User talk:Patrick Haseldine

Welcome to Wikispooks!

We're glad you came.
You will probably want to read the help pages.
The page at WikiSpooks:Getting Started should help you get started. Peter P 10:55, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Peter, I can see there is quite a lot of work in prospect! Patrick Haseldine 11:22, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

I've just finished reading through your entire user and article pages. There is lot to digest and it is welcome here. I've added the article page to the 'Whistleblowers' category. I guess you've discovered that, when you take on the State over a matter deemed 'sensitive' by the guardians of its dirty little secrets, you cannot win - period. Having clearly followed the dictates of concience at the expense of career you have both my admiration and support. FWIW, Wikispooks is my way of dealing with the State's systematic betrayal of the loyalty which it demands (and ultimately enforces - or else) from its citizens. It's a wicked old world we inhabit, but after early retirement and 10 years intense study, it is crystal clear to me that the British State is right up there with most Machiavellian - not to say Orwellian - of them all. It was a painful experience to have to admit to myself that my country was NOT on the side of the goodies and - not excluding 2 x world wars - never had been. --Peter P 13:56, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

As it happens, last week's episode of my radio show was on whistleblowers/the surveillance state in USA, which notes that Jane Turner is the one that got away - the exception to the general rule that Peter suggests. But if you can keep your integrity, whatever TPTB do, as far as I'm concerned, you win! Hats off to you, Patrick - and I see you as definitely the most authoritative person to edit your biography, by the way, as long as you are the real Patrick Haseldine:) As Peter says, Wikipedia is in practice not as unbiased and impartial as it claims, so comparing the Wikipedia and Wikispooks articles might prove an interesting test case. I think wiki etiquette usually grants you exclusive editing over your user page, but I'll take the liberty of tweaking the presentation so you can see how to format stuff for this wiki. Feel free to 'undo' any changes, it's your user page. Robin 14:47, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks both! I hope to get editing in earnest in the next day or so. Patrick Haseldine 18:54, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

You've been putting in some interesting edits recently. This is to remind you to look at WikiSpooks:System Maintenance due to a security upgrade. Robin 02:11, 16 April 2013 (IST)

A very useful reminder, Robin, thanks! Patrick Haseldine 09:53, 16 April 2013 (IST)

The How, Why and Who of Pan Am Flight 103

Patrick, you've been working so much on The How, Why and Who of Pan Am Flight 103 that it's grown long and is no longer the easy read it once was. I'm not suggesting you delete any material (unless it's duplicated elsewhere on the site) but a reorganisation would be helpful. Take a look at template:FA if you don't already know it. You should find it fairly easy to shift out some sections into new pages, so that what remains is an easy read. I could try and have a go, but you're much more familiar with this material than I am. The aim is to leave a clear and concise summary of the ideas and evidence presented elsewhere. Robin (talk) 16:38, 15 December 2013 (GMT)

Hi Robin, I'm about to issue an important email which will reference certain sections of the current The How, Why and Who of Pan Am Flight 103. From my point of view a page reorganisation at this stage would not be helpful.

I usually include Peter on my distribution list: please let me know if you'd like to be copied in.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 16:59, 15 December 2013 (GMT)

Sounds mysterious. So just this once, yes, BCC me. Feel free to remove the Cleanup template if it suits your purposes - but the article could still do with a major tidy at some point in the future. Robin (talk) 18:22, 15 December 2013 (GMT)

Thanks Robin. What's yer email (patrick.haseldine at btinternet.com)?--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 20:01, 15 December 2013 (GMT)

Alan Feraday

As he is the subject of the article, all the material presented should be more or less directly relevant to Alan Feraday, and the connection should be clear to someone without expert knowledge. I'm still failing to find clear connections. I've just revised WikiSpooks:Style_Guide#Encyclopedic_Style which is my attempt to explain what is wanted in terms of style.

