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Welcome to my Wikipedia user page, est. 2003.
On Wikipedia anyone, even a kid, or a random person on the street, or in a library, can help write the corpus of human knowledge. Be bold! I was a kid myself when I started editing the encylopedia, and gaining community trust through advanced permissions, and I learned a lot through the years I spent with the system and process. The community is an evolving place, and a lot has changed since then. What hasn't changed is the radical ad hoc simplicity of the wiki model and culture of getting shit done without red tape, or obstacles to quick change. Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy although it does have increasingly inaccurately named functionaries that I was once one of.
You can edit this user page right now. If you do, please make it useful, or funny, or both. On Wikipedia, vandalism isn't allowed and will be quickly reverted, though particularly funny vandalism may have some form of immortality, see WP:BJAODN. I'm giving you permission to be WP:BOLD and edit my user page right now, but I will probably revert you if I don't agree with your changes. Well, unless you actually make this page better by adding insightful information, wikilinks, references, or fixing mistakes. Wikipedia is a work in progress. Red wikilinks are welcome! I'm not precious or particular, and I'm here to learn and listen.
Reliability of Wikipedia: Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia and general reference work. It helps Google provide good search results. It is a great nonprofiteducational resource. You should consider donating your time and/or money because it can be very rewarding. See the donation page or Wikipedia:Community portal.
💥 💥 💥 If you really want to edit a page, you can go ahead and edit it right here, right now. 💥 💥 💥
🌞 🌞 🌞 This is a sandbox where you can safely try editing. I'll leave stuff here but clean it periodically. 🌞 🌞 🌞
you can edit here!
About me
I was known as and signed as just "Andre" for many years. In retrospect, why didn't I have an acuté accént? I knew how to make one for Pokémon. My pronouns are he/him, but I don't care if you want to use neutral pronouns or words. "Guys" is a gender neutral term IMHO.
I started editing Wikipedia after reading an article about wikis in a computer magazine obtained from Barnes & Noble. My first edit was List of dragons. My first creation was Microsoft Agent. I was active on IRC and joined the conversation on freenode, learning how to revert vandalism. I became an admin in 2004. I was nominated by node_ue and passed unopposed with 20 supports, wow, it's been a while huh? I had 1800 edits at the time. I was also very interested in Gentoo Linux, writing QBASIC, primitive JavaScript, HTML, and TI-BASIC at the time. One of the cool things was making a user page layout or a signature CSS tag and seeing new users copy my "work."
I later became a mediator, a bureaucrat in 2007, IRC op, meta-admin, sometime writer of thoughts that have later become those shorthand policy shortcuts: WP:RIG, WP:DAQ. As a bureaucrat, I renamed over 1000 people and promoted over 20 administrators. I closed one bureaucrat discussion and participated in several. I've also nominated 4 admins though they are long since inactive now. Because MEDCOM was prominently advertised and my name was alphabetically high up, I would often get pinged by strange random new or anonymous editors with weird, wacky disputes. My page was also vandalized somewhat often, which was a kind of badge of honor or a rite of passage back then, so 200(!) people are watching this page. Because I've been around for a while and was a known quantity, I was even once used as a baseline for a successful sockpuppet investigation. Also, I forgot about this, but check this out: Burma or Myanmar? I've created over 3750 pages on Wikipedia, somehow, with over 20,000 live edits, and deleted over 700 pages as an admin. I am currently Wikipedian number 5345 by edit count.
I got to meet and make a lot of online friends, I'm not the greatest at keeping in touch with people, but feel free to reach out and rekindle the magic any time. I am best reached via talk page or e-mail. I am on Discord with the handle skeptical_personage and on Libera Chat with the nickname EternalSunshine.
I once, many years ago (about 2009-2010), was paid $75 by a small company to help them update their Wikipedia page with basic factual information. I did so in accordance with all policies and guidelines including NPOV. Around the same time, I also created an article that I had a WP:COI on due to working for the company, though I was not specifically asked or paid to do so, and I also tried to be impartial. I've since gotten the pages deleted. Aside from that historical instance, my comments and edits reflect me only, and I am not representing the opinions or work of my employer or day job. I am currently employed by a large media company managing a team of software engineers on a streaming videocontent management system.
