User talk:MichaelCrawford

Who Do I Have To Blow Around Here To Be Considered Notable Enough For A Wikipedia Article?

This is MichaelCrawford; this is my own User Talk page, but I'm unable to reset my password as I can't get into that email either. There is a way to fix it, but I've been working very, very hard lately and so am very tired. I'll deal with it, but not until I get caught up on my sleep. 50.131.200.103 (talk) 18:31, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

For years now, I have been totally stymied as to why Wikipedia regards web content as non-notable, while "dead tree" content is notable.

This is neither idle curiousity nor an attempt at shameless self-promotion.

Given that it is 2012, that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 or so, that I myself have been on the Internet since 1985, and that the Internet was invented in the late 1960s, I find it utterly UNFATHOMABLE that online publication would in any way be regarded as non-notable.

I find that attitude, quite frankly, totally asinine.

Here is a partial list of my own publications.

You will see that the vast majority of them are self-published on the web, with my last print publication being in 1994. I have many, many publications to add to that list, by a factor of five or so, every last one of which is self-published on the web.

That is for very good reason, as one of my most deeply held and fundamental personal values that if anyone at all can in any way benefit from my own experience, insight or expertise, that they must be able to do so without any manner of monetary charge, and to the extent humanly possible, with as little effort or expense on their part as possible.

The web is uniquely suited to fulfill such a purpose. That's why I publish nowhere else.

Someone did publish a Wikipedia article about me a while back, then rather unwisely blasted the news about it all over Kuro5hin.

It happens that there is a cyberstalker at Kuro5hin who goes by the nick of "modus", who has devoted three solid years of his existence to little else than making me completely unemployable, as well as doing his damnedest to drive all of my closest friends to hate me with a passion.

If you examine modus' Comment or Diary History for the past few years, you'll see he rarely has anything at all to say other than something really bad about me.

Thus when that Wikipedia article about me was announced at Kuro5hin, not five minutes passed before it was nominated for deletion!

I pointed out in the deletion debate that I have devoted many, many years to researching, writing, publishing and promoting essays and articles on the general topic of Mental Illness, not just my own but that of others.

I have a whole bunch of different Mental Illnesses, Neurological Conditions and Endocrine Conditions all at the same time, any one of which would completely cripple most other people.

There was a time when I hallucinated so vividly that I was completely unable to see where I was going when I tried to walk.

One of my diagnoses is Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder, which is somewhat like being Manic Depressive and Schizophrenic at the same time, but the two together are far worse than the two seperately because of the complex and sublte way they interact. The condition is very rare, very poorly understood and so very difficult to treat. There is no medication meant specifically to treat it. To the best of my knowledge there has never, ever been a large scale study of Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder, because their just aren't enough of us to serve as study subjects.

In my entire life I have heard of just one other Schizoaffective who is able to hold a job at all, but I myself have been self-employed off and on since 1986, continuously since 1998, I was Product Development Manager at Working Software, a Senior Engineer working in the role of "Debug Meister" at Apple Computer, I was an embedded storage systems developer for several years, Principal Software Engineer at Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, I have a Bachelor's Degree in Physics from UC Santa Cruz, I wrote my UNDERGRADUATE these on a US Department of Energy grant at the giant particle accellerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and while I never completed my doctorate, I did well in what Graduate Physics classes that I did attend at UCSC.

It is commonly thought to be completely impossible for Schizophrenics to make their auditory hallucinations - "Hearing Voices" - stop of their own volition.

I didn't believe my Psychiatrist at first when he told me I was hallucinating, but once he was able to convince me, just by thinking about doing so, I made those Voices completely cease in but three days. I happened to quite casually mention to a Psychiatric Nurse what I had done, how I did it, and that the very first thing I attempted made all those Voices stop on the very first try.

That nurse shouted at the very tops of her lungs, "YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO DO THAT!"

Shortly before I was discharged from that same hospital in the Summer of 1985, another Psychiatric Nurse quietly, calmly and rather obliquely said to me:

We could learn so much from you.

I spent many, many years puzzling over what she could possibly meant by that statement, eventually to realize that indeed I had a great deal to teach the Mental Health Community.

Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Neurologists, Biologists, Chemists, Geneticists and the like study Mental Illness from the outside, without any real understanding of what the Inner Experience of Mentally Ill people is really like.

While many Mentally Ill people write or speak about our experience, few of us are able to do so eloquently or insightfully. It is also uncommon for a profoundly Mentally Ill person to be as steeped in the Scientific Method as I am, and so able to report research results on my investigations into my own mind in much the same way as I would report results collected in a Physics lab.

A few years ago I printed out most - but definitely not all - of my essays on Mental Illness. Printed on both sides of each sheet of paper, it was a stack two and a half inches thick!

I was told by a Mental Health worker in 2004 or so that my fifty-page essay Living with Schizoaffective Disorder is on an official reading list that the State of California Mental Health Department distributes to its County Mental Health Clinics.

There is quite a lot more I could say, but perhaps you get the picture that just because I publish on the web, it's not like I'm just blogging about what I had for lunch that day.