As a specific example of my concerns, consider the two images at the top of the Alan Feraday page, the captions of which are confusing to an uninformed reader, who naturally expects directly relevant images, such as, say, photos of Alan Feraday himself. There are one or two more lines in the article (e.g. "On 20 May 2012, Megrahi died of prostate cancer") which have no clear relevance to Feraday, but a more serious weakness is poor organisation. I may have a go at reorganising it, such as through headings and sub-headings, but I'm aware that you wrote most of it and are better informed than me. I don't think it needs much work, just some reshuffling of content so that Feraday remains the clear topic of all parts of the article. The top should have a clear hierarchy of headings preceded by a short lede to give an overview. Robin (talk) 06:16, 14 January 2014 (GMT)

Yes, Robin, I agree the article needs some work and I'll certainly devote the necessary time and effort.

The subject of the article and I go back a long way. In 2007, I wrote the Wikipedia biography of Alan Feraday. It didn't take long to become "controversial" and was eventually deleted by WP Admin JzG aka Guy Chapman. I kept a copy of the article and reentered on WP a few months later. JzG quickly re-deleted it and for good measure blocked me from editing on WP. I reported this sorry saga to Prof Robert Black and he promptly posted the Alan Feraday article on his blog The Lockerbie Case, where it remains today - even though Prof Black and I are no longer on speaking terms!

You mention using photos of Alan Feraday. The problem is that because of all his (trumped up) evidence against the IRA, Alan is very camera-shy. If he is called to give his 'expert' evidence at the Old Bailey trial of John Downey beginning today, perhaps the press will oblige us with a portrait of the 76-year-old Feraday.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 15:26, 14 January 2014 (GMT)

Copying this section to Alan Feraday talk page.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 15:38, 15 February 2014 (GMT)

Latest from Robert Black's blog

Today, these three comments appeared on The Lockerbie Case blog:

1. pesceman said: So we know al-Megrahi was innocent. Of that there is no doubt. Why was the Heathrow break-in totally ignored from the very start - the Anti-Terrorism Police in the UK don't seem able to recall the event at all???? It is pretty obvious that the South African CCB were wholly responsible and assisted in the cover up by UK Intelligence and UK Police.

2. Robert Black said: It is by no means obvious. And the notion that the CCB was responsible stems from Patrick Haseldine's fevered imagination. There is nothing whatever that counts as evidence to support it. No further comments giving credence to Mr Haseldine's ravings will be accepted on this blog.

3. Quincey Riddle aka Robert Forrester said: Dear Peaceman, I agree entirely with Robert Black vis-a-vis the South African theory. Mr Haseldine is frankly certifiably doolally and an extremely manipulative individual, whom I felt obliged to expel from JFM for his conduct. I would be careful too about laying too much store on the issue of the Heathrow break-in as being linked to Pan Am 103, maybe it was maybe it wasn't. In my view, the only significant factor here is that COPFS appears to have hidden a tree in a forest in terms of the evidence made available to the defence. That from my perspective is as reprehensible as the Gauci payments being denied to the court. Robert.

I shall update the relevant WikiSpooks articles to incorporate this new information.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 19:18, 14 January 2014 (GMT)

Recognizing wikipedia contributors' IP rights?

Greetings!

Didn't we cross paths on the wikipedia?

Over the last year or two I ported a bunch of articles to another small wiki. A big drawback is that although they agreed with a suggestion I made that they publish regular archives, as wikispooks seems to do, they haven't done so.

A bonus is that they have a "save article" feature, that fetches a wikipedia article, and copies a snapshot of its contribution history onto the new talk page. In theory wikipedia contributors are entitled to have their names listed when articles they contributed to are ported. It is one of the rights contributors hold under both the CC and GFDL.

Mind you, it probably only applies to contributions of intellectual content that pass de minimus -- not excisions, spelling corrections, or rearranging the order of material without altering it. Similarly it really shouldn't apply to adding references, adding wikilinks, or other metadata.

For my own material, I don't care. That other small wiki's license was PD, not CC or GFDL. I wrote brand new, or ported, quite a bit of material there, which I guess is now all be PD.

I noticed you ported Jeremy Greenstock -- so far without attribution.

How likely do you think it is that this could trigger a copyright challenge? Anyhow, I am just saying.

For what it is worth, there have been occasions when I wanted to port an article for which I was the primary author of its intellectual content, where I either ported an earlier version, or removed the paragraph(s) drafted by others, before I ported it, so I wouldn't be complicating the attribution history with attributions to individuals not on that wiki.

