Hello 👋🏻, my name is Donald Trung (chữ Hán: 徵國單), and I am here mostly to upload pictures 📷 of coins and paper money 💴. 😉 I collect coins and banknotes from all over the world 🗺 but take a special interest in those from the Far-East. 🌏
I have a Trungfession to make, I really love 💘 seeing the pictures 📷 I upload here on Wikipedia, however that doesn't mean that I would replace a picture superior to mine, or that I would insert a picture 📷 I perceive as inferior in an article. I mostly stumble upon them in articles I have little prior interest in, and I rarely am the one to actually put them in Wikipedia. 😅 (update: Or I will look for subjects in Wikipedia and take pictures specifically for the articles. 📸)
Generally speaking I will actively look for items, objects, places, and companies that already have Wikipedia articles but don't have an image and will take a photograph of them, however I am limited by my geography and will only realistically look for what I can find. I will occasionally help with categorising items here on Wikimedia Commons, but when I create a new category it's usually for photographs that I will upload myself. I have seen pictures I’ve uploaded with previous accounts used outside of Wikimedia projects such as in Indian, Finnish, German, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, and American newspapers 📰, used on websites for local projects and even a charity. Reusing my content doesn't require my permission, but it would be most kind to inform me when you do (you know, for bragging rights ).
If you want to use my pictures 📷 then you can attribute them as "Donald Trung Quoc Don (徵國單) / Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-4.0", this is the license only for the pictures I took, those I uploaded that were taken by other people have their own respective licenses..
If you want me to take a picture 📷 of something just ask. 😉🖼
The type of picture 📷 Wikimedia Commons is missing… although ironically the example I use are Northern Song dynasty coins which Wikimedia Commons DOES have enough of. 😅
Explaining why, and how I drafted , then published the articles “Ryuukyuuan mon”, “Tenpou Tsuuhou”, “Yuan dynasty coinage”, Southern Song dynasty coinage”, “Jurchen Jin dynasty coinage”, “Liao dynasty coinage”, “Western Xia dynasty coinage”, “Nagasaki trade coins”, and the “Qing dynasty coinage”.
Well, the story starts not on Wikipedia but elsewhere, specifically in my browser favourites ⭐ on Microsoft Edge, I had already prepared a list of numismatic websites in a folder 📁 dubbed “Numismatica”, I had originally planned to wait until I would buy a new (“less crashy, less buggy”) laptop 💻, but for now my Cell.-phone suffices and it’s better to add content today than to wait for tomorrow (with things like “linkrot” and all, so if you’re planning on contributing to Wikipedia DO IT NOW. The reason why my laptop 💻 is so horrendous is simply because I NEVER DELETE ANYTHING, ABSOLUTELY NEVER, not a single e-mail 📧, picture 📷, draft (even if I can’t send it), or anything, in real life I'm an obsessive, compulsive hoarder and that translates into my digital life as well, to this end the hundreds of application programmes I had installed ruined my ability to use my laptop 💻, and I can't force myself to use “factory 🏭 reset” because that’s simply against my nature, now welcome to me editing on my cell.-phone 📞, where do I begin? Well, let’s start chronologically with the first article I had created with this account, the “Ryukyuan mon”. In my favourites there’s a link called the Ryuukyuuan coins by Dr. Luke Roberts from the University of California at Santa Barbara. But let's first explore how I got here before we get to the article creation bit.
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Now I write these things here for what one might find a rather… ehhh… “stupid” reason, if I’d ever become a person that would fit English Wikipedia’s WP:NOTABILITY that I don’t have to explain my life based on (rather vague) memories in interviews, I could then always just point at a computer 💻 and say “my entire life, my every thought is there, feel free to look for it”, but that’s besides the point, I don’t write about my personal life here, only about my “WikiLife”, and what I do, how I do it, why I do it, and what obstacles I (had) face(d) and hopefully let the one (1) or two (2) people that will ever read this learn 🏫 to make themselves into better users/editors while at it, I don’t know, just an idea 💡.
Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. Now let me first explain my prior experiences on Wikipedia before entering the world 🗺 of Numismatic articles below. 💫⬇💫
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Disclaimer: In the above I describe “a Clique of bullies” which I do so not because of some bad editing style but specifically because they resort to personal insults when they interact with other editors in the talk pages, and/or when they revert edits, also this is not a personal attack on them I have (in vain) tried pointing WP:CIVIL out to them (as have many others) but if you post anything to them they will immediately call upon their friends to call you “a talk page stalker” and other ad hominem insults rather than address the issues, and as I’ve said before reporting them didn't seem to work for me or others, though in general I have very little against their overall editing style and the only reason I cannot respect them is because of their arrogance and personal insults, they basically insulted my first “made-For-editing” account wherever I went, but the reason I stopped using that account was very simple, I lost my password 😅, meanwhile there was another user who DID have a bad editing style that basically consisted of reverting a user, then re-inserting THAT EXACT SAME CONTENT (and occasionally with a different source, sometimes because he didn't like the name because it sounded “too bloggy” in his ears, welcome to the world 🗺 tech-Wikipedia, also this user edits other tech articles from Android, ABD/and iO.S. as well.), this person isn't a member of that clique and clashes with them too, the reason I call them “a clique” is because they openly conspire together to make sure none of them ever break the 3 revert rule, this is not an insult towards them but simply pointing out why I use the words I use, I do think that they (probably) act in WP:GOODFAITH and that they believe that they’re improving Wikipedia but it's just that I dislike it when they insult people (not just me, people in general because I believe in civility). In retrospect I could've probably written this as a part of some “goodbye letter” on the second account I had created for editing as I didn't even give that one a User-page. 🤔 Anyhow the “Deletionist clique” probably think that removing all, and any changelog they can find will “save” Wikipedia from future lawsuits, even if they were reworded up to standards, and I do think too that they genuinely believe that they're helping Wikipedia with their actions.
Note 📝: After I had created a second account solely for uploading a few images of products I noticed that those same people stopped insulting me, so that account wasn't a WP:SOCKPUPPET in any way, I just genuinely thought that “my work was over” but I just wanted to upgrade the last few “stub” articles I could find, after that I stopped editing there because I felt like I wasn't contributing but “racing” other editors to see “who could add content first” and all of the issues I first saw had been resolved anyhow.
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2nd disclaimer: I never used those accounts to WP:SOCKPUPPET, and generally avoided talk pages, discussions, or even articles I had discussed with the former account.
The real reason I stopped contributing to Microsoft articles: Well, it's actually quite simple and I won't go around it (well, I often find myself writing WP:TOOLONG messages, and since I could talk at 9 (nine) months old I have practically always been blabbering non-stop 🤚🏻 since), the real reason I became less passionate about Microsoft was because Steve Ballmer left the company, his vision for Microsoft was one I liked and the moment Satya Nadella came at helm and started cutting both divisions, products, and services I started to see the “deletionist” mentality of Google, and MySpace manifest itself at Microsoft, to this end I became less passionate about adding content, I expanded and created a few Microsoft articles here and there, and with the Xamarin acquisition I temporarily felt passionate to write on Wikipedia again in order to document Xamarin’s history but after that I realised that my addiction to reading Microsoft-related news 📰 websites, and commenting on their and Microsoft’s official “fora” (forums), and “covering” them had become an unhealthy addiction so I just added references every now, and then so articles wouldn't fail WP:PRIMARY, but most articles were already filled it, and “a hot new generation of editors” usually beat me to adding the content anyhow, there were many factors that lead me to stop 🤚🏻, but in general I think that it was mostly the disappointment from Windows 10 essentially “bricking ” my laptop 💻 as I really didn't want to spend 2 (two) or 3 (three), and in one case 8 (eight) hours editing a page that used to only take 5 (five) minutes.
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Above my original prime motivation was to make sure that “Microsoft Mobile Oy was better documented than Nokia” at first creating more references, links, redirects, and even articles, after succeeding I started to move to other Microsoft articles, I had effectively created a world where one could use Wikipedia to check on Microsoft articles related to mobile devices and not need to venture outside for much (additional) information, to that end I also edit Asian numismatic articles. Now I used to exclusively use a pre-prepares “citeweb” references for Microsoft articles all the time, not only are they so well documented that good sources are “a dime a dozen”, but generally speaking they’re so easy to find that you can’t NOT stumble upon them, and though I still take some (well… a lot of) pride in improving all of those Microsoft articles, and creating a fair share of them too, I simply can't say that this editing style translated well into the Numismatic “region” of Wikipedia, you see Wikipedia is like a multiverse, there are “ocean-planets” of information you can find, all connected somehow, but the Numismatic articles are kind of “special” as in that their web documentation is less than optimal, numismatists today (as of July 18th, 2017) still largely rely on paper works for reference, and to obtain any of these works one must often travel 🚢 (in person) to those places to obtain all the books 📚, many of them are so obscure that they're not on the internet, or even when they are can only be ordered in the(ir) country of origin, so what can we add? Well as editing numismatic articles require a lot more research it also often requires us to use sources that don’t easily fit in the “citeweb” reference formula, I had attempted it but it's not uncommon for some parameters to not be able to be filled in, authors may be unknown, the date of publishing is rarely mentioned (even with Microsoft-related articles I could still find it in the U.R.L. if I couldn't find it in the body of text), with the “Ryuukyuuan coins” article by Dr. Luke Roberts I can kind of more lucky 🍀 did document some of his publishing dates, but only when they were last updated.
