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Welcome to Wikipedia, Danh108! Thank you for your contributions. I am Gtwfan52 and I have been editing Wikipedia for some time, so if you have any questions feel free to leave me a message on my talk page. You can also check out Wikipedia:Questions or type {{helpme}} at the bottom of this page. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that will automatically produce your username and the date. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Gtwfan52 (talk) 08:00, 10 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Can't get much better than welcome cookies! Thank you :-) Danh108 (talk) 03:34, 18 January 2013 (UTC)Reply


User Talk:

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Some suggestions I hope you will find helpful edit

Hi Dan,

First of all thank you so much for your part in improving the BKWSU article and getting more admin and independent editor attention on it.

I decided to come back to life because things seem to have got kind of stuck and I may be able to help. I'm not here to promote any point of view with respect to the article but to see if I can restore a working cooperative environment again. Currently it seems that the article is in a kind of lock-down, at least with respect to COI editors, but I can see that there are good reasons for this and given the article's history of disruption I hope you agree that a strongly monitored and policed article is actually a good thing. I hope you also appreciate that to effectively police an article the editors and admins that have kindly volunteered to do this must remain impartial and beyond any possible accusation that they are taking sides. In particular, if an admin is going to carry out admin tasks, such as blocking, they have to follow WP:INVOLVED, which may explain why admins may appear to be reluctant to offer any editorial input to the article when you ask them.

Firstly I suggest accepting the WP:COI status if you haven't already. Although simple membership of or employment by and organisation doesn't in itself imply a conflict of interest a style of editing, by itself, that seems to promote a topic does. I definitely thought that some areas of the article looked promotional in tone and gave undue weight to achievements that could be construed as puffery. And that's from someone who also has a COI! I appreciate this may not have been intentional and you were doing the best job you could, but that is the nature of COI. It is also not a death sentence or a mantle of shame. Even Jimbo Wales has fallen foul of COI accusations [1]. The COI restrictions may seem onerous but the way I read the situation right now is that there is a choice here. Either the article is impartially policed with restrictions on any editors that mainly edit BK articles, or, the article remains the battleground it was. I know which option I prefer! It may take a long to to make simple contributions to the article but since the article has taken 8 years already, what's the rush?

You need consensus from more than one impartial editor. This makes sense to me. If one editor alone passed your contributions then if there was any dispute about the article's neutrality etc, justified or dramatised, then that one editor would be implicated. On the other hand if each contribution was subject to community approval then it would be possible to identify disruptive challenges as being such i.e. if some guy comes along and starts shouting that the page reads like an advert, it was written according to the BKs agenda, etc then it really, really, really helps if the article doesn't read like an advert and doesn't look like it was written according to a some BK agenda.

How to get consensus? There are several routes for this. I also found that posting in the project pages for NRMs were a bit unproductive. There are some things you can do to maximise the likelihood that someone will respond. Lets take a look at your recent post in the Spirituality project [2],

"Another editor feels my hobby interest may be a COI so in the interests of keeping everyone happy I was thinking to make a push to get a few editors together to get the article expanded".

OK there are several problems with this request. First of all your are indicating that you disagree with your COI status and some editor is unjustifiably giving you are hard time over it. This is going to put anyone off straight away. They may be happy to proof-read something but they certainly don't want to wade into some dispute over it. Also any perceived inability to accept Wikipedia's guidelines is going to sound alarm bells. What if you don't accept their input either? Then the second half the sentence, "make a push to get a few editors together to get the article expanded". The word, "push", is also going to sound alarm bells. Push what? A point of view? In the context of the first half of the sentence it looks like you may want editors to rally in your favour. OK, this is a creative expansion of what you actually said but people can and do read between the lines and it is useful to be able to anticipate and avoid this. The final part is a bit of an ask, "get the article expanded". It kind of implies a lot of work. You already have some content to propose, you just need external input to check it meets Wikipedia's standards.

The best way to get input from other editors is to make the request as painless and simple as possible. Something someone can just look at and say "yes" or "no" to. To achieve this keep the requests small, but not so small that it results in lots of separate requests. You may need to feel your way to find the amount of text other editors are happy considering on the various help pages.