I've ported a couple of articles yesterday, but they were articles for which I think I was the sole author of the intellectual content. I am going to ask Peter for guidance on the attribution issue.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 17:38, 14 February 2014 (GMT)

Hi Geo Swan. Not sure I can assist with your concern about IP rights. The Jeremy Greenstock article was attributed thus: "The first version of this page was imported from Wikipedia on 28 January 2014. Original page source here." From my own resources, I added a great deal to the article.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 00:07, 15 February 2014 (GMT)

• I added the list to the talk page. Here is my discussion with Peter. Geo Swan (talk) 06:29, 15 February 2014 (GMT)

I've highlighted the version that I imported to WikiSpooks on 28 January 2014.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 15:31, 15 February 2014 (GMT)

• I'll share my secret. I didn't screenscrape the contribution history myself. Instead I used the button provided for that purpose at another wiki, that has a robot that does the screenscraping, and copied the attribution list from that. That took about a minute.

I then made some minimal changes at that other wiki, to move it from their sandbox to their article space, that took a few more minutes. I won't take advantage of their handy button just to get the screenscraped attribution list, without providing some benefit to them.

I told Peter I want to feel free to be fickle, and spread my contributions to multiple wikis. If I understood him, Peter has no problem with that. You would be free to replace the article on the other wiki with your more extensively updated version here. If so, note that the licensing policy there is contributions are donated to the public domain, not cc or gfdl.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 17:10, 15 February 2014 (GMT)

See WikiSpooks talk:Importing From Wikipedia --Peter P (talk) 07:30, 16 February 2014 (GMT)

Good Style

Firstly, Patrick let me say that I applaud your intent in petitioning to open all MI6 files on state sponsored murders, and for a UN Inquiry into the deaths of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and UN Assistant Secretary-General Bernt Carlsson. I am not happy about assassinating people myself and paying taxes to an unaccountable group of professionals to do it for me seems to me just as unacceptable. The 2 deaths you single out are definitely worthy of further investigation; the full truth has not yet been told about either.

That having been said, please cast an eye over "WikiSpooks:Style_Guide#Avoid_Repetition", and also check WikiSpooks:Style_Guide#Focus. Wikispooks aims to be an encyclopaedia organised by topic, with one page per topic. A corollary of this is that unless material directly relates to the page on which it is situated, it does not belong there. Commendable though your petitions are, having multiple copies of the same information is really not helpful.

I noticed that you recently reverted (without explanation, I may add) my tidying of the article on Susan Williams. Especially if you are reverting someone else's recent edits, you should include a comment to explain why. Is Susan Williams a signatory to any of your petitions? If so, then you can place a link. i.e. "Susan Williams signed Patrick Haseldine's petition demanding MI6 disclose details of those it had killed". If she is not a signatory, then information about your petitions does not belong on her page unless she helped you draft them or has some other direct connection - in which case, this should be explained with a unique piece of text.

I thought this should have been obvious from the policy page, but apparently it was not, so let me be crystal clear: Just copying and pasting stuff with little regard to relevance is not acceptable behaviour on Wikispooks. Please bear this in mind in your future editing here, and apply it retrospectively to your earlier edits as needed. Robin (talk) 08:59, 17 May 2014 (IST)

Thanks for the guidance Robin. I've re-worked the offending section of the Susan Williams article and hope you approve: Susan Williams#Petitioning for a UN Inquiry. Maybe you and Peter P might like to sign my petition to Ban Ki-moon.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 12:51, 17 May 2014 (IST)

Avoiding long quotes in articles

With reference to your latest addition to the Dag Hammarskjöld article, I just added a note on article size. All the non-document articles on Special:LongPages can be considered too long. I understand your eagerness to contribute recent documents to WikiSpooks, but large quotations in main articles is not the way. Instead, post the source document in the Document: namespace, then reference it from the main page. This is more work, but the result is a much better product, one which clearly distinguishes the not-editable (source documents) from the editable (interpretation and conclusions). By way of demonstration, I just excised last month's Guardian article from the Dag Hammarskjöld page and posted it to Document:Dag Hammarskjöld's plane may have been shot down, ambassador warned. If you uncertain how to repeat this procedure for the other documents quoted at great length in the article, let me know. Robin (talk) 07:36, 24 May 2014 (IST)

