User talk:Jerzy/Top Arc AC Dilog

This page contains my Topical Archive re Dialogue with Adam Carr

• In /Top Arc AC Dilog (14 KB, 2004 Jul 16)

Consolidation of Dialogue with AC

[Moved to User talk:Jerzy/Top Arc AC Dilog Jerzy(t) 05:32, 2004 Jul 16 (UTC); originated on User talk:Jerzy and User talk:Adam Carr, and consolidated on the former, 17:45, 2004 Apr 21 (UTC) thru 21:37, 2004 Apr 22 (UTC)]

The remainder of this section is the refactoring and reformating by Jerzy(t) of a series of User-talk communications between Jerzy(t) and User:Adam Carr AKA Adam, in 2004 April, in which each participated entirely by editing the other's talk page until the point where Jerzy(t) 21:37, 2004 Apr 22 (UTC) did this reworking.

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I haven't finished counting my reasons for objecting to this edit by you, but let's start with the the lack of sig. I welcome info on why you did it, and anything else that might moderate my opinion of you. But i also see the need to be blunt:

Don't do that.

BTW, you might consider tuning the wording of your no-headings request in light of the label "Subject/headline:" (rather than "heading") that appears when someone selects "Post a comment" from this page: some users will not realize that putting down a subject (and BTW, adding an informative summary into the history) creates an unwanted heading.
--Jerzy(t) 17:45, 2004 Apr 21 (UTC)

Re this: I haven't finished counting my reasons for objecting to this edit by you, but let's start with the the lack of sig. I welcome info on why you did it, and anything else that might moderate my opinion of you. But i also see the need to be blunt:

Don't do that.

[ Jerzy(t) notes, at time of refactoring, that the broken ital markup is from AC's original.]

I have no idea what you are talking about. I made no such edit, and even if I did, so what?

Adam 23:56, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

If you followed the link i gave you, namely

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Josip_Broz_Tito&diff=3266738&oldid=3105015

then you saw the server's assertion that your acct (or one that was used between 22:23, 2004 Apr 7 and 02:05, 2004 Apr 8 in editing Talk:Josip Broz Tito) was used to link the existing string "Joseph Tito" and to add the link "Tito" to Talk:Josip Broz Tito. One click from that page, at

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Josip_Broz_Tito&action=history

you will see

• (cur) (last) . . 02:05, 2004 Apr 8 . . Adam Carr
• (cur) (last) . . m 22:23, 2004 Apr 7 . . Shallot (=Grenades vs. shells= just a confirmation)

which is the server's assertion that there were no edits by other accts between those times.
I chose not to add my previous msg to your talk page in the heat of the moment. Perhaps my caution gave your memory time to become less clear than you initially assumed.
--Jerzy(t) 07:04, 2004 Apr 22 (UTC)

I made this edit: Who made the silly decision to call this article Josip Broz rather than Josip Tito or Josip Broz Tito? He is universally known as Tito, regardless of what his legal name might have been. We don't call Lenin Vladimir Ulyanov or Stalin Iosif Djugashvili. Unless someone can give me a good reason not to, I am going to redirect it. Adam 10:48, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I have no memory of making the other edit, and I don't know what it means or what it is about it that offends you. Maybe someone attached my name to it.

Adam 07:31, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes, i recall the entry you referred to on my talk page, which also shows up in the history here, where it also indicates it was you who preceded it with the heading "His name"; we're talking about some 3 hours later.

I've just checked further, exploiting knowledge of that time-frame, and see an explanation that would convince me of what i had unintentionally done, if it were i in your position. You may want to consider it, and learn from it if you judge it as i would.

At a (hand-edited) URL among your possible "User contributions" pages, you'll see what you were doing around that time, notably

• 02:06, 2004 Apr 8 (hist) Greek Civil War
• 02:06, 2004 Apr 8 (hist) Joseph Tito (New)
• 02:05, 2004 Apr 8 (hist) Talk:Josip Broz Tito
• 02:03, 2004 Apr 8 (hist) Josip Tito (New)
• 02:01, 2004 Apr 8 (hist) Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) (top)

I trust you will recall the 4 of these edits other than the Talk one that we are discussing. If these were my contributions instead of yours, i'd say to myself, "Oh, of course i needed links to the Josip Tito and Joseph Tito pages, in order to create those redirects, and Talk:Josip Broz Tito could have been a good place to find at least something close. I could start an edit of the section where the "Joseph Tito" version is mentioned, and build the links i need but never save them. OK, copy Josip Broz Tito over here, take Broz out leaving Josip Tito, hit Show preview, click on the link, paste, and bingo, the Josip Tito link is done. Take "Josip" out, that's Tito, Show preview, follow the link, oh, good, someone already got that one right. What's left? OK, put brackets around "Joseph Tito" for Joseph Tito, hit Show preview..." and i'd figure that at that point i clicked on Save page instead, or even just hit Return while the cursor was in a vulnerable place (like, IIRC, the Edit summary pane!), i could have accidentally saved it.

If that still doesn't sound plausible to you, i recommend you

• change your password,
• be sure you never click on "remember my password" when you go to WP from a machine you don't own, and
• rethink the physical security of your primary computer (can people walk in and take over your WP session that you left logged on?)

-- because a compromised password is what it's supposed to take, for someone else to be able to put your user-name on the Page history and User contributions of an edit, as they are in this case.

If you are really sure that both of those are wrong, IMO you should go to Source Forge or get a developer to listen to you, bcz then you're a victim of a real bad bug, that probably no one is looking for at this point in the software life cycle of the data base.

