User talk:Utopianfiat

Userpage Creation

Thanks for your contribution to the List of Everyone Who Has Ever Lived; however, if you will read the guidelines it specifically requests that you not add links to Wikipedia pages that do not exist (in this case, your user page). I have gone ahead and fixed it for you; however, please think of this in the future. Thanks!Kurt Weber 22:14, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

No personal attacks (Talk:Meme)

Please see Wikipedia's no personal attacks policy. Comment on content, not on the contributor; personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Note that continued personal attacks may lead to blocks for disruption. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thank you. Gwernol 16:58, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

In my defense, the user's negativity was disrupting the progress of the page. Perhaps my ideas clash with the No Personal Attacks policy, but I felt like at the time I had to set a hard and fast boundary. I did what I did and I maintain my amount of force was appropriate, and I did it in what I assumed was acceptable humor. Note that wikipedia does not have a No Jokes Policy. Feel free to continue this discussion if you like. --Utopianfiat 15:19, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Okay yeah, it was dumb. Sorry about that. --Utopianfiat 20:01, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Quickseek.com status

Have there been any new developments with the Quickseek.com situation? Ardric47 05:09, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

It's fixed, I believe. --Utopianfiat 17:06, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Per this

[[1]] Why are you congradulating a vandal?Abce2|This isnot a test 03:42, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Sometimes, in the course of reverting edits to wikipedia, one runs into an edit that is so obviously wrong and yet has evaded the watchful eye of editor after editor. This particular anonymous vandal changed a perfectly verifiable direct quote from the Dead Sea Scrolls to end in "Sweed, a type of drug" instead of "destruction". I was impressed at how such a ridiculous edit evaded notice for 2 years and 11 months. Also it's WP:FUN. Why, what's your thought? --Utopianfiat (talk) 03:47, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Aside from messing with the vandals head, isn't kind of rewarding them? I'm surprised as well.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Abce2 (talk • contribs)

I hope it rewards me a lot more than it rewards them, at the least. Note that I'm not openly encouraging them to vandalize pages, although consider if you will that the pages which are edited least frequently, if vandalized, pop up on recent changes more often and thus have a greater amount of oversight. Vandalism is a bad thing, but there's a point at which it's better than bitrot. Keeps editors on their toes, keeps articles checked for facts. An argument could be made that Stephen Colbert caused more improvements to the Elephant article than a thousand zoologists worldwide, just because he forced people to keep their eyes on the page. --Utopianfiat (talk) 03:57, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

In addition, there's some stuff I've been reading that might interest you: WP:The Motivation of a Vandal and WP:WikiProject Vandalism Studies--Utopianfiat (talk) 04:07, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Robot Software

Hello,

I had tried to cleanup the robot software article and thought I had made some progress, but it still needs more work. Cheers, Carl142 (talk) 22:19, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Regarding your edit summary

Regarding your edit summary, I suggest you take a quick read on the history of the Republic of China before making such hasty and blunt reactions. In 1912, Taiwan was a part of the Empire of Japan, and the Republic of China was located in Mainland China. Your argument that "The ROC is not the PRC" makes no sense, as nobody was saying that the ROC was the PRC. You merely assumed so based on your own misunderstandings. Since half the article deals with the historical ROC before 1949, equating the ROC to the island of Taiwan makes no sense at all. The ROC only acquired Taiwan after 1945 - how can the Republic of China be called "Taiwan" when it had nothing to do with Taiwan for the first 50 years of its 99 year history? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:47, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

So, personally I'd like to stay out of this dispute because I think it verges on political. I think you're right to take issue with equating the ROC to Taiwan in such straightforward language, but I would encourage you to be careful with what language you use to do so. I think that Western standards of referring to countries and governments and peoples reflect a present state of being that the Republic of China article reflected in my reverts. For example, Rome refers to the modern city, not the ancient empire. The top three links on the disambiguation page Turk refer to the modern-day turks, turkiç peoples, and Turkey, the present country, not the Ottoman Turks, the Ottoman Empire, or any other historical state. The only article that doesn't conform to this is Palestine and I think we can come to an agreement that it's a special case.

Also, I'd caution you that this discussion ought to be moved to Talk:Republic of China. Interestingly enough, it looks like you have already posted this objection there, so it really evades reason as to why you would go out of your way to contest edits I've made on my talk page of all places because it's the community that matters, not me or people who read my user talk. In addition, I feel like your characterizations that I have not read anything about ROC history, that I have made "hasty and blunt" assumptions based on "misunderstandings", is a bit one-sided. In addition, I think your argument, which for me boils down to "You cannot call the ROC 'Taiwan' because the ROC used to be other places" begs the inevitable "Then what are we going to call the ROC?" and means that we're going to refer to the ROC as an awkward historical relic, which it isn't, or we're going to invent a political status for the ROC which would be a little too creative for an encyclopedia and really more suited to a political science dissertation. --Utopianfiat (talk) 05:24, 10 April 2011 (UTC)