek a "standing" position in a following year if they want to take that role on regularly.

But, if all 60 were, at least theoretically, capable of filling any of the positions for a given year, we might have a much better chance of avoiding the discontinuity of community memory and leadership which I think happened when Kirll and Brad left the ArbCom.

Anyway, any ideas? John Carter (talk) 18:14, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

• 1) Arb com is complicated enough already.. We should be looking at procedures to simplify the process.

2) Perhaps I have a prejudice here, but the difficulties last year were not due to lack of experience of myself or the other new people. If anything, perhaps there were last year altogether too many people on that committee whose long experience led them to an apparent commitment to entrenched ways of doing things; I at least certainly felt difficulty in getting an effective voice, especially in internal discussions. But the real difficulties were due to the unfortunate but unavoidable situation that several major cases had no really satisfactory solution. DGG ( talk ) 18:33, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, you, having been there and all, would probably know a hell of a lot more about it than me, who wasn't there. :) But, maybe, the "entrenchment" you speak of might be a symptom of loss of earlier leadership, I dunno. Regarding simplification, I think in a sense this might be a bit simpler. One of the problems that several have commented on is that few people really read the questions to candidates, and the sometimes questionable nature of the questions, and act however they would anyway, generally based on possibly questionable opinion they have as outsiders to the system who know the system even less than well than I might. Creating a publicly seen final discussion among the electeds might make it easier for at least that select group to deal with what they might see as real issues involved. And, a proposal like this, of the House/Senate type, sort of, might be a bit easier for a lot of people in the US anyway to understand, although I admit it might be harder for non-US people or people who don't have a bicameral system to follow. John Carter (talk) 19:02, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm not quite clear on your proposal: how are the 48 members not on the standing sub-committee "drawn" to participate in an arbitration committee task? Are you envisioning that for each task, be it a case, an appeal review, responding to incoming email, and so forth, that X number of people be drawn from the pool of 48, and added to those from the standing sub-committee who are also participating in the task? On a side note, I don't see how this relates to a bicameral system, where there are two separate deliberative bodies, and they act as a balance for each other. (Unless you are suggesting that any task be replicated by the standing sub-committee and the rest of the larger committee, independently?) This is more like an organization forming a sub-committee with a set of standing members and a set of rotating guest members. isaacl (talk) 03:49, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

First, I think it worth noting that the proposed board is where not only the ArbCom itself would be drawn from, but also maybe the MedCom, the Arb clerks, the regular AE enforcers, and other similar functionaries be drawn from. Basically, if something like this were done, the 60 or so would elect all the holders of those positions, which would probably be about 30 or so people. The other 30 who aren't selected and haven't yet filled such functions could, at request, if they wanted to, maybe ask to take part in specific processes (individual Arb cases, Med cases, clerking for a single case, etc.) which more or less requires selection of some sort, as either an observer or additional member of the "team", under the supervision of an existing "team" member to see if they might think they want to more actively seek such a post in the future. And, yeah, you're right, it is more like legislative committee appointments and officer selection than a bicameral legislature. John Carter (talk) 14:48, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the additional clarification of your ideas. From your description, it sounds more like a pool of alternate members, or a pool of apprentices. isaacl (talk) 23:10, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Isidor Sauers - skeptic?

I was just casting around for things to clean up and fix in Wikiproject Skepticism, and I noticed the article Isidor Sauers. WAY back in October 2007 you tagged into the project (here's the diff: [1]). I'm just curious - why? I've pored over the current state of the article and done some Googling of this fellow and I can't for the life of me figure out his connection to Skepticism. Apologies in advance if I'm missing something obvious here. --Krelnik (talk) 19:59, 9 June 2016 (UTC)

@Krelnik: I'm guessing the article has been changed a bit since then, maybe. That page is currently included in the Category:Scientific skepticism, and that was probably the reason for the tagging, but it might be that the content supporting for that categorization has been perhaps removed. John Carter (talk) 17:42, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