I pointed this all out in that debate over the deletion of my article, with the result that some Wikipedia editor - clearly not one of the Kuro5hin trolls, replied:

That's all very admirable, but it doesn't make you notable.

If that doesn't make me notable, what possibly could?

I bring this up now as a few weeks ago, I stumbled across the Wikipedia article about some poet who had published perhaps two books of poetry.

While I have published vastly more material than he has, which is far more widely read and that makes a profoundly more positive difference in the lives of great numbers of cruelly tormented people, I'm not considered notable because my writing is online while this poet IS notable because those were DEAD-TREE books.

That Just Doesn't Make Sense.

My work on Mental Illness, while I regard it as my most important work, is actually only a small part of my published writing. Far more abundant are my social commentaries as well as my technical articles on software engineering, power management, software quality assurance, business, law, and many different aspects of website operation.

I quite honestly considered posting a new Wikipedia article about myself, that would cite every last one of my publications, along with a detailed discussion as to why I feel that it is WRONG to publish in print form when one has the opportunity to publish on the web instead.

Not because I knew Wikipedia frowns on submitting articles about one's self here, but because I feel very strongly that it is of VITAL importance to defeat this policy that web publishing in general, and self-published web writing in particular is non-notable, I decided instead to work within the system, despite that I fully expect it will take quite a lot of time and a lot of effort, to reverse what I regard as a profoundly ignorant editorial policy.

Thank You For Any Advice You Can Give Me. 50.131.200.103 (talk) 18:31, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Hello, I will ask an admin to restore the material to my userspace so that I can look over the content. Ryan Vesey Review me! 19:00, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Ryan Vesey I Am Eternally In Your Debt.

However I hasten to point out that the article about me that was published, nominated for deletion then actually deleted, had many substantial problems. The CONTENT of the article itself was not really written in an appropriate way for Wikipedia. Not all of it was factually accurate, either.

But none of those factors were considered in any way during the debate over deletion. The only concern discussed in any significant way was whether or not I could be considered notable enough to have an article of any sort, whether well-written or poorly written.

To the very best of my knowledge, there was not one single regular Wikipedia contributor who knew anything at all about me. It was up to me - and to me alone - to convince them of my notability in the space of but a day or two. At the same time, [Kuro5hin] is home to some of the most notorious trolls who walk the Earth - no more than twenty minutes at the site will convince you of that - every last one of whom were all over Wikipedia like a cheap suit to get my article deleted.

If some reasonable number of Wikipedia editors, who are regular contributors here, know all the policies, have some history and reputation and so on, were to research my life, my work and my publications, they would readily see that I have made a great many contributions to the community, with most of those contributions being made with no compensation of any sort.

As I posted above, because the importance I place on not charging money for my writing, I am completely cool with finding other ways to pay the rent. For many years I have worked as a Software Engineer. While I am quite good at the work, I am quite desperately unhappy with it, and so only devote the bare minimum time to coding that I absolutely have to to avoid starvation. That enables me to devote far more time to writing.

Quite ironically, because most Kuro5hin members are Software Engineers as well, for me to point out that I regard writing code as a complete waste of my valuable time, that I would write no software at all anymore if I could possibly avoid doing so, is taken by most "Kurons" as the most offensive kind of insult, thereby leading them to redouble their efforts to make me miserable and to interfere in every way they possibly can with my achievement of any goal that I ever set for myself.

Look Man: I am a Physicist, not a Software Engineer. I only took a job as a coder because I was weary of living as a starving student. I persisted as a coder because coders usually have flexible hours, so I am able to work at night as I prefer. Given that the only reason I ever wrote software was so that I would not be so dead broke anymore, and that I persist because I get to work at night, how is it any surprise to anyone when I point out that I am unhappy with the work and would rather devote myself to my writing.

I at least have the G-d Given Insight to KNOW I am Mentally Ill. It happens that it is well-documented by the Mental Health Community that only one in ten Mentally Ill people are ever treated in any way by a Mental Heath Professional during their entire lives. I don't have a citation handy, but lots of cites would not be hard to come up with.

That leads me to a few observations, the first of which is that anyone in their right mind who spends much time at Kuro5hin will readily agree that most of those sorry lot are completely out of their trees, and that their various Madnesses put my own completely to shame. But they don't know that; despite being quite seriously mentally ill, they are all completely convinced that they are perfectly sane and healthy.

I state a second observation in The Mental Software Problem:

The Mental Software Problem can be understood by the fact that British Petroleum didn't even apply for an ecological drilling permit before it blew a smoking crater into the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in the most ignorant kind of way.

If you think British Petroleum just fixed the Lousiana Shrimp Industry but good, just wait until you see what the United States Justice Department is about to do to British Petroleum's Stock Market Capitalization.

I then assert that while The Mental Software Problem does include Mental Illness, it is actually a superset of Mental Illness, with other examples of The Mental Software Problem including people or organizations behaving in profoundly nonsensical ways while at the same time remaining completely convinced that they are completely rational actors.

