User talk:Robertinventor

Hello and welcome! I think it should be fine for you to do this editing on Miraheze — though to create a set of pages on the subject, you should create your own Miraheze wiki, not do it on Meta, which is properly only for discussing and promoting Miraheze at large.

However, why can't you do this editing on Wikipedia (in your own userspace)? A topic ban is a ban on editing the encyclopedia articles on the topic, not a ban on discussing the topic anywhere on the site! 14:44 11-Aug-2018


 * Thanks, glad it's okay. My topic ban is broadly construed. This means that it applies to my user space and talk pages as well as the main space. Not just talking about articles, talking about the topic of Buddhism at all, anywhere in Wikipedia. I can't even talk about this page outside of a topic ban appeal on Wikipedia. You can get indef blocked for violating the broadly construed". And if there is any question about whether it was or wasn't a violation, the presumption is that it was. Thanks for your undestanding! Robertinventor (talk) 15:13, 11 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I am astonished — even your own talk page, where the easy fix to a conversation that was "disruptive" (shades of Facebook!) is for those "disrupted" to simply withdraw from your talk page. However, I am not an authority, there or here.  Happy editing!   15:22 11-Aug-2018


 * Yes even on your own talk page. During my original topic ban discussion, I was told that it is okay for me to tell others I'm Buddhist and even talk about my faith to others so long as I don't mention Wikipedia's coverage of the topic - but it is so easy to go over the line that I wouldn't risk it myself.


 * You definitely can't mention the Wikipedia articles or the events that lead up to the t-ban - or the other editors or anything even remotely related to the dispute anywhere after you are t-banned, even on your own talk page. As an example, a friend got an indef block for mentioning the subject of their own topic ban in a discussion on their own talk page with the administrator who closed the case against them. They said to the admin that something they were accused of in the t-ban was false - and for mentioning the topic area in this way to their closing admin, was given an indef block. Also - you can't talk to other editors about your t-ban to ask for help with understanding why you were t-banned. And it is also a violation to talk about your constructive plans for how to behave on Wikipedia if your t-ban is lifted, just hypothetically, or asking others there to help you work out how to avoid being banned again in future. This same friend did that too and was severely criticized for doing it. If you keep doing things like this you risk escalating sanctions just for talk page activity - up to an indef block. Some resort to sock puppets once they are blocked out of their pages in this way in what seems an unfair fashion for things they don't see as offences - when that happens they are liable to be site banned.


 * I have come across several topic banned editors who don't know where to turn to as there is no support for them after they are topic baanned on Wikipedia, they are just banned until they figure out for themselves what went wrong and what to do, and some never do. Especially one case of an editor who contacted me, self identified as having a very low IQ, 70 or below (i.e mentally impaired but still able to contribute) - he was gifted and talented at making things and had a lot to contribute but just hadn't a clue about what was going on when he got t-banned. He ended up with a global site ban - site banned from all the wikipedia sites including meta, just because he didn't know what was going on and nobody tried to explain in a way he could understand. By the time he contacted me it was irreversible, wiht no possibility of appeal and he was very distressed by it, as you can imaagaine. I was able to help him understand what happened, but there wasn't any way to revesre what happened. Still - that did help. I think Alzheimers and autism and various other conditions might make it hard for editors there to understand what went wrong and what is required of them. I think there must surely be large numbers of such editors out there. And the site attracts people like that, who can do things on their computer taht are worthwhile, also engaging with others and socializing on the web in this way too - talking about something they do that is valuable - maybe if autistic they find it hard even to communicate with others in real life.


 * This is unrelated to my t-ban but several of us wanted to create a support space for editors t-banned from Wikipedia on meta, just to let them talk to each other and any admins who want to help them, about what happened and how to move forward. But the admins there didn't understand even that there is a problem. We had a request for comments and it ended up as no consensus (which meant we couldn't create the page) with the admins all voting against the idea. We can talk about our t-bans on meta so long as we are not banned in the same topic there - and I tried putting this page up there instead, but an editor on meta blanked my page and said it is not permitted on meta - presumably because it is not a page intended for use in meta itself, discussion here.