I thought the same thing, but I dug around in the article history, and I can't find any "smoking gun" removals of text that might explain it. Here is what the article looked like the day you tagged it. Ah well, just one of those mysteries I guess. --Krelnik (talk) 18:25, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Alejo Carpentier and WikiProject African diaspora

Hi John Carter, Just wondering why you added Alejo Carpentier to the list of articles "belonging" to wp:WikiProject African diaspora and rated it importance=Top on 22 August 2012? Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (talk) 13:55, 9 October 2016 (UTC)please ping me

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, John Carter. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority 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 in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Trump difficulties

The Donald Trump article will be an extremely hard article to bring up to average Wikipedia standards, not to mention GA or FA. It will probably involve much fighting and many months. Either that or one group of people will wear out the other 2-3 groups. Compounding the problem is that Trump is very controversial. About 52% of people voting did not want him. Another 25% had negative feelings toward him even though they voted for him. That leaves maybe 20% that either support him a little or a lot, 80% don't like him or viciously hate him.

I feel it is beyond my expertise to fight a talk page battle so I will leave it to more experienced hands like you (or 3 others that I wrote to). Below is a link to my sandbox, which shows an edited version that does 3 things. 1. It fixes the jumping back and forth of related areas that are placed apart (there's quite a bit of that). 2. Trims down some trivia. 3. The lead represents a better summary and also is the permitted 4 paragraphs. I did not edit the political and campaign sections yet and don't intend to.

Here is the link. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Usernamen1/sandbox&diff=prev&oldid=754347721

Consider commenting on the Donald Trump talk page about this sample revision. I do not plan on extensive discussion on the talk page and will leave it up to you. Let me know what you think.

Disclaimer: I am a foreigner and not a registered Republican or Democrat. Usernamen1 (talk) 05:02, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Your help in a Catholic saint article

Dear sir I had made a request for TFA of Mother Teresa i have seen it has a multiple of issues and I have seen it has been removed from Good article list also I request your help in the article as I find u more helpful in making the article great in a Catholic topic --✝iѵɛɳ२२४०^{†ลℓк †๏ мэ} 07:27, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

German Wikipedia

See my talk page - I got tipped off - and here in Die Welt. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:18, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Thank you

And a happy new year as well JarrahTree 23:17, 9 January 2017 (UTC) You may well be semi retired - I think of full retirement when I encounter some of the genius and sheer mindless perversity on this damned thing, but, you have always been there to help with the damned project tweaking, it is both appreciated and honoured - and may it serve you well sir ! (I am sure that it channelling a John Lennon line, but damned if I can remember from where ) JarrahTree 23:23, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

At this point, I am far from being an everyday editor here like a lot of others are, which is a form of retirement, and am also trying to develop wikisource on my own, and, maybe, talking others into it, which reduces the amount of time I spend here. And I thank you for your very kind words above. John Carter (talk) 23:27, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

I am now even honoured to have you as an eminent page stalker while I sleep (at 8+), my thanks and appreciation moves higher... may your capacity to sleep well in face of the world changing friday, this friday be allayed (or should that be the propensity and propinquity for sleep if we allow the terms to invade wikipedia talk pages) by residence in a country of very strange people JarrahTree 00:32, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

Additional thanks

Thanks for your comment at EP. I'm always glad to hear that I'm not totally off-base. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:09, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Need input on a Maldivian name

Hi! I need someone who has access to some decent sources for the geography of the Maldives to resolve a question at Talk:Inguraidhoo (Raa Atoll)#Requested move 5 January 2017. Thanks for whatever light you can shed on it! — Gorthian (talk) 06:30, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Zuyud