A more recent development is that I have found through hard and quite repeatible experience that if I point out to most who experience The Mental Software Problem that they make no sense at all to me, that they quite commonly fly into a furious rage, at times becoming quite dangerously violent. That actually led two uniformed police offers to first slam the left end of my left eyebrow into a concrete wall as hard as they could, then to pick up my entire body and slam the right end of my right eyebrow down onto a bare concrete floor.

The result of that is that I lost two and a half days of conscious memory. I honestly do not know if I was in a coma, just sleeping, or if I was fully concious most of the time only to have my memory of those two and a half days suddenly obliterated. I was experiencing all manner of bizarre brain damage symptoms fully three weeks later.

Any why did they do that? I pointed out to an Emergency Room Nurse who wanted to inject me with Geodon and Ativan that it would cost her hospital a lot less money to give me tablets instead. I did not actually resist or refuse the injection, only point out that injectable drugs were an unwise economic choice when I could swallow tablets. But even so, those two cops went totally out of their trees and damn near murdered me.

If the debate over deletion for that first attempt at an article about me had focussed on the Wikipedia editors - those who were not Kuro5hin members - actually reading a few of my better articles or essays, I am confident that the deletion would not have taken place. But somehow someone was able to steer the discussion so that they only consideration was whether I had published enough non-Internet material as to be considered notable enough.

The reason I want a Wikipedia article is not to become famous, make money, promote my business or run for political office. I want an article because that would lead a lot of readers to my articles who would never otherwise have the good fortune to learn something of value from them.

Thanks Again! User_Talk:MichaelCrawford 50.131.200.103 (talk) 19:56, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Before we get too far into this, I would like to let you know that at this point I have only taken a cursory glance at the deletion discussion and other relevant history. It may be entirely possible that when I get a chance to fully review the article, the discussion, the sources you have provided, and those that I find myself, that I will get the opinion that you aren't currently notable enough to have an article. I hope that is not the case and I will go into this with the presumption of notability. If I do find you to be notable, I will work on the article and seek assistance from some other editors who write articles about similar topics. Once I believe the article is ready for the article space, I will request a deletion review so that the community can confirm that the issues addressed in the deletion discussion have been addressed. Ryan Vesey Review me! 20:14, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

[1] is a perfect example of while most online content is unsuitable: What is your letters policy? —Passed by a majority of the editorial board, March 17, 1873. The New York Times is considered a Reliable Source; it is not considered a good source for reporting on itself, although comments from its ombudsmen provide counterpoint or validation to objections raised elsewhere, not internal praise. Even they make errors, which they infrequently admit, but print corrections and retractions. Faculty bios may or may have had editorial oversight or fact checking, but regardless are not independent. Official websites of elected officials are called out when they fall short of the truth or are fanciful, but Joe's blog doesn't get that level of scrutiny. For years, government records insisted I was born in Pico Rivera, CaliforniaNew Jersey, a non-existant place; I can only presume a template fill from previous entries which had not been blanked before re-use, as I wasn't born in either state, let alone Pico Rivera. A friend was listed as born on leap day - in a year that didn't have one - and had to 'prove that he wasn't. Dru of Id (talk) 21:52, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Fr517 P507

Welcome!

Hello, MichaelCrawford, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  -- GraemeL ^(talk) 15:07, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Nice to see somebody showing up and taking the responsible path to adding external links instead of slapping them across a dozen or more articles. --GraemeL ^(talk) 15:07, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi GraemeL, thanks for the tips and the welcome. I expect I'll be able to contribute actual content, and not just links, once I get to know my way around a bit better. I have a degree in Physics, I'm an amateur astronomer, and I've worked nearly twenty years as a software engineer. And as I'm sure you've already observed, I like to write :-) MichaelCrawford 19:11, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi again,

By starting at the five pillars of Wikipedia, I read the discussion of what should and should not be an external link. Notably it was argued that one should lift specific information from the external pages, if not actually copy the pages verbatim, if their license permits it.

While I'm happy to contribute my methods, some of them are not appropriate to Wikipedia. It was pointed out that Wikipedia is not for howtos or tutorials, but for verifiable facts. While my article contains some facts, on the whole it is a howto and a tutorial. As I said in the SEO talk page, some of my methods are not in any practical way verifiable.

My article is inappropriate to be copied verbatim because it definitely does not use a neutral tone. For example, I argue impassionately that one should not use Flash intros to homepages, and that web designers who recommend them do not have one's best interests at heart. I'm sure one could demonstrate my assertion in a verifiable way, but my purpose in writing it the way I did was not so much to inform, as to convince. Such rhetoric is not appropriate for Wikipedia.

That all said, I expect I can contribute actual content to the SEO Wikipedia entry, and I can both supply some of my verifiable facts, as well as write new versions of material that was removed but copied to the talk page.

My link has been there twelve whole hours now. I'm feeling pretty hopeful about it. MichaelCrawford 00:16, 31 March 2006 (UTC)