Because Wikipedia's culture is largely borne out of the engineering and science/social sciences world, it has inherited a strong cultural emphasis on correctness, exactness, and adherence to the letter of rules. However because Wikipedia is a countercultural exercise that inherited the early InternetSilicon ValleyCalifornia ideology of libertarianism combined with the UC Berkeley, Steve Jobs-on-acidAtari in the 1970s, hippieEric Schmidt-at-Burning Manutopian earnestness, surrealism, humor, gestalt, art, music, pervaded the early, freewheeling days of Wikipedia. There were Bomis babes[1]. There were some unusual characters pretending to be something they weren't. There were huxters, scam artists, and also some brilliant and very unique contributors. It wasn't pure and it definitely wasn't stuffy. It may have been kind of corrupt, plucky, but it meant well, and you must have some nuance when judging the early project. Constraints may inspire creativity, but creativity needs chaos, space and is connected to anarchy - when you tighten the screws and put on a business suit, the innovators often move on. Still, the community has always had leading lights of compassion, peace, and friendliness to newcomers. It has generally tried to avoid being punitive when addressing abuse and concerns. In fact the community has given a massively long leash to some extremely pernicious, dangerous contributors at times. Other times the community has been quite harsh and aggressive on certain transgressions. What I want to talk about is something different: pedantry.
Pedantry is about outcomes vs. outputs. Sometimes it's important to be exact. Like in cooking or chemistry (which are the same thing). Sometimes it's important to be able to abstract things to a high degree, like in physics, linguistics and computer science. Abstraction is the process or property of isolating a mess to be able to reason meaningfully and operate on a subject or object. Encapsulation is the ability to compartmentalize or insulate the exceptions to apply a map (see map-territory relation). When you consider pedantry harmful, you're eliminating the rough edges, adding offramps and slack into the system. It's a form of practicalcyberneticelasticity. It's useful to have a flexible structure because it bends, and not breaks.
Discretion is discretion for a reason. It's not a misuse of the system. It is not required to find a way to make the exception fit the letter of the rule. That's why it's an exception. The important thing is a good, common sense outcome. If you can shortcut the proceedings and all the ceremony, and achieve an outcome that improves the project, that is preferable to following the process for the same, let alone a worse outcome. Pedants are often Gaming the system, scrupulously cultivating constraints to trap up the works, Wikilawyering, often achieving a worse outcome with more fuss. They may acknowledge that a better outcome could exist, but their hands are tied by following the rule. Thankfully, creators of living systems knew about politics and system-gamers, that's why they designed elastic clauses like WP:IAR.
This same phenomenon infests governments, corporations, online projects, you name it. Rule-followers who don't understand how to cut through red tape and get shit done. Pedants often wring hands on the idea that they should avoid any possible appearance of impropriety or inconclusivity. They are more concerned with making sure the outcome is defensible, documenting a paper trail for ass-covering, not that it be swift. Justice delayed can be justice denied at times. We owe due process and swiftness to the project and its contributors. It's better to deliver the value quickly. There are a lot of revolving doors - outcomes that can be reversed. If we're at 80%, it's usually good enough to pull the trigger, relying on instinct, because politics is an art, not a science, for the most part. So don't worry so much and trust your instincts.
This was something that the old breed of WP:ROUGE [sic] admins did reflexively, sometimes pissing people off or getting into hot water, but we traded some accuracy for speed. This is now a legacy model, and prospective/current admins will likely be sanctioned or blocked or otherwise ostracized for defending or mimicking the cowboyism and the perceived battleground mentality of the olden days. The project has changed, but perhaps somewhat to its detriment in some ways. So consider this at your own risk! I am no longer an admin and I won't be. But it is instructive to make sure we do not allow stultifying bureaucracy to gum up the works. Gatekeeping is dangerous, as is process adherence, losing the spirit. Projects grow and flourish when they have a spark of creativity, which necessitates some freewheelingness. IT HAS TO BE FUN! AND A LITTLE CRAZY! WP:OGTW#10 WP:TROUT or else your project slowly dries up as all the zany vibes are squeezed out of it. The process is negotiable and it's a means to an end, not the end-in-itself.