Hey, so, in 2008 you created this article Zuyud, with the "Gazetteer of the United Arab Emirates. Washington, D.C. : Defense Mapping Agency, 1987" as a reference. I have not for the life of me been able to find a copy of this document (or book? I'm not sure) to verify or find any other information about this place. Do you still have your copy, or know where to find one? And if so, could you point me towards it? I haven't been able to find any other sources for anything about Zuyud and I'm hoping that the Gazetteer might help. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 18:22, 20 January 2017 (U

@PMC: It is listed at WorldCat here but from what I remember it didn't have much more than I added to that article, considering it is public domain as a government publication and I could reproduce most if not all of it anyway. John Carter (talk) 01:32, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! Not sure if my Google-fu was weak or what but I couldn't find it for the life of me. :) ♠PMC♠ (talk) 02:45, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

RfC on "No paid editing for Admins" at WT:COI

I've relisted an RfC that was run at WT:Admin in Sept. 2015. It is at Wikipedia talk:Conflict of interest#Concrete proposal 3 as there are a number of similar proposals going on at the same place. Better to keep them together. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:31, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 6, 2017)

A high school in Malaysia Hello, John Carter. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Secondary school Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Nvidia Shadowplay • African nationalism Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:09, 6 February 2017 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI •

Thanks

But now that he's posted to the article talk page I doubt he'll read mine. There is something weird going on with the university press release. Nothing Jordanian is a reliable source fir this so far as I can see. Doug Weller talk 21:21, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Re: Talk:St. Joseph's Cathedral, Asmara

Well, Til Eulenspiegel was once of those I was alluding to -- he also edited as Codex Sinaiticus at first, I believe -- but the one I was indirectly praising was Yom, who wrote some of the Ethiopian articles which properly were graded as GAs. (And I seriously wish would come back & contribute more.) In any case, we never had more than 3 or at most 4 editors at once who were fluent in Amharic, Tigrigna, or Somali, so even banning one would be banning a significant share of them. And if we include all three languages, I believe as many as three or four who have these skills have been banned. Sigh. It would be nice if this were a statistical anomaly, but IMHO they are more zealous about getting their viewpoints into Wikipedia than is good for them. It's a symptom of living in a part of the world where freedom of speech cannot be taken for granted. -- llywrch (talk) 00:20, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

A note

You might want to be careful about joining a discussion that Hijiri's been one of the most active contributers to—you don't want to find out that "broadly construed" includes such situations, especially as you've made a counter-proposal to one of Hijiri's. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:15, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Actually, FWIW, I think I was the first one involved in the discussion, even starting the thread at WT:COMICS. If that is the case, then the other party might be the one who might have more cause to worry. John Carter (talk) 23:17, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Uh ... no, not by any stretch of the imagination. Whatever. I was hoping to prevent another potential ANI dramahfest. Feel free to ignore this. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:32, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

What exactly are you saying "no" too here? That I didn't start the thread at WT:COMICS#Assistance in developing content relating to individual characters across multiple articles? I thought I did. If drama arises, I don't know that I have necessarily done anything to spark it. John Carter (talk) 23:35, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm not going to continue this discussion. I was trying to be helpful. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 23:51, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

The help might be better directed elsewhere, I think, if problems arise. Your argument seems to me to be based on the premise that, having been inactive since Wednesday, any activity of mine thereafter has to be weighed against developments in the interim. While under some circumstances that might be reasonable, I also think that, prior to Wednesday, as the record shows, I have been one of the most involved people in the discussion, and I think that much earlier involvement on my part would have to be looked at by any admin seeking to level sanctions. John Carter (talk) 23:52, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

"Your argument ..."—I have no argument. You're reading something into my comment that was never there. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:01, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Different use of the word "argument" I'm afraid. I was thinking more along the lines of Milton, using it as a synonym for "summary of content" or something similar. I think you might be reading something into my comment which wasn't intended to be there, whether it could be perceived as being there by others or not. John Carter (talk) 02:04, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

I really don't care. I was trying to be helpful. Fuck me. Curly "JFC" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:23, 14 February 2017 (UTC)