User talk:Dtobias

See also Archive 1 (20 Dec 2004 - 16 Jun 2006), Archive 2 (30 Jul 2006 - 19 Aug 2007), Archive 3 (24 Aug 2007 - 04 Apr 2008), Archive 4 (06 Apr 2008 - 31 Mar 2010), Archive 5 (12 May 2010 - 10 Jun 2019), and Archive 6 (12 Sep 2019 - 04 Apr 2024)

Precious anniversary

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:16, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! *Dan T.* (talk) 18:21, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Notice of noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Trilletrollet. Thank you. — Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 03:49, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

ANI notification

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Snokalok (talk) 19:36, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

AE notification

Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Dtobias. Thank you.

Give it a minute, they make us give notice before the thread goes up Snokalok (talk) 00:34, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

ARE question

Dan, replying to your question here in order not to distract the more bureaucratic process there with these side comments. And I hope you'll forgive me being blunt with my thoughts, which are based upon spending an hour yesterday reviewing your talkpage/board contributions in the GENSEX area.

It is clear that you have well-developed views about gender identity (which is fine!) and that you wish for these views to be reflected both in wikipedia content and in how wikipedia treats related sources etc (which is also fine, and perhaps even healthy with regards to achieving neutrality). The problem as I see it is that in arguing your case, you seem to have lost sight of how to be most effective in achieving the latter goal and have instead started reveling in striking rhetorical blows and hurting the other, esp. transgender, discussants; your intelligence and facility with language even makes you "good" at doing this. This is not fine since, judging purely in terms of its on wiki effect and ignoring real-life ethics, it makes it more difficult to collaborate, achieve consensus and build an encyclopedia.

To briefly exemplify these observation by looking at the analogies that were brought up at AE:

The problem with "transgenderism" as religion or Big Brother analogies, even if you wished to focus on the parallels narrowly, is that they come with so much cultural baggage (cf Godwin's law), that they tend to inflame and derail discussions (aside: also worth introspecting why one would pick Islam as the religion for comparison, even if that choice was not a conscious one).
The mental illness analogy is even less excusable in that I can't even think of reason for stooping to it beyond trying to cause pain.

I don't imagine that you will suddenly agree with my readings but I hope you'll give some thought to how your communication style in this area appears to an outside observer with no axe to grind. Cheers. Abecedare (talk) 16:29, 22 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Being blunt is fine… that's what I want. You've given me a lot to think about. *Dan T.* (talk) 10:55, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Notice that you are now subject to an arbitration enforcement topic ban

The following topic ban now applies to you:

You are indefinitely topic banned from gender-related disputes or controversies and associated people, broadly construed.

You have been sanctioned as a result of this AE report

This topic ban is imposed in my capacity as an uninvolved administrator under the authority of the Arbitration Committee's decision at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Gender and sexuality#Final decision and, if applicable, the contentious topics procedure. This sanction has been recorded in the log of sanctions. Please read WP:TBAN to understand what a topic ban is. If you do not comply with the topic ban, you may be blocked for an extended period to enforce the ban.

If you wish to appeal the ban, please read the appeals process. You are free to contact me on my talk page if anything of the above is unclear to you. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:07, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hallo

I’m sorry about what happened at AE, and I’m glad that you’ve started editing again. Best wishes. Sweet6970 (talk) 11:31, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Sweet6970: Thanks... I wasn't sure what I was going to do after that, but I'm not the sort to quit in a huff; I've been in the middle of wikidrama plenty of times and never went away entirely (even if I sometimes went years with fairly little editing). But this is the first time I've had any sanction placed on me in the nearly 20 years I've been on this site. Maybe it's for the best... editing less controversial stuff doesn't raise my blood pressure so much. Perhaps it's for the better if people (like me!) who get really obsessed with one topic have to move away from it, though I wish that would be applied more evenhandedly to people on all sides of the hot button issues. From a standpoint of encyclopedic standards, it would be best if articles (especially controversial ones) get written by people whose main aim is to document facts impartially, not to ride a hobby horse, though this runs into the problem that it's the obsessed people who are motivated to do lots of work in the area. When the obsession is with something like a favorite musical artist, or Pokémon or trains, you get lots of free work out of them documenting everything about the subject, at the expense of other editors having to sometimes gently curb the fan enthusiasm a little bit to tone down the effusive raves to something more balanced. But if there isn't a toxic culture war on the subject, it's still manageable. When there is such a culture war, maybe the warriors of both sides should be kept away so the articles are left to more neutral and less passionate people, but if just one side is curbed you get imbalance.

