User talk:Ncopeland

Welcome!

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

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Aboutmovies 00:13, 28 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

December 2011

Hello and welcome! It may not have been your intention, but you recently removed the entire contents of an article. If this was a mistake, don't worry; the content has been restored. If there is a problem with the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page. If you think the article should be removed entirely, see the instructions for requesting deletion. Thank you! Dan653 (talk) 21:41, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The recent edit you made to Bristol (software) has been reverted, as it removed all content from the page without explanation. Please do not do this, as it is considered vandalism; use the sandbox for testing. If you think the page should be deleted, see here for what to do. Thank you. Millermk90 (talk) 21:44, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, as you did to Bristol (software) with this edit, you may be blocked from editing. Dan653 (talk) 21:58, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is your last warning. You may be blocked from editing without further warning the next time you vandalize a page, as you did with this edit to Bristol (software). WikiPuppies! (bark) 22:22, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Talkback

Hello, Ncopeland. You have new messages at Dan653's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

23:02, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi, sorry you've already run into the pointier end of Wikipedia.

I would suggest that you take this information and host it locally, for the benefit of the Bristol user community. Don't rely on Wikipedia for your own goals - it's not reliable enough. If you wanted, you could even host a local MediaWiki setup - it's not hard, if you have web hosting with PHP & MySQL. You can also lock it down so that only the site authors can edit - a good way of doing a content management system for technical stuff.

If you want this deleted, you might tag it with {{db-user}} - a simple request for user-created articles to be deleted. Some admins will observe such tags in main article space, some won't. There's also {{prod}}, which might cause it to be deleted too. If you want it deleted in a few days, probably the simplest way is to let the AfD run to its seemingly inevitable conclusion.

Blanking the page or adding "editorial" comments to it will have no effect. WP sees this as an attack on The State itself and will have you the editor liquidated as a subversive long before it considers the merits of the article. If you vandalise an article hard enough, it can become near-invulnerable to any form of deletion as another Monument to Martyrdom At The Hands Of Vandals, and coach-trips of schoolchildren will be brought to visit it to see how "robust" Wikipedia can be at preserving useless, unreadable crap.

On the whole, I would like to keep this article. It's well written (although WP has no metric for seeing that as a benefit), let alone that it's interesting and useful (those subversive concepts are again things that get editors excluded from the cabals and cliques).

The problem is to get it through the assinine process that is AfD, where editors who are wholly ignorant of the topic get to judge it by the mythical "notability", because they don't have the knowledge to do anything better. "Notability" is done by counting and weighing "reliable sources", which are in turn a biased subset of what's on-line and findable by Google, salted with a smattering of high-sounding textbooks (the AfD denizen won't admit their own inability to find and check such references, so anything that sounds like you pulled it from a university library is effectively inviolate).

You'll note that any porn actress is immediately notable on WP (there's one at AfD at the moment). This is presumably because it's the one field where the dwellers in AfD's basement have excellent access to the sources.

Really this article does need 3rd party sourcing. Did it get reviewed in any of the muso mags? They're pretty good, especially if they have on-line archives. Are there any bands who've stood up and said they're using it?

I understand your frustration with the process. It's horrendous, and it's one of the biggest bars to the sort of good editor (i.e. those who write useful articles) that we really need. Try not to let it get to you though, the bureaucracy is byzantine and frequently does the wrong thing, but it's there and we're stuck with it. The mistake is to think that WP:NOTABILITY is any sort of badge of notability. It isn't: the real world exists and has its own measures of worth. WP needs to look at what's important for it to bother recording, not for a real-world author to think that "getting noticed by WP" means anything at all. Good luck with it though. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:16, 18 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Another perspective on the Bristol article

Hello Ncopeland,

Another editor called my attention to the Bristol (software) page. I felt I ought to offer my opinion on the matter, strictly for what it's worth.

It looks like you put a lot of work into the article, and you clearly know a lot about the subject, so it must be frustrating to see large amounts of text removed or to have a discussion as to whether or not to keep the article go on, with a decision on that being reached by consensus of various editors. I thought you should know that I appreciate that.

