This user has been on Wikipedia for 17 years, 3 months and 9 days.




Who am I?

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My RL name is Colin Robinson, and I live in Sydney, Australia.

Some things I've done in Wikipedia

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Other articles I've contributed to: East Germany, German Faith Movement, Carl Jung, Popular Front, Titan (moon), Transpiranto, L. L. Zamenhof, The Haunted Stars, RNA world, Polycephaly.

Verifiability or truth? How I helped redraft conflicted policy

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An RfC in July 2012 established consensus for a new lead section to WP:Verifiability. WP:Verifiability is a core policy page, whose wording had been hotly debated: especially the phrase "verifiability, not truth" which used to appear in the lead section of the policy.

Before the RfC, I took part in a working group to draft a new lead — one which would distinguish between verifiability and perceived truth, but without using the phrase "verifiability, not truth" except perhaps in a footnote. This working group was part of a larger mediated discussion about the policy page, the mediator being Mr Stradivarius.

We wrote a series of 22 drafts. Our starting point was a draft by Becritical. I did quite a lot of the subsequent rewriting, though certainly not all of it.

Draft 22 was submitted to the RfC, as one of 5 options for how the lead could look: Option D. And that was the option that got consensus support at the RfC.

It was a historic moment for WP policy.

You can verify my contribution to the successful team effort by looking at the following diffs:

About my username...

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Yantra of Goddess Kali


Kalidasa (from Sanskrit) is a masculine gender name, which literally means a male servant of the female deity Kali.

The equivalent name for a female servant of Kali would end in "-dasi". So the fact that I use the name "Kalidasa" logically suggests I'm a boy...

Why I use this name:

  • I appreciate the vision of dark radiant Kali, as expressed in Sanskrit, Bengali and other Indian literature. I also appreciate the wisdom of other traditions and cultures, both religious and secular.
  • Kalidasa is name of a classical dramatist and poet, who wrote about a lot of topics other than goddess Kali... I admire this Kalidasa. Like him, I write about a range of topics, and I try to write as well as I can...



 
A boy...