I'm not familiar with the Document: namespace procedure and agree that the Dag Hammarskjöld biography can read better by having newspaper articles such as "Document:Dag Hammarskjöld's plane may have been shot down, ambassador warned" hived off in the way you suggest, Robin.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 15:19, 24 May 2014 (IST)

Patrick. To create a document, put "Form:Document" in the search box. That will present you with the required form. For a new page just put its title in the single presented field and press the Create or edit button. That will present to you with a form which is fairly self-explanatory. There are 4 x tabs at the top of the form. The document content goes in the 'Free Wikitext' area. --Peter P (talk) 15:40, 24 May 2014 (IST)

Article splitting

I was pleased to see you split off the information about Megrahi's compassionate release, an important enough event in itself to justify a separate page, Id say. Simply exporting the text is the main step, though there are a few more small details which improve the reader experience:

1. Include a pointer to the new article (use template:FA for this). This will typically include only the most salient details. I just added one at Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi#Compassionate release.
2. Comb through the two page pieces, to check that the split separates the information is split cleanly. e.g. "Abdelbaset al-Megrahi married Aisha in 1982. They had five children: four sons and one married daughter." is better in the main Megrahi page, rather than the compassionare release page, I'd say. There are probably other pieces which could be relocated.
3. Adding an object template - every page should have exactly one such template. For the Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi/Compassionate release page, I chose Template:Event
4. You'll have noticed that I moved the compassionate release page into a subpage, which automatically gives an easy link back to the main page at the top. There is no standard on this yet, but I think it's an easy logic.

Many of the Lockerbie pages are too long for comfortable reading and would benefit from similar treatment if we can identify such sub-events. You know the material much better than I do, or I'd have already pitched in to split up some of the long pages. Robin (talk) 16:41, 6 June 2014 (IST)

Thanks, Robin. I'm beginning to realise that, as a two-year-old when D-Day took place 70 years ago today, I've still got an awful lot to learn about all this new-fangled computer stuff!--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 23:03, 6 June 2014 (IST)

File:MH17_Crash_Site.jpg

Could I please ask that you take a look at the discussion page for this graphic at https://wikispooks.com/wiki/File_talk:MH17_Crash_Site.jpg

Regards --Two Dogs (talk) 15:09, 18 August 2014 (IST)

Interesting discussion, Two Dogs. The graphic seems very clear to me. If there are any mistakes over timings etc, no doubt they will be rectified in the course of the MH17 investigation.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 19:00, 18 August 2014 (IST)

It is not a question of IF there mistakes in the timings on this image; it is a matter of fact. Regardless of the GMT-BST-Euro-time-UTC issue, they are unambiguously wrong because they show 4 hours between take-off and crash when 3 hours is the correct, uncontroversial, agreed time-lapse that has no need of an inquiry to confirm. --Peter P (talk) 09:55, 19 August 2014 (IST)

"sabotaged over Lockerbie"

I just replaced one, but last check produced 18 hits for this phrase. If you are tempted to cut and paste, please remember that such repetition can be quite off-putting; a uniquely written text is surely the best bet. That was by way of general advice, but specifically, I take issue with the phrase "sabotaged over Lockerbie" - sabotage to me suggests an act of nefarious but underhand destruction (e.g. cutting of brake cables, removal of crucial load bearing bolts) intended to have a larger destructive effect elsewhere and/or later on. By this definition, if the plane was sabotaged at all, it seems highly unlikely that the sabotage occurred over Lockerbie. Robin (talk) 19:15, 2 September 2014 (IST)

Agreed Robin: "exploded" makes a welcome change!--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 21:43, 2 September 2014 (IST)

Circular links

I just amended the style guide to clarify about WikiSpooks:Style_Guide#Links 'circular' links, which basically waste time; the existence of a redirect means the links does not show in red, but if the redirect is back to the source page itself, then the users gets nowhere - in which case just a lack of a redirect may be better. Robin (talk) 12:39, 5 February 2015 (GMT)