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Bottom line, i'm no longer interested in this matter, as i have a malice-free explanation that satisfies me. But in hopes of cleaning it up:

As to my role in it,

• i'm glad i was persistent, and as cautious as i was;
• i was blunt before it was entirely necessary (on the reasonable tacit assumption that accidental edits are much less common than cowboy editors, and that drawing out what could probably be more quickly settled (WRONG! [sigh]) was an inefficiency to be avoided.
  • I'm stopping short of apologizing for that judgement, but
  • i certainly regret that it turned out plausibly to have exacerbated the issue, and
  • i may turn out to call this an error and gauge similar situations differently in the future.
• (And i babbled about the day or so between discovering the problem and editing your page, without remembering that it was weeks after the edit in question before i noticed its existence.)

Things that have more to do with you than me:

1. I expect you'll be glad to know of a new feature aimed at this "where do i get a link for the page i want to creat" situation.
   1. Paste or type the new title in the upper-right corner pane next to Go and Search.
   2. Click Go.
   3. Toward the lower right corner of the page that results is a link to the page; it's blue, even though the page doesn't exist yet.
   4. (You can also
      1. edit a URL, or
      2. use a link on a preview page as i assume you did, or
      3. edit it in, in WP:Sandbox or a private sandbox
      4. -- but this is much nicer.)
2. Consider whether it's worth your while to learn more about the WP tools. The contribs and history and diffs don't really take much study, and are occasionally great labor saving devices -- usually for things you just would do without if you didn't use the tools.
3. If you choose to forgo knowing the tools better, you are IMO in error if you don't dial down your confidence about what you do and don't understand. "Someone put my name on the edit" can be plausible in the absence of evidence from Page history and User contributions when used carefully with Diff. In contrast, the evidence i had put before you pushed into conspiracy-theory ranges the plausibility of explanations involving what might be called "forgery" (except when done by password theft).
4. I'm sympathetic with your not thinking thru the implications of irregularities while you felt confident they didn't happen on your watch. But (especially since i'd be sympathetic with your being tired of this whole thing!) please now indulge my determination to ensure you grasp the issue. The problem with the edit was that it muddied the record in a way that's hard to trace (and requires an inefficient search for its cause, using the history and diffs tools, which are always more effort than orderly sigs, and whose combined use is not well understood by everyone). In particular, it misattributes text. (You appear to be someone who would understand the importance of that in scholarship, which is pretty much what we do here.) In this specific case, it made me look like a fool to latecomers.

Thanks for your patience in a tricky situation.
--Jerzy(t) 10:50, 2004 Apr 22 (UTC)

[Takes deep breath] Thanks for placing large amounts of stuff I don't understand on my Talk page. My dim recollection is that, yes, I created links from Josip Tito and Joseph Tito to the article Josip Broz Tito. I have no recollection of how I did it, but I suppose I must have done it in the way you suggest. My reference to someone else adding my name was a throwaway line because I neither knew nor cared how the edit in question came about. I still don't understand what you are getting so worked up about. Who cares whether Tito's name in a Talk page has brackets around it or not? And what is "sig"?

Adam 14:11, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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[ Jerzy(t) is making the following response only on User talk:Jerzy:]

Presumably My Last Word

I appreciate your deep breath, which i consider good for both of us.
You ask

And what is "sig"?

Your sig is the expansion of ~~~~, i.e., the remainder of that 'graph, following the question i am answering. The term could also apply to the expansion of ~~~, i.e., to that link to your user page, with the date omitted.

(FOLDOC provides some context in the "<messaging>" sense (the first of the two senses labelled "2", sorry about that), and WP's user interface to our ".signature" analogue is a pane in, IIRC, the lower right quadrant of one's Preferences page. You appear to have entered "Adam" in that pane, while User:Angela, i, and too many others to enumerate, have something like "]][[" in the middle of ours.)

As i said, i'm no longer interested in this matter (though i'm glad to offer the courtesy of responding to what i take to be a sincere request for information). Besides that, i think direct response to the portions i've neglected in your last 'graph would, in one way or another, demean us both.
Be well.
--Jerzy(t) 21:37, 2004 Apr 22 (UTC)

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Copy of Closure Message

[ Jerzy(t) is posting the following three 'graphs on User talk:Adam Carr, to replace the entirety of Jerzy(t)'s recent contributions there:]

This 'graph replaces approximately 1300 words edited in by Jerzy(t). The matter previously discussed partly here and partly on User talk:Jerzy now appears, refactored into chronological order and reformatted for clarity, at User talk:Jerzy#Consolidation of Dialogue with AC. It should eventually be moved into an archive, with the move documented at User talk:Jerzy#Log/Index of Archived Material

Adam, it sounded like you'd be happier to have yr talk page decluttered of the material i have replaced with these three 'graphs. If i'm wrong, read User talk:Jerzy#Other Approaches I'd Applaud for suggestions.

If you are interested in my 186-word response (118 if you ignore the parenthentic portion) to your last msg, link to User talk:Jerzy#Presumably My Last Word
--Jerzy(t) 21:37, 2004 Apr 22 (UTC)

Other Approaches I'd Applaud

According to you tastes, i'd applaud your

• putting back all of what i've deleted, and/or
• adding my refactored & reformatted version at User talk:Jerzy#Consolidation of Dialogue with AC, or
• deleting any or all of the three 'graphs, or
• keeping at least the first 'graph (beginning "This 'graph replaces..."), and
  • adding a note of your choosing indicating you're modifying what follows, and
  • putting a version of either what was there or of my refactoring, modified and/or abridged as you like.

I'd also be glad to provide technical help, if you have problems reverting, or otherwise retrieving deleted material.
--Jerzy(t) 21:37, 2004 Apr 22 (UTC)