User talk:Nikisketches

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Thanks for becoming a member of the TARDIS crew! If you have any questions, see the Help pages, add a question to one of the Forums or ask on my talk page. Shambala108 ☎ 08:52, December 25, 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the page of Niki Haringsma

Hi, first of all, as an admin here, let me officially welcome you on this wiki.

Secondly, let me assure you that, as already pointed out by SOTO, our policy T:ACTOR#Crediting trans people (applicable to all creative people behind DW and which I had the honour of co-creating and enforcing) affirms everyone's right to self-determination.

Upon reviewing the edits at the page Niki Haringsma and its talk page, it is absolutely clear that the only reason pronouns were changed was a misunderstanding. The moment the situation cleared, Danniesen even added a hidden comment to avoid this situation from repeating in the future.

Unfortunately, upon a careful consideration by three admin, we have come to the conclusion that this hidden comment could not prevent such incorrect edits from happening again. Here is why.

The page does not in any way indicate that you self-identify as androgynous and use both she/her and he/him. Since you edited this page before, I infer that you do not want this information to be present there, a wish we can fully respect. However, the consequence of this choice is that an editor looking at your page is not alerted to the duality of pronouns as your personal choice. While this can be uncovered by a series of clicks, it is sadly not reasonable to expect every single editor, including occasional and IP editors to verify their every edit.

While it is now clear for you, me, SOTO, Danniesen, Revanvolatrelundar, and several other editors that the information is correct, somebody else can look at the page believing it to describe a cisgender and deciding to protect this cisgender from misgendering by unifying the pronouns. It is only too well known that men can get very offended by being mistaken for a woman, and vice versa. (Being a male cisgender myself, I do not see why being called "she" should be offensive, but others do take offence when a wrong pronoun is used, and it is natural for an editor to try preventing such an offence from happening.)

Thus, an editor can reproduce the offending edits for the very purpose of trying to avoid offending you. But what about the hidden comment, you would ask? Well, it is not visible in the VisualEditor (which many people, including you, prefer for editing). In other words, a well-meaning editor using the VisualEditor would receive no information that would stop them from editing.

The only way to prevent this from happening in the future, therefore, is to protect your page from editing by anyone other than an admin. This has been done, and, since most of the admin are now aware of you being non-binary, you can be rest assured that this will not happen again.

The side effect is that you will not be able to edit your page either. But that is, in fact, how it should be. We have a long-standing policy T:NO SELF REF disallowing anyone from providing information about themselves. This policy is rather universal: compare it, for instance, with an even more restrictive Wikipedia policy. Your friend NateBumber knows this policy well and does not edit contents of his page or of pages of his stories, leaving this task to other, more impartial and unbiased editors.

This, however, does not mean that you have no say in what your page states. While not able or allowed to edit it directly, you can request an edit (a similar mechanism is employed by Wikipedia). To make things simpler and friendlier for you, instead of a faceless template, we have assigned a whole admin to be responsible for hearing your wishes and implementing them (naturally, in accordance with all wiki policies). Thus, if you feel that something on your page requires changing (e.g., a pronoun), please, leave a message on the talk page of our own proudly non-binary admin SOTO. They will be sure to understand your concerns much better than any cisgender every could.

Needless to say, we welcome your contributions on any other page of the wiki unrelated to you. Happy editing! Amorkuz ☎ 00:13, August 20, 2019 (UTC)

Allow me just to state for the record that though he mentions me, Amorkuz is not in fact (entirely) representing my position here. I was part of no conversation in which it was decided "this hidden comment could not prevent such incorrect edits from happening again", took no part in locking the page, and have zero reservations about using correct pronouns whenever they are known, and enforcing as necessary. I think the hidden message ought to be sufficient (though this is one small detail). This solution works perfectly well on other pages. It is true that hidden messages do little for VisualEditor users, but I see no reason to lock a page until there have been repeated instances of ill-advised and/or malicious edits. I feel we should not get in the habit of locking the page of every person we cover who ain't cis.