Have you tried the standard edit request page for requesting COI edits? Just post the request for the article with a link to the proposed sandbox text for approval/disapproval and other responses.

But please feel free to feedback and ask any further questions. I apologise in advance if this post has maybe been a bit too "Let's be Frank" for an introduction ;) I hope you found some of these comments useful. Please respond on this page. I have it on my watch list and I like to see threads on the same page, whatever page that is.

Best wishes Bksimonb (talk) 09:22, 13 April 2015 (UTC)Reply

Hi there,
I don't mind frankness. I will number the points I think you have made and respond accordingly.
1. COI - I accept that these constraints are being imposed, not that they were justified. Sorry. The only pieces of the article that I was responsible for that got identified as a problem was the link farm. As stated, that was out of ignorance, and I had consulted an independent 3rd party about it before inserting, they just never got back to me. IMHO Wikipedia's male dominated environment is not conducive to an article about a women lead organisation. I have been met with a wall of cynicism - just because some Wikipedians have become jaded by repeated attacks from interests groups doesn't mean my innocent mistakes aren't just that (it's pretty much the only article I've edited, so I hardly know what I'm doing). It isn't easy to write a good article; it's very easy to criticise and find fault in another's work. It is very easy to make accusations; it's not so easy to provide evidence.
If you look at Wikipedia, Christians write about Christian pages, Jews on Jewish pages etc. Yet here this is considered an immediate COI. The treatment of alleged COI is very biased. I have a closer connection to some of the other topics I edit, yet no concern was raised about that. Again, bias. In my view, this is mainly because one troll has been able to stir up so much bad faith and suspicion with their own paranoid delusions - while they got blocked, it's amazing the damage they were able to leave behind. Wikipedia runs so much on trust and goodwill, and one person has basically managed to destroy that on this article. As a new-ish editor, I am now reluctant to give much time to Wikipedia anymore....what's the appeal in just getting bagged and ridiculed? It's such a shame people can't meet face to face in real life as I think it would so quickly become clear what's really been going on....
2. Thank you for giving another place to post my request. I think you have read a whole lot into the other request that wasn't actually there - it seemed to me to be more likely that those pages are just someones good idea, but are hardly used - or at least some projects have very few active editors (a view which appears to be supported by the edit histories).
3. Anyway, these are my concerns. However I realise/accept the community has no effective mechanism for dealing with these. And if I was more involved in Wikipedia, I may even develop the same prejudices - if 90% of the time it's true, it's only human...Regards Danh108 (talk) 22:10, 21 April 2015 (UTC)Reply
Hi Dan,
  1. You may well be right about there being a systemic bias against members of NRMs on Wikipedia. Check out Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias_in_religion. I also don't happen to think that slapping a COI stamp on your personally was the best solution unless you had actually first resisted intervention by other (non-block-evading) editors. Unfortunately we have to live with the situation as it is now but I can also see that it could be mutually beneficial. What do I mean by that? Well, if every significant change to the article requires outside consensus then that makes the resulting article more robust against disruptive editing because more of the article is there by consensus of more editors than just you, or any other individual editor. It makes it easier to identify editors who are helping the project and quickly demonstrates those editing tendentiously as doing so.
  2. Hope you get to try it out soon! There are also RFCs which may be more appropriate in some situations.
  3. Either there are "no effective mechanisms" or you haven't yet used the mechanisms effectively. I think it is more of the later than the former. For example, if you suspect a sock puppet, and have clear evidence, then file a sock puppet report. Don't just spend, like, months beating your head against a brick wall.
Best wishes, Bksimonb (talk) 13:14, 24 April 2015 (UTC)Reply
P.S. You may also find the Wikipedia:Editor_assistance service helpful. You may be able to get one-to-one advice on how to effectively raise consensus. I may try it myself soon since the RFC I raised also, as of today, seems to be stuck on a desert road with tumble weed blowing past it :( Bksimonb (talk) 07:45, 1 May 2015 (UTC)Reply

Please comment on Talk:Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University edit

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A barnstar for you! edit

The Special Barnstar
Thank you for encouraging me to edit wikipedia and especially posting policies and guidelines on my talk page. Supdiop (T🔹C) 19:45, 8 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

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ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open! edit

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