Please post new messages at the bottom of my talk page. Please use headlines when starting new talk topics. Thank you.
Tech News: 2021-43
20:07, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
Tech News: 2021-44
20:27, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
Tech News: 2021-45
20:35, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
Missing
Hi. You are now listed as missing. Should you ever return or choose not to be listed, you are welcome to remove your name. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:36, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Chris troutman, and anyone else who comes across this note. Thanks very much for your concern about me, and for continuing to hold the fort on the wiki.
- It's obviously been a very long time since I last edited, and having had a lot of activity on-wiki prior to that for some months, I recognise fully that having disappeared so suddenly was potentially worrying and concerning. Whilst editing Wikipedia is, of course, in theory not something one should have to make a specific hours commitment to, in practice I ought to have been more attentive to it since, or at least sent a message explaining where things were. I'm sorry for any stress or upset I've caused anyone.
- For so long as Yapperbot continues to work, I will try and continue to maintain it (in particular, I've recently received an email about having to migrate to a newer version of the Toolforge host it's currently on) - but I can't promise to be dedicating a huge amount of time to it. I might well end up having time to edit again at some point in the future, and can certainly see myself making occasional small edits, but I don't think it'll happen in the near future unfortunately.
- If anyone is interested in the personal "lore" as to why I suddenly disappeared, I've written it up below - but I imagine it won't be of interest to many people! A particular thank you also should go out to @Sdkb and ProcrastinatingReader: I've seen both of you have said some lovely things about me in my absence, and thanks as well to Proc for picking up the Yapperbot Uncurrenter task - I had no idea that that had even stopped working, to be honest!
Where did Naypta go? (The Lore)
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In 2020, during the first wave of the COVID pandemic, A levels and GCSE exams in the UK were cancelled due to students being unable to safely sit them. At the time, I was a final year A level student, and had taken up Wikipedia editing during the lockdown as a way to continue my studies and keep expanding my knowledge before coming to university. My intention at the time was very much to continue editing into university.
The cancellation of the exams, however, led to the 2020 UK GCSE and A-Level grading controversy, in which Ofqual, the Government agency in the UK responsible for setting qualifications, developed an algorithm for determining what grades a student "would have got" had they sat the exams. Unfortunately for all of us, this algorithm was not only ill-thought-through, but patently biased and dangerous. So much so that, at the start of August 2020, I realised that it would need challenging, and began to use my time to do just that. My edits stopped because, working with the legal nonprofit Foxglove, I was setting out to challenge the algorithm in the courts, which eventually got some fair media coverage (perhaps making me qualify as a WP:BLP1E!) We ultimately didn't have to go through with the court process in full as the Government U-turned of its own accord a matter of hours before we were due to file our case formally in the courts, but the events still turned a lot of what I was doing in the rest of my life upside down, and effectively dominated the next couple of months of my life. By the point that the fallout from that was over, another COVID wave was striking the UK, and I knew I wanted to do something more to help respond to it - so I began volunteering with St John Ambulance, the UK's first aid charity and volunteer health reserve, where I'm still giving pretty much all my volunteering time at the moment in both a clinical and a management role. All of those things put together really didn't leave a lot of time for Wikipedia, and every day that passed I found it more difficult to write this explanation of what had happened - it didn't occur to me to do so at all for a couple of months, but beyond that it kept feeling as though it were too late! That probably sounds ridiculous, but it's the truth :) Also, if you're reading this all the way to the end, thank you, but you evidently find me a lot more interesting than I do! |
- With hugs, and with another heartfelt apology for my sudden disappearance: Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 23:33, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Feedback request service § Sending requests to dedicated user talk subpage
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Feedback request service § Sending requests to dedicated user talk subpage. * Pppery * it has begun... 20:10, 15 May 2022 (UTC)