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User:Robert Merkel

A postgrad at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

This "articles I've worked on" list is very old. I can't even recall all the articles I've worked on. Anyway:

and probably others I've forgotten, and made substantial edits to

The Formula One page
Australia

A question about user page policy. Should we redirect an existing Robert Merkel to user:Robert Merkel?

Yes. -- Toby Bartels, Sunday, May 19, 2002

I have revised the "incest taboo" page and would like to know what you think and if you still prefer to revert it to "incest," thanks, SR

The content is much improved and now stands as a reasonably interesting article. I think it still probably belongs on the incest page, though (as this debate shows, the only things that make interesting the topic interesting are the taboos around it (and the genetic implications, I suppose), but I'm not going to force the issue now that the content is OK and independent of the other article. I still intend to keep an eye on this page though.

Ark is kinda feisty, isn't he? --Robert Merkel

I am glad you see improvement -- personally, I don't care whether it is part of a bigger page including incest, or separate (actually, maybe it is a good thing that it is separate). By all means, keep your eye on it.

Feisty, huh? Well, it seems to me that somewhere along the line Ark discovered that s/he could get her way by being abusive towards others. Fortunately, my own life has helped me learn how to handle most (well, many) abusers. slrubenstein

This may come as a surprise to you but the incest, and infanticidal parenting pages are the only ones where I've resorted to abuse in a long, long time. It's obvious why though. They're the only topics where people are so psychologically resistant to it that they'll abuse others in order to deny reality (or perfectly legitimate points of view if you prefer). And that includes you too, SR, at least at the beginning.

I think Roadrunner is dishonest, disingenious, deceptive, an ignoramous and an idiot to boot. I am never going to be able to tolerate his sleazy, underhanded antics. Having to deal with him doesn't bring up pleasant feelings in me. -- Ark

Would you care to explain to me why you choose to entirely DELETE my article on agricultural science, and recreate it under a slightly different name, being apparently entirely identical ???? Is it a technical problem ?

I understand we are supposed to participate together in the building of this encyclopedia. You may criticize this piece at will, change it, comment in length, add stuff; But, at least, I will be able to argue over what I wrote and what I think is a proper introduction of agricultural science and was left uncultivated before. Do you ???????

I think it is a sort of a hickjack to simply delete things others took great care in writing and make their contribution totally disappear after a couple of hours. Please, I believe there must be a very clear explanation of this, and I would be very pleased if you gave it to me. --Anthere

Read wikipedia naming conventions about improper capitalization. BTW, it isn't "your" article it belongs to the community under terms of the GNU FDL --maveric149, Tuesday, June 4, 2002

I understand your point on naming conventions (I have a lot to learn), and I will take care of that when I dig further on this field (the link at the bottom of the page, leading to agricultural basic topics wasnot changed to fit new conventions, was it ?). Notice, however, that it is not as if I created an article with wrong naming conventions; I merely improved an already existing short article, that had a very happy life on its own.

Don't go GNU on me Maverick. I may not have been around as long as you did, but it is not my first article here, or on the french wiki. It's the first here under a name, however. Who knows what else I wrote ? There are from a totally anonymous voice, hence I can't claim any authorship. I felt more pride in other stuff (even if very far from being perfect ;-), both from a content and a language point of view) I wrote than in this article. That is not the point. There are some reasons I wrote it openly, so I am "pained" when my contribution is immediately cleared. While there is no "legal" authorship of an article, it is sometimes nice to distinguish who contributed to it. Am I being clear here ? I don't care for this page, it is the principle I "protest" against.

Worse. As a "watcher", you take the responsability to welcome newbies and check they make no damage while learning their way through the wiki. Fine. Consequently, since I first showed myself under this pseudo a very little while ago, I am a newbie, right ? Now, dig in your memories (it ain't that far away), and remember the first page you ever created. Did you do a good job ? Did you feel proud of it ? I hope you did. So, remember again, when you came back a couple of hours later, was the page still there ? with your name as ONE (not the) of the contributor of it ? Was it merely corrected, improved, completed, utterly changed ? Did you get a comment on it ? Remember...how you felt...

So, now, the question I care to ask : do you guys want newbies to just visit and admire the work being done, or do you want them to stay, contribute, and feel part of the community ? Do you want them to have the feeling that even if the wiki say it's a community work, there is a bunch of guys that are acting as primary editors, a sort of an elite ? Everybody needs a minimum of recognition from the others. And somehow, making the first contribution of a newbie disappear is prone to discourage him. When the wiki is 100.000 articles big and all fields covered, you can shake off newbies. Not now. Or take care of little covered fields such as the one we are talking about.

Sorry if I am harsh right now. BTW, thank you very much for welcoming me a while ago. That was very nice of you. Now, time to move on to another topic. --Anthere

Hey Robert - there is an easier way to move articles now. All sysops can click on the "Move this page" link on the side bar and that will move the page and its history to the new page title (if it didn't exist before). The move function also turns the moved-from page into a redirect. This does not currently fix other prexisting redirects though. Doing an administrative move should cut down on angry comments from newbies thinking we are trying to "erase" their contributions when we are just enforcing our naming conventions. --maveric149

Important note for all sysops: There is a bug in the administrative move feature that truncates the moved history and changes the edit times. Please do not use this feature until this bug is fixed. More information can be found in the talk of Brion VIBBER and maveric149. Thank you. --maveric149

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