So next time someone, purposefully or accidentally, ignores a rule and closes/does something that seems uncontroversial, as I was wont to do in my heyday, to occasional great consternation, which I do regret, but I digress... ask yourself, next time that happens, or anything else that seems like admins shortcutting the ceremony and going rogue, would the outcome have been different if a different uninvolved closer had closed it? Or are you just harping on the rules and not focusing on whether anyone was harmed? Wikipedia is pragmatic and preventative, not punitive, so injury must be substantiated by evidence toward outcomes. (PLEASE NOTE this is not excusing mistakes I made myself, or asking for forgiveness, or the slate to be wiped clean on the times when I jumped the gun and in doing so, created more fuss than necessary, or did something else that broke the rules in a way that actually did cause harm however small OR large.) Next time it happens, ask yourself if you're more concerned with the APPEARANCE of propriety and process-following-correctness, or about the IMPACT that the decisions are making (good or bad). I'm not looking to reconsider my own actions or a referendum on that. I'm looking to make an abstract, philosophical point as I often do, which might itself feel pedantic, but it's NOT! It's about big ideas. Wiki is not a court of law, and we are not lawyers or lawmakers. Very few of the things we do here are about life and death. We have to be here to build an encyclopedia. Move fast and break things. Learn by doing. Fail, learn, and fail again. Be bold!
TLDR: Lighten up, focus on the principles and values, not the specific process. If you're not WP:AGF and having fun, you're doing it wrong. It's OK to learn by making mistakes. Don't create a punitive or a pedantic environment. Wikipedia should encourage breaking the rules, or short circuiting a bureaucratic process, in the interest of expediency, lightening the load, and empowering good users with broad discretion and the ability to act instinctively. That doesn't mean a green light to do whatever all the time. It means you should focus on whether anyone or anything was harmed, and whether outcomes improved the project and peoples' lives. It also means we need not give infinite chances to obvious bad actors.
The global computer network is a messy place. There are issues. Many people are good, trustworthy, and some are sociopaths or utility monsters who effectively manipulate the system. Most people are good people with some flaws who occasionally mess up or do bad things. Naively, Wikipedia is set up to be easily vulnerable to well poisoning, copyright violation, self promotional paid editing or COI editing, sockpuppetry, meatpuppetry, Wikibullying, other forms of Long term abuse. There's also an extremely long WP:ROPE for Fresh starts, Right to vanish, or general 2nd chances granted by the community. The community can occasionally be capricious and it is sensitive to mob mentality. Also, many of the desires and behaviors of the community evolved organically over time, and norms shift as rigor and structure replace values and principles, with lessons, learnings, and complex Byzantine apparatus. This can sometimes serve to scare away, or discourage well-meaning newcomers who don't have a tough hide or a thick skin to navigate complexity. It can also produce bad results. The community may penalize or call out well-meaning people for political or toe-over-the-line technicalities [not talking about myself, I had feet over several lines at one point]. It can also occasionally overlook bad actors and allow the system to fall prey to their mistakes, such as the many cases of editors who have bulk added bad information, copyright violations, non-notable stuff, insidious POV pushing or misrepresented sources.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the patience of well-meaning people here and there, who are willing to do extremely frustrating argumentation for free, doesn't scale when you're dealing with the infinite patience of a 13-year old guzzling caffeine and ready to rumble. Also, many of the people willing to do the frustrating argumentation are going to be folks who aren't acting with the best interest of the project at heart. So we need to design a system that rewards acting with good interest, and which can accurately locate and dispense with mistakes or bad-faith edits. The system is a lot better at doing this than it was in the early days, but there seem to be fewer well-meaning contributors who aren't jaded or burnt out.
There's a well-known phenomenon that when you ask someone to sign up for something, even something free and beneficial, if you make them fill out a bunch of forms, and work with uncooperative people at the DMV or the post office or the IRS to get it done, they might just give up and do something else. So those who are left are the ones who have unusual traits. The odds are good, but the goods are odd. The Cynic's Guide (WP:CGTW) #18
Wikipedia relies on WP:AGF to work. It also relies that the good people speak up, rather than succumb to fear of saying the wrong thing. Being bold, and also providing psychological safety rather than punishing dissent. That's why it works when it does work: the power of a robust debate in the public square. Solutions like the blockchain address the trustless nature of online transactions. I wrote in 2018 this set of thoughts about a hash-based system to defeat sockpuppetry. There are other schemes we could devise. We need better tools because I would say that the existing tools are hit-or-miss, and there is plenty of evidence for that.