It is, however, a fact of Wikipedia that wikidrama can erupt on any topic, not just the usual hot buttons... I see from looking at your talk page and recent edit history that you've gotten into minor scraps over such things as whether a bird should be called an "animal", and whether referring to "transit" in the context of ancient history would imply you could catch a bus at Stonehenge in 3000 BC. Still, none of that generates quite the heat of the gender wars, where you've been rebuked a few times on the talk page but still not sanctioned as I have been.

Anyway, when I made my last talk page comment related to the dispute, on 23 July, I wasn't sure where I was going from there... but I wasn't going to have time or energy to do much soon since I had just started a 2-week European trip as the final decision was being made on my status, and the 23 July comment was written from a hotel room in London after I arrived on an overnight flight, tired and jetlagged, taking a short rest before heading back out to wander the streets so, after failing to sleep on the plane (I'm never good at sleeping on planes, trains, or other transportation), I could go to sleep at an hour vaguely fitting the time zone I was now in. So I would spend a few hours doing tourist stuff and trying to forget my WikiWoes. This brought me to the South Bank, by the London Eye, where I heard an amazingly cheerful singing voice of a cute blonde busker performing there. Nobody could stay in a bad mood after that! I made sure to put some of my random British coins in my pocket (left over from earlier trips; these days I don't have nearly as many occasions to use cash) in her guitar case before moving on.

A couple of days later (and much better-rested) I saw the Back to the Future musical at a Strand theatre, then had to get to a dinner reservation across town (at Il Portico, the Italian restaurant made famous by J. K. Rowling when she and a bunch of other gender-criticals dined there, and then she featured it in one of her Cormoran Strike books). Google Maps suggested taking a bus that went pretty much straight there, but after waiting a while at the bus stop where every bus line serving that stop seemed to arrive except the one I needed, I found an alternative route via the Tube, requiring walking a few blocks to the station. This brought me past the Charing Cross train station, where I decided I needed to use the toilet, so I went in, and right in the middle of it was the same blonde busker I had seen on the South Bank, singing a Taylor Swift song this time. Between songs I told her I'd seen her before, and she said she remembered seeing me too. This time I used her electronic payment terminal to tip her. I also followed her on social media (she's fully in the 21st century, having social media addresses displayed on her busking stand) and in this way found out when she'd be busking again the next day, finally watching a whole set of hers (including some of her original songs). All along I thought her name, Charlotte Campbell, sounded familiar... finally I remembered that that's the name of a character in the Cormoran Strike books. But that Charlotte is nasty, and this one is nice.

And now, I'd kind of like to get a Wikipedia article on her up, but there's where possible Wikidrama comes in yet again... people around here are really picky on notability rules for musical artists, so that not every garage band or street performer gets in. If they don't have a record on the pop charts, or a gold/platinum record, or a Grammy award or something, it's really tough to establish that somebody is notable, even if they're well regarded in a particular scene. Charlotte has been mentioned in places like the Guardian, the BBC, and other media, and appears to be one of the more prominent members of the London busking scene, but is it in a context where she's "notable" (whatever that means)? It turns out that there was a previous attempt to create an article on her, preserved on EverybodyWiki (which this site won't let me link to), which grabs a lot of Wikipedia stuff before it gets deleted. This article was created as a draft by User:Ardhoniel, who attempted to get it created via Articles for Creation, but was rejected due to lack of evidence of notability. This seems to have led to the user departing Wikipedia altogether; the experience must have been frustrating. The same user also created a Wikidata entry on her, which did stick around (the notability criteria being much less stringent there). But failing to get a Wikipedia article created probably soured that user on the whole idea of editing here, showing that it's not just the hot button culture war areas that can cause people to run away. So do you have any idea what it would take to establish notability to the satisfaction of the guardians of wiki integrity? *Dan T.* (talk) 19:04, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I’m glad you’ve been having a good time in London – thanks for the update. I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about notability for entertainers. I only ever intended to be a casual editor, without any ambition to create articles (which I have not done) and when I created my account, I thought I would only be making one or two edits a month. Somewhere it all went wrong…..I was also resolved not to get involved in editing in the topic-which-must-not-be-mentioned, because I feel so strongly about it. So that’s another failure by me. I certainly was happier editing before I ever received (or served) a CT Notice. But, as you have noticed, it’s still possible to get involved in arguments about other subjects. It had never occurred to me that a bird would be referred to as an animal. And it turned out I was wrong, because shortly after the discussion on my Talk page, I came across a story in a newspaper in which an ostrich was called an ‘animal’. There are so many pitfalls in the way different people use words. All the best. Sweet6970 (talk) 21:43, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome... and I finished the trip a while back and am back in the U.S. now. *Dan T.* (talk) 23:09, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]