 * Yes I'm astonished too. I have wondered if it might be okay to put this page up in Wikipedia in my user space during the t-ban appeal itself. Maybe it is permitted but with that background, I don't want to risk it in case it prejudices my appeal - even if it is permitted some of those voting might not know that :). Robertinventor (talk) 16:02, 11 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I read your user page. Wikipedians are prickly about being a reference source rather than a collection of essays.  I am plenty authoritative about the fact that the New York Yankees are crap, but you see where that leads.
 * More problematic is when you encounter editors who want to plant the Wikipedia orthodoxy in articles. I took pride in writing text that presented alternative theories of climate change, but human causation is Settled Science [sic] at Wikipedia.  Also, every article has to explain its effects on the LGBT Community, and there is a detailed article on "Homophobia" in the absence of any evidence that resistance to the LGBT political agenda is primarily motivated by personal insecurity.  It is no longer worth the drama of an edit war.  Consequently, I have not been banned.  Came close, once, when I fought the use of Wikipedia to direct traffic to a fork of a wiki and its advocates tried to make me the issue.
 * You might monitor across Miraheze (for example, look at what other wikis are being requested in the Farmer Log, or in the Gazetteer of wikis) because other users who want a refuge from Wikipedia might join you as contributors to a single wiki rather than have a variety of single-editor refuges.  13:32 8-Sep-2018
 * I'd also like to welcome you to Miraheze, and thank you for your kind words about Miraheze on your userpage :) It is sad how many users get blocked on Wikipedia for such reasons. Reception123 (talk) ('C' ) 17:47, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Yes I know about not doing essays there - I am a blogger as well but kept the science blogging well separate from wikipedia editing. I didn't do essays there, mine were well sourced and followed all the Wikipedia guidelines as best I could, they were neutral point of view and to the best of my ability in an encyclopedic tone. But they blocked me after 10 years of work there. You don't have to edit war. I never did, I always tried to resolve everything through discussion, and still got indef blocked. Never did a double revert, very rarely even did a single revert. When my own edits were reverted I'd discuss, and if it didn't come to a resolution, go away. But they found my talk page discussions to try to save the content they wanted to delete tedious, and still blocked me.

You are lucky not to be sanctioned. It is a bizarre process that proceeds by people just shouting out "Guuilty" at any stage and saying any allegations, it's a case of allegations first, then sentencing then talk to the editor you just sentenced. You can turn up at the ANI sanctioning debate against you and if you don't get there in minutes, then in the worst cases as happened with me, you are liable to see at least one votet to topic ban you or indef block you or whatever. I already had an indef block vote against me before I got to the board even though I knew from previous experience how important it is to respond quickly, and got there in less than an hour after the announcement on my talk page.

My wikis are rather specialist ones, any editors could help with wikignoming of course, but for the actual content then you'd need to know about Microtonal music, or Astrobiology - or - the Doomsday Debunked one is the more general one I think but still you need to be expert in one of its topics. I don't think there are any other wikis on these topics here yet. I'm not trying to develop a generalist Wikipedia - and wonder if perhaps this is the way to go for the future for the Wikipedia content generally, to split up into smaller more self contained wikis (that could also link to each other eventually...).

You don't need many editors to be able to easily do a better job of curatingthe content than Wikipedia. Because large areas of the project are just inactive, only a few doing minor edits, and others introducing errors almost as fast fast hey are fixed. In Astrobiology and Buddhism then they are introducing more errors than they fix,in my view those two topic areas are steadily deteriorating rather than improving - and they blocked me basically for trying to reverse that trend. So - I don't actually think attracting as many editors as possible is the way to go. By the Wikipedia data, then if you can have 1 editor doing careful edits of 100 articles you are already way ahead of Wikipedia I think. So a wiki of a few hundred pages - can be managed by maybe 2-3 editors. One can do it if they put a fair bit of work into it. So I think building up slowly and attracting good careful editors is the way to go.

For the most part my wikis use criteria similar to Wikipedia but the microtonal wiki is also going to rely on modern theorists who are highly respected, but do not do much academic writing, even though some of them are trained as academics, but in this topic area they publish their research on their own websites rather than in academic journals. Which makes it almost imposible to use their research in Wikipedia.

With the astrobiology one, the article they deleted uses modern highly reliable cites and one of the most bizarre things was how the editors there didn't seem even to know that NASA's science goals for Mars is about the most reliable cite there is on the topic. How could they not look at that? Anyway as a blocked editor I no longer need to try to fathom the mysteries of the strange behaviours of Wikipedia editors. But most of my content will be released under CC by SA so if they want to reuse it back in Wikipedia, they can.

