User talk:Vttale

Hello, Vttale, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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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!  --Kralizec! (talk) 00:20, 16 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Hello. Thanks for your message. I'm afraid Wikipedia is about verifiability rather than "truth", and it draws only from published, reliable sources rather than its editors' own research and conclusions. We could write a lot about Parry if we tracked down and interviewed his university friends, and we could sift the truth from the mistakes and misrepresentations if we put the time into it, but that's simply not how Wikipedia has decided to work, for good or for ill. A Wikipedia article is simply an aggregation of what all reliable published sources have had to say about the subject.

In actual fact, I'm afraid the WP:BLPSPS policy completely rules out using any sort of self-published website as a source for a biography article. There's no room for editors to debate whether or not a university friend's essay is a valuable source, a misremembered anecdote or even a misleading private joke - policy simply says never to use it. If no history-of-Usenet books or press interviews with Parry have yet thought to look into the precise origin of the "Kibo" pseudonym, then Wikipedia isn't able to write about it.

I trust this makes some sense. --McGeddon (talk) 10:15, 16 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hi Vttale, Thank you for your interest in the Vermont article. I concur that "woodchuck" is not pejorative on the level with the.N-word. It's still sufficiently pejorative that people don't refer to themselves as woodchucks, nor would they be pleased if you called them one. The same goes for "flatlander". Assuming the jocular context that the citations use the term in, I still don't feel that the term belongs in the Demographics section. In my view, it's not consistent with an encyclopedic entry, but if it were to make an appearance, I'd put it into a Popular culture section. I'll not take any further action, until we have had a chance to discuss this, Vermonter to Vermonter and in good faith. I'll look for your reply, here. Sincerely, User:HopsonRoad 19:14, 20 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Thank you. I confess that when I added it I did not feel that particular section was the ideal place for it, but I could find no better. It got added because I had an edit of mine to the Woodchuck (disambiguation) page deleted because "usage is not supported by the linked (Vermont) article". As this is factual information and not at all vandalism, having an edit completely reverted rather than improved or at least tagged for improvement was not, in my opinion, in the spirit of spreading knowledge through Wikipedia. I can understand your reluctance to use the term because apparently some people do use it pejoratively, and I completely understand adding additional wording and a citation that would warn people that not everyone sees it with affection. It is not in my character to want to offend people with pejorative labels, and thus I did not include the "flatlander" term even though it is in the title of the citation and on the Flatlander (disambiguation) page (where it remains despite User:Bkonrad's objection on Woodchuck (disambiguation) that "usage is not supported by the linked article").

Perhaps another section, or at least a sentence, which touches on the tension between multi-generational Vermonters and immigrants is warranted; this is an area of some scholarly study and seems entirely appropriate to me as relevant information in an encyclopedic article about Vermont. I'm not sure another page like Politics of Vermont or a new entry from Category:Vermont_culture is suitable, but am certainly open to considering the various possibilities.

Thank you for your open discussion. Vttale (talk) 19:52, 20 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

I concur strongly with your suggestion, concerning the tension between multi-generational Vermonters and newer arrivals, a point that I made in the Vermont talk section after my post here. The words "woodchuck" and "flatlander" are symptoms of that tension and deserve to be mentioned in that context. I appreciate your attempt to mitigate the question of offensiveness. It's interesting to read the "Nigger" article for a scholarly discussion of that term, which would be offensive for you or I to use in any context, but strangely some African-Americans apply to themselves in general conversation. You might consider developing the subject of native/non-native tension in an article, like Politics of Vermont, as you suggested. Sincerely, User:HopsonRoad 20:03, 20 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

You are invited to participate in the 20,000 Challenge, aiming for 20,000 article improvements and creations for articles relating to the United States. This effort began on November 1, 2016 and to reach our goal, we will need editors like you to participate, expand, and create. See more here!

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:40, 8 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Open Back-End. Since you had some involvement with the Open Back-End redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. – Fayenatic London 11:46, 7 November 2018 (UTC)Reply