That said, the article was problematic in a number of ways, the first of which is the fact that it was created by the author of the software it's about. I don't think you had any malicious intent in creating the article or in adding all the information to it that you did, but it does give the appearance of a possible conflict of interest. This is exacerbated by the lack of references in the article. The information you added to the article may well be completely true and accurate, but there's no way of knowing that without referring to reliable third-party sources. Your word here is, to be frank, no better than mine or anyone else's.

The lack of reliable sources covering the software in a significant way does also suggest that the software is not sufficiently notable to warrant an article. it doesn't make it bad software. It doesn't make it unpopular software. It does mean that it has not been covered by enough reliable sources to verify any of the information in it.

When other editors began making significant changes to the article, that seems to have bothered you a great deal. I'm not here to argue whether the changes made were correct or not. In fact, my point is that I, on my own, don't have the authority to decide what is the 'correct' way to present the information in an article. Neither do you. Neither does anyone else. An editor makes a change that he or she feels improves the article. Others do the same. Some of the edits persist and others are, quickly or eventually, undone, redone, amended, abbreviated, &c. That's the way this works. When you tell other editors to "delist the page or butt out and put it all back," you're assuming a level of ownership of the article that you simply do not have. Once your edit it saved, it becomes fair game for other editors to work with. If you want a page describing Bristol that remains static and/or under your control, you'll have to mount it elsewhere. That can be tough to accept when you've put a lot of effort into an article, but it's the way Wikipedia is.

Finally, and you seem like an intelligent and Internet-savvy person, so this shouldn't come as a shock, calling people names and being disruptive tends to weaken your case, not strengthen it. I get it that you're frustrated, and I believe I can understand why. It happens to everyone. But calling other editors "the stasi" or "assholes" isn't likely to win anyone over to your way of thinking. I'm sure you know that, and I'm not your mother so I won't belabor your lecture. I'm going to assume you know better.

I'm not saying everyone else here has been a bunch of angels. Maybe the article was pruned more than it needed to be; I don't really know. Maybe there are some good third-party sources out there that I wasn't able to find; I'd be happy to see them included and the article saved. I'm sorry you feel as bad as you do about how this as all gone; it would be great if you could dust off, gain a little from the experience, and continue contributing. If you have any questions or want to respond, please don't hesitate to leave a message on my talk page. Thanks, --some jerk on the Internet (talk) 00:48, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My thoughts on Bristol

Since I kicked off the whole request for the deletion, and have been concerned about the article on Bristol for quite some time, let me chip in my thoughts.

I've used Bristol a little bit. I think it's quite an interesting little project, and the fact it's free is great. At some point, I may stick it on a laptop loaded with Mediabuntu or whatever the flavour du jour of multimedia based distros are these days and plonk it in a rehearsal room. I haven't particularly used it extensively, and I stand by my opinion that a Nord Stage produces generally much better sounds, and is a little more portable than a controller + laptop with Bristol - however the former costs £3000 and the latter costs nothing, so it's hardly a fair comparison!

You might find this a bit difficult to take in after the discussions we've recently had, but overall I would like to see Bristol become more popular, and my concerns about the article are probably based around the fact I thought it was restricting itself to a small, technically savvy, hobbyist audience. (To be perfectly fair, my opinions may be a little out of date as I see there's now a deb package for Bristol available, whereas I remember compiling it from source when I tried it). Having a Linux only desktop application is a hard sell to get noticed in the first place, so I think you really need to pitch it as the most user friendly and basic level you can. If the app becomes more popular, there's a chance somebody might pick it up and being motivated enough to add features - hell, maybe even somebody who understands Core MIDI might turn up and finish off the OS X port, which would make the application far more popular. Somebody might even pay you! ;-)

Anyway, a suggestion that an article fails WP:RS can only ever suggest that the subject of the article is not notable at this time. It doesn't suggest that the subject will never be notable. Nominating an article for AfD might seem like an extreme step, but if I genuinely can't find reliable sources myself, and nobody else can, then it can be a useful "last call to arms" to get people to try and dig them out. If somebody does come forward with reliable sources, and the consensus is to keep the article, then that's fine - Wikipedia's not about winning, after all. --Ritchie333 (talk) 15:21, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]