My one and only issue here, aside from one editor trying to speak over another over the latter's own pronouns, is, like Amorkuz says, that we like to keep away from real world people editing their own pages. In this case, the wiki rightfully defers to you, as the only possible authority on your own pronouns. But if it comes to adding content to the page, it would be best to use the talk page to make the request. This is just to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

The same would apply to editing your own story pages, by the way, both for the reason cited above, and just in case your recollections of earlier drafts and/or plans affect your understanding of the released version's content.

So I as well would ask for a fair amount of caution when it comes to editing any pages related to your own works. Amorkuz is absolutely correct to point you to T:NO SELF REF, and also in pointing out that I am a good person to come to if you notice something that needs fixing. I wrote that new section of T:ACTOR (with important contributions from other admin) with these sorts of situations in mind, to make sure the most current and correct pronouns, as determined by the individual, are always employed, and indeed protected.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 01:56, August 20, 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, both of you. Please unlock my page as soon as you can, it's REALLY not okay to lock people's pages just because they're trans. The talk page convo should be enough to let other editors know what's up, and otherwise stuff can just be changed back if there's another misunderstanding. Anyway, I'm cool with following wiki guidelines and not making edits about my own stuff from now on. Nikisketches ☎ 07:12, August 20, 2019 (UTC)

I gotta agree with User:Nikisketches here. Pages are usually locked when there has been excessive vandalism (which was explicitly not the case, User:Danniesen merely misunderstood Nikisketches' actions), and even in those cases, the lock is temporary. I know there are a few permanently locked pages, but I don't think this one falls into the same situation. Shambala108 ☎ 13:38, August 20, 2019 (UTC)

Response to SOTO

Well, since my good friend SOTO decided to publicly misrepresent my actions and positions, I have no choice but to publicly respond and correct SOTO in return. The discussion of this situation happened privately among three admin, of which SOTO and I were two. During the discussion, it was mentioned several times that I have protected the page and it was explained why the hidden message would not prevent misgendering from recurring. SOTO never objected to it until publicly here. The only thing remaining was to explain to Nikisketches why Niki Haringsma's page was protected and that Nikisketches should not edit any pages relating to Niki Haringsma. This was supposed to be SOTO's task, and I poked them multiple times to do it ASAP. Having received no response and remembering how I was practically begging SOTO over a period of several months to formulate what has eventually become T:ACTOR and how it has not been done early enough to prevent a lot of unpleasantness, I posted the message myself. It would have been more productive for SOTO not to keep their objections until it was too late and/or perform the task assigned to them.

However, it is even more surprising for me to read SOTO's suggestion that we are somehow getting into "the habit of locking the page of every person we cover who ain't cis". I would like my good friend SOTO to provide an example of other pages of non-cis persons that are protected. I can, however, easily provide an example of a page of a cis person that has been protected for years: Steven Moffat. The protection was removed only in October 2018, almost a year after Moffat left the helm of the TV show. Despite SOTO's bizarre suggestion that the protections are somehow targeting trans people, it has been quite common to protect pages if a violation of rules was expected. The most obvious example is that story pages are routinely protected from creation until the story is out, in order to prevent the violation of Tardis:Official releases. I would think that protecting people, in this case from misgendering, is more important than protecting rules, especially if these people have already protested. But clearly there are different opinions on this topic. I do not like the idea that, to earn our protection, a person has to be misgendered repeatedly. I'm not sure how misgendering can be avoided if any new information is added to the page, given that there is not a single pronoun that can be used without the danger of misgendering. Indeed, "he" and "they" have already been ruled out, and "she" seems to be equivalent to "he". This is why I did not dare use any pronoun for Niki Haringsma in this post. I simply do not know which pronoun is the correct one.

But, as always, I will of course defer to the person in this regard. If Nikisketches would prefer Niki Haringsma's page unprotected and open to future (IMHO almost inevitable) misgendering, so be it. Amorkuz ☎ 14:58, August 20, 2019 (UTC)