User talk:Geo Swan

Welcome to Wikispooks!

We're glad you came. There's lots to do.
The Community portal is probably the best place to start for new users.
If you've got a topic you're itching to write about, just dive in. If you're not sure where to start, you can introduce yourself by editing either this page or your user page. Peter P (talk) 18:43, 12 February 2014 (GMT)

The Guantanamo stuff is welcome here. I look forward to seeing it --Peter P (talk) 18:48, 12 February 2014 (GMT)

• Can I ask a couple of questions first?

First off; Until Robin arrived and apart from odd agenda-driven one-off contributions, the entire content of the site was constructed - some of it authored by me. --Peter P (talk) 08:32, 14 February 2014 (GMT)

1. How are the bills paid?
   1. Out of my pocket. There is the occasional donation - usually anonymous but donations do not (currently) cover costs
2. How would other contributors challenge material I contributed? Do contributors have {{afd}} like discussions over deletion?
   1. Currently I would be the final arbiter - autocratic IOW. That said I am beyond personal ambition and keep a tight rein on my ego. ANYTHING that challenges the official narratives of power will get a fair hearing here - in fact the presumption - in the absence of concrete evidence - will ALWAYS be against official narratives.
3. How are wikistalker dealt with? I didn't have any of my wikipedia wikistalkers follow me to http://en.wikialpha.org, or http://complexoperations.org -- but who knows? My most persistent wikistalker made over 15,000 edits, that were either to material I originally contributed, or were about material I originally contributed. That wiki-id was eventually blocked for edit-warring, but it took 28 months.
   1. We haven't had any - yet.
4. Complexoperations.org used semantic wiki extension. I wonder if they are the same extension as you use here. Oddly, they did not support the {{cite}} templates. I tailed off my contributions there, because they were/are DARPA funded, and thus could not allow references to material published by WikiLeaks.
   1. Don't know the site. I'll have a look. We started using SemanticMediaWiki recently and Robin has lead on some major develpoments based on it. They are ongoing.
5. Wikialpha's owners make porting about to be deleted material from the wikipedia to their site. They hope to make a profit. They support the {{cite}} templates. They will accept all kinds of material that wasn't acceptable on the wikipedia -- including "original research". About a year ago I suggested they do as you have done, post regular archives. Contributing there is a risk, as, although the management agreed publishing archives was a good idea, they haven't done so, and all my contributions there could evaporate at a moment's notice.
   1. We are currently experiencing issues with Scribunto which is needed to run the latest iterations of the major Wikimedia templates - especially . I will try to make sure WS remains compatible with {{cite}}
6. I'd like to be fickle, and port material I wrote to multiple wikis where it is welcome.
   1. No problem whatever with that. WS mission is to make suppressed information available as widely as possible, NOT to be proprietorial or in any other way 'precious' about it.
7. What is the policy towards "fair use" images?
   1. We've hit copyright claims issues only a couple of times. In each case they were quickly resolved. There is no definitive polcy guide other than to credit where credit is due and to respect copyright but not to the point of declining 'Fair-use' as commonly understood. Having absolutely no pecuniary interest in the replication of possibly copyrighted material makes it relatively easy to demonstrate and insist on 'fair-use' relaxation of copyright.

Thanks! Geo Swan (talk) 23:35, 13 February 2014 (GMT)

Hope that's a start --Peter P (talk) 08:14, 14 February 2014 (GMT)

• Thanks for your reply.

Thanks for your generosity in paying the bills, so far.

You may have seen I also ported Rubén López Sabariego, Cuban workers at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Manuel Prieto Gomez. Ruben's article is the one that would trouble fans of the US military the most, as he was murdered by a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor. However Szili's account of dragging the corpse up a cliff -- twice, and he was dropped a second times -- could also explain all the broken bones and other wounds. Jackson, the actual shooter, of course had no authority over Ruben, once he hauled him to the Cuban side of the border. He had no authority to be armed. He had no authority to demand Ruben proceed across kilometers of broken ground and swamps, at midnight. Ruben probably knew that the land surrounding the camp was site of mine-fields. Jackson's drunken command was a death sentence.

Reading between the lines it sounds like Jackson, Ruben's murderer, was a drunk, a bully, and a moron who fully subscribed to the red-baiting of the time. I didn't stress this, when I worked on the wikipedia version, but it seemed to me some of my references hinted that the US coverup triggered Cubans to believe the reasonable conclusions their pathologists drew on their examination of his body -- namely that Ruben had been very brutally tortured, played a huge role in further eroding US-Cuban relations, and likely played a significant role in encouraging Castro to accept the missiles that lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis 18 months later.

ALL of that is welcome here - work it into the article as you see fit. If I think we're becoming exposed to a defamation suit, I'll chip in. We've made a few such adjustments in the past but will not cave in easily on either fair comment or speculation when clearly flagged as such. I've had a good look through both articles and they're fine by me --Peter P (talk) 18:51, 14 February 2014 (GMT)

No rush on the template tuning, but can you think of a central place to report stuff like that, and where I could look for notes when you thought a technical problem had been swatted?

We have WikiSpooks:Site Status. Used especially to flag site maintenance work with a main page notice. Also suitable to report software issues. I'll revisit whether we need something additional because using repective user talk pages is not optimal for this sort of thing. Robin may well jump in on this too --Peter P (talk) 18:51, 14 February 2014 (GMT)

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 16:11, 14 February 2014 (GMT)

Yeah, WikiSpooks talk:Site Status is currently the best place for bug reports. I've just clarified this at the top of the technical section of the community portal. Robin (talk) 16:16, 19 February 2014 (GMT)

• OK, I ported military ranks and naval ranks, and my use of the {{cite}} template generates a "script error"... Geo Swan (talk) 00:10, 14 February 2014 (GMT)`

Assume the cite error it will be fixed for now - I'll have a root around asap --Peter P (talk) 08:14, 14 February 2014 (GMT)

Welcome

I was interested to read your observations about how Wikipedia's departure from S.O.P. in the area of Guantanamo. As Peter says, your Guantanamo material looks like it would be a welcome addition here - we have a huge gap in that area - as would be any suggestions on Problems with Wikipedia, for which I'm largely responsible. Robin (talk) 00:21, 13 February 2014 (GMT)

Emad Abdalla Hassan

Yesterday I added the |victim_of parameter, for people, which is still basic as yet, but my research lead me back to your Wikipedia account while digging for more information on Emad Abdalla Hassan. If you'd like to input any other such articles, you're welcome, of course. Robin (talk) 09:20, 7 June 2014 (IST)

Welcome back!

Good to see you editing again. -- Robin (talk) 16:10, 3 September 2015 (IST)