Quotes
I don't know anyone who treats Bill Clinton's biography as their holy book, either. I don't know anyone who believes that the existence of France is a myth. I don't know anyone who believes that cars are a foodstuff. That's why I'm not about to start editing those articles with comments like "Believers in the existence of France claim that it is a country located in Western Europe..." and then defend them on the basis of NPOV.Harry R
I do not worship logic, any more than I would worship a hammer. But neither do I scoff at logic, or at hammers; they are instruments most fine.Silence
I have complete faith in the continued absurdity of whatever’s going on.Jon Stewart
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.Douglas Adams
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.Niels Bohr
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. Bohr
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question. Bohr
Life itself is but a compromise between death and life, the struggle continuing throughout our whole existence, until the great destroyer finally triumphs. All legislation, all government, all society is founded upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these everything is based... Let him who elevates himself above humanity, above its weaknesses, its infirmities, its wants, its necessities, say, if he pleases, I will never compromise; but let no one who is not above the frailties of our common nature disdain compromises.Henry Clay
"It's easy when you know how To get along without Biff! Bang! Pow! And if I see you're fed up I'll stop and give you a leg up Overpriced unreal estate, surreal estate The highest price they've hit to date Creating new divides and tension This is a tale of two city/situations Mutual appreciation Away from narrow preconception Avoiding conflict hypertension Non-phobic word aerobic This was my domain 'Til someone stole my name You've got to tolerate All those people that you hate I'm not in love with you But I won't hold that against you" - Super Furry Animals
On userboxes
I resisted having userboxes for many years. There was a famous debate about it. Jimbo came out against them, then he had to dial it back a bit. It now seems that userboxes are pretty commonplace and that everyone has them. So now I have way too many. Think of it as my statement of intellectual biases, out in the open. I reserve the right to edit on topics that I have an opinion on, but will attempt to do so neutrally and according to policy and guidlines. Feel free to let me know your feedback if you disagree (I know you will!)
2018
I resigned my adminship and bureaucratship in 2018 under a cloud of concern about my actions, which I thought of as protecting the encyclopedia from what I perceived to be serious threats. Some - perhaps many - of those actions were driven by stress and were indefensible. I've spent a lot of time thinking about those actions and how I could have done them better, and I'm ready to contribute again, though I will probably not seek adminship again. I apologized at the time for "temporary insanity" and drastic measures that were due to extraordinary circumstances. It's reasonable that the community or its members may still not agree with my past actions or even my present, but I am resolved to follow the spirit and letter of Wikipedia policy and guidelines (including WP:IARWP:5P5 though maybe those did not apply in those cases), learn from mistakes, do the right thing, do what works, and be kind. To those who felt betrayed, I apologize for betraying that trust. I have made mistakes, I have tried to listen and engage with feedback, when the community is telling me that I am wrong and to stand down, and correct mistakes swiftly and reasonably timely. I have always tried to improve the project. I stand by the blocks of some indeffed users and I have committed to examining a battleground mentality and a legacy cowboyism, which I understand the community considers harmful.
Some folks have opined that my apology here was insufficiently apologetic so let's be really specific: I absolutely did make mistakes, argue for wrong things, for longer than I guess some say I should have. But I have always tried to engage in good faith, consider perspectives, and change my mind when that is the right course of action to do. I have tried to always keep an open mind even when, at times, emotions or mistaken ideas have overridden good logical thought. Maybe I really shouldn't ever be an admin again, and so be it: I gave years of my life trying to make this a better project and community, and I am proud of what I did overall, and I contend that even when I was breaking the rules indefensibly, I only tried to improve the encylopedia, and most of everyone that I ever was mean to, later got indefblocked. So, I'M SORRY! I CAN CHANGE! It's one of the only things I'm sure of is that I'm changing constantly. "You only live once" is a lie - you actually live dozens, maybe even billions of times.
If anyone wants more specific details or apologies, I'd be happy to share them with you!
Andrevan(talk· contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · moves · rights · renames · global renames)
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