I have looked at the other wikis here. There's a Harry Potter wiki that interests me, but I don't have time to do anything with it at present. It would be easy to import all the Wikipedia Harry Potter related articles into it however for someone who wanted to give that a go. It seems to have been abandoned as far as I can tell. Robertinventor (talk) 20:43, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Yes I meet so many people who have been blocked for similar reasons. I think actually - maybe there's something to be said for having separate wikis for different topic areas rather than trying a single monolithic "encyclopedia of everything" though that does have its benefits too. And - I'll be releasing most of the content under CC by SA same as Wikipedia so they can use my material if they want to back in Wikipedia. Robertinventor (talk) 20:33, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

{ Just to say - you might like to know I wrote up a blog post about MiraHeze on my Science 2.0 blog here: Easy To Improve On Wikipedia In Specialist Encyclopedias (Ours: Astrobiology, Microtonal Music, Doomsday Debunked & Buddhism) - maybe send a few people your way, who knows...

Wiki created
Hello, I would like to tell you that I have created your wiki. You can now access it at https://astrobiology.miraheze.org. You should have been automatically granted administrator and bureaucrat rights, if that's not the case then please leave a notice on Stewards' noticeboard so we can fix it immediately. Do not hesitate to ask questions if your question was not answered in our FAQ. Also, if you want an extension, gadget, or anything else, please ask us here. Thank you for choosing Miraheze, and we wish you good luck with your wiki! 08:35, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Wiki created
Hello, I would like to tell you that I have created your wiki. You can now access it at https://doomsdaydebunked.miraheze.org. You should have been automatically granted administrator and bureaucrat rights, if that's not the case then please leave a notice on Stewards' noticeboard so we can fix it immediately. Do not hesitate to ask questions if your question was not answered in our FAQ. Also, if you want an extension, gadget, or anything else, please ask us here. Thank you for choosing Miraheze, and we wish you good luck with your wiki! Reception123 (talk) ('C' ) 11:54, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Wiki created
Hello, I would like to tell you that I have created your wiki. You can now access it at microtonal.miraheze.org.. You should automatically have been granted founder rights (administrator and bureaucrat), if that's not the case then please leave a notice on Stewards' noticeboard so we can fix it immediately. Do not hesitate to ask questions if your question was not answered in our FAQ. Also, if you want a extension, gadget, or anything else, please ask us here. Thank you for choosing Miraheze, and we wish you good luck with your wiki!--Msnhinet8 (talk) 10:03, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Asking for help
Hello Robert. You are very experienced, so I'd like to benefit from your experience.

I want to do 2 things:

- Being able to back up via a software my wiki, as there are no enough interesting page publicly readable to ask an exemption from the dormancy policy, and I'm afraid to be too busy in some period of my life. So, the perfect solution would be to auto-backup the content, to upload on another place, a cloud, another wiki, or/and a place given by my internet hosting service.

- Being able to have 2 categories of page, one readable and editable only by me or a group of users (some pages are some kind of drafts, and other are memos), and the other categories, readable by everyone on the Internet, but editable only by me or a group of users.

Should I ask an extension for this?

Thank you for your help! Regards. --PERCE-NEIGE (talk) 04:28, 26 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Sorry for delay in reply. There's an extension "Author protect" which you can install via the extensions manager for your wiki which lets you protect pages so that e.g. only administrators can author them


 * For the backup, you can do an xml dump from Special:Backup and export / reimport. Won't include user account information but all the pages and history which you can import to another wiki. No images but if you use Wikimedia commons that won't matter. you can request an image dump. See


 * Mediawiki is not set up to permit hidden pages. Except for hiding everything except the main page. But you can add a note to the top of the page explaining the nature of it. You can also add another category or add a blog which won't turn up in the main space searches. You can also add __NOINDEX__ to the top of any page to say that you don't want search engines to list it, so that at least it doesn't turn up in search results in Google. For most purposes just hiding it from Google is all you want to do. That's what I do with drafts. You can put drafts in your user space - is the usual way to do it in Wikipedia. If you look at my user space here see the "Currently working on" it's a draft in my user space set to no index. You do it by just adding the page name after your user name e.g. I could do: User:Robertinventor/test to create a new page called test on my wiki.


 * Sorry for delay in reply Robertinventor (talk) 19:13, 5 May 2019 (UTC)