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I'm at least temporarily semi-retired from Wikipedia
I'm at least temporarily semi-retired from Wikipedia, as it's proving too much of a distraction from more important things. I had intended to be fully retired at least until if and when I had completed some of those 'more important things', but so far that has proved too difficult. If I do succeed in completing 'some of those more important things', I plan to eventually return, though I'm not sure when (and I may eventually decide that returning would be a mistake).Tlhslobus (talk) 11:22, 8 April 2015 (UTC) I see my edit counts for 2017 and 2018 are now above my previous peaks in 2013 and 2014, so I guess I must have unwittingly come out of semi-retirement quite some time ago.Tlhslobus (talk) 09:27, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
(However I was unable to access my account from mid January 2020 until today, and I'm not sure how busy I will be now that I'm back) Tlhslobus (talk) 11:42, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Hi there,
For privacy reasons (and partly also because of the inhibiting effects of Ireland's 2009 anti-blasphemy law (see below)), I don't really want to say too much about myself. But you can have the following info:
Politics: some rather conservative and eccentric variety of Social Democrat
Religion/philosophy: my own thoroughly eccentric variety of agnostic, ignostic, skeptic, and humanist. Or at least that's arguably the least misleading short description I can offer. A bit more on all this can be found in sections S20 to S30 below, even tho I can't say precisely what I might ideally want to say, partly (but not only) due to the inhibiting effects of the 2009 Irish Blasphemy Law.
The easiest way to contact me is probably to leave a message on my Talk Page, and be prepared for a long wait, as I don't necessarily check it very often. You can also try e-mailing me, especially if you want to say something private, but as I check that e-mail address even more rarely than my Talk Page (it's not my normal business e-mail address), you should probably leave a brief note on my Talk Page to let me know about your e-mail, and you should keep a copy of your e-mail in case it needs to be re-sent because the original has got lost somewhere in my spam.
S10: Please Feel Free To Pass This On: Wikipedia unsurprizingly doesn't tell you, but be aware that as an editor you just might get sued, jailed, or even murdered - aka Obviously fake usernames may be safer
Here is an instance in which somebody (seemingly unsuccessfully, at least so far) tried to sue 54 Wikipedia editors for $10 million for alleged defamation. That's just in one of hundreds of jurisdictions around the world, and it's in relatively pro-Free Speech America, but you might well be sued wherever Wikipedia is read. One well-known celebrity, despite being a fugitive from US justice, recently successfully sued in London (again not exactly thought of as the worst enemy of Free Speech) over an article published in the US (he wasn't suing Wikipedians or Wikpedia, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have sued them if it had been a Wikipedia article). Needless to add, there is no way Wikipedia can tell you what the precise legal situation is in all the world's jurisdictions even now, let alone at some unknown future date. And defamation is only one of many issues you might face (incitement, blasphemy, criminal libel, copyright violation, and doubtless much else that I haven't thought about) - and some of these may be criminal offences for which you might get jailed, and alleged 'blasphemy' might also get you murdered by religious extremists, and in some circumstances organized crime and/or various tyrannies and/or other kinds of extremists might conceivably also want you murdered.
Perhaps these risks are all very low, but we can't know for certain even now, still less for the future. Arguably Wikipedia should automatically tell you all this when you join up, as well as sending you a message if you have already joined (as you would seem to have a clear right and need to know), but, at least to the best of my current knowledge, they unsurprizingly don't tell you, perhaps because they are short of editors and don't want to frighten you away, and perhaps also in some cases out of fear of putting nasty ideas into nasty people's heads. Also if you are sued, Wikipedia's lawyers will probably try to protect you, but quite likely only up to a point, as it's arguably in Wikipedia's long-term interest if the kind of editor who causes unnecessary offence gets punished, as such editors are often very damaging to Wikipedia (of course this is itself an argument for Wikipedia warning us all when we join in order to protect itself, but it isn't clear that it outweighs other arguments against doing so, at least from the perspective of Wikpedia's interests, as distinct from our own interests as editors and human beings).
None of this has deterred me from editing (at least not so far, and see the exception below), but I have sometimes felt that something I put in to avoid the risk of unnecessarily defaming people would be less likely to be reverted if more editors were aware of the risk of being sued, and similarly that potentially defamatory material might be less likely to be put up in the first place, and so on. However it was an implicit hint (possibly just an innocent unthinking posting, but not much less scary for that) of an editor's alleged 'blasphemy' against Islam (tho the word 'blasphemy' was not explicitly used), following only a few days after the murders of alleged 'blasphemers' at Charlie Hebdo, that helped persuade me to finally write this comment. Needless to add, I can't even tell what that hint was (that's the above-mentioned 'exception'), for fear of just possibly getting the allegedly blaspheming editor murdered (arguably very unlikely, but ...).
One rather obvious way to at least reduce some of the above risk is to edit under an obviously fake name rather than your real one. (But editing under a fake name that is not obviously fake seems a bad idea, as it may endanger others who happen to have your fake name as their real name.) Incidentally, this also has other advantages, such as reducing the risk of your editing leading to you being bullied or harassed outside Wikipedia. So it might be a good idea if Wikipedia explicitly recommended this as a security measure, especially to newcomers.
Of course you're also at arguably much greater risk of other things, such as being insulted and/or bullied here on Wikipedia, but on the whole Wikipedia does quite a bit to warn you about that (arguably as distinct from doing as much as it could or should do to protect you from such risks, but that's another lengthy and complex debate, which I have also engaged in sometimes, with not much to show for my efforts).
Please feel free to try to reword and/or improve a copy of this essay, but not here on my home page (but please feel free to let me know about improvements you have made to it elsewhere). And please feel free to use it as the basis for a Wikipidia Essay (in which case, please let me know about this on my Talk Page). Tlhslobus (talk) 04:50, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
S20: Some Thoughts re inhibiting effects of the (now seemingly soon-to-be-repealed) 2009 Irish Blasphemy Law
This section, along with the related Sections S21 to S30, has now been removed, but can still be found here (which also gives reasons for removing them, and for retaining this link to them, in its initial 'Preliminary Note 1' subsection). Tlhslobus (talk) 03:07, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
Tlhslobus (talk) 09:27, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