3rd disclaimer: Though I write above that it was my “mission” to always make Microsoft-related articles bigger, and with more references than their competitors’ articles this didn't imply that I would delete content from those other articles (as I would still sometimes contribute to those), it simply meant that I would prefer to add “as much content as possible, with as much references as possible” for this “competition”, I am “a Radical Inclusionist” and would be against deleting content even if I passionately hate that content, I just hate deletion even more… ✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻✍🏻
With technology articles WP:NEWS 📰 ends right on the doorstep, whatever news 📰 you read about technology will probably be on Wikipedia tommorow, and that’s not a bad 🙅🏻 thing, however with Numismatic articles both the nature of the sources written about. Them, how you can integrate them into Wikipedia, and the research you must conduct to add them are all radically different, but I’ll explain how different those are later below. A little bit about my style on Wikimedia Commons before I’ll dive too deep into the thought process of writing numismatic articles for Wikipedia. 📝 🤔
As I had said I have long seen Wikimedia Commons as “basically another Cloud service for storage” but that doesn't mean that I would upload images here that fall “out of scope”, to that end I use the Facebook, and a myriad of other services to back those up, my “new” mentality is that “1 cloud ☁ service isn't enough, there should be a minimum of 5 just in case one gets discontinued”… during the beginning of what I like to call “The Cloud ☁ Era” I started to excessively back-up all of my flash-drives online, I had moved every file 📁 from external drives into my laptop 💻 to only move those to online services, several years ago I took it upon myself to bring all non-copyrighted files into Wikimedia Commons, and sometimes by coincidence I still stumble upon my old pictures on Wikipedia (and once even in a news 📰 article) but that’s besides the point, after that I even decided that Wikimedia Commons would become “my primary host for non-personal images” superseding Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, MEGA Privacy 🔏 and Google Drive, concurrent with me using the Facebook (and Facebook-Messenger) for personal files, of course I have already explained before that when I take pictures I make sure that they’re ”within scope”, and it's actually quite rare that I even look at my older pictures so the only reason I even keep them is because I’m”a crazy hoarder”, but how does this relate to me improving Wikipedia? Well, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and would always need images, and a lot of images here can be used on other websites and even “the Outernet” (real life) as well. So we’ve established that the closets filled with U.S.B. Sticks, external hard drives, and floppy disks, C.D.(-R.O.M.)’s, and D.V.D.(-R.O.M.?)’s I (used to) own are now publicly available, and that I seem to hold this mentality with even my own thoughts, how can that lead to an improvement of those articles? Continue reading for the answer.
Note 📝: I said “used to” because I specifically “donated” (read: Gave away(, as gifts 🎁 )) my external storage devices after moving all of the files out into the Cloud ☁, with services like Wikimedia Commons.
Just to be clear: COMMONS:NOTHOST ends where the usability of pictures 📷 for educational purposes begin, there’s plethora of users who have uploaded more pictures 📷 to Wikimedia Commons in a year than most (if not all) gratis Cloud ☁ storages would allow, I’m not arguing for a justification of my actions, just that my actions are already justified, when I take pictures 📷 I make sure that I can use them for educational purposes, and lately I sometimes only took pictures 📷 to upload to Wikimedia Commons rather than the other way around. And yes, even the most “mundane” things can find their way to educational uses here, I only uploaded a few pictures of food by accidentally clicking on them with an older account and recently found out that they’re on the top of a Wikipedia page about them, if you read this and think about not uploading a picture 📷 of some tree 🎄, DO IT (well, after checking if there aren't plenty enough pictures 📷 of that tree 🎄 here already. 😅).
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So naturally the next step would be to write about what the differences are in adding numismatic-related references, and technology-related references.
Well, let's take a closer look at Dr. Roberts’ work shall we, on his website he specified a few sources as to where he gets his information from, all of those sources tend to be in Japanese (with one notable exception regarding Korean coinage), with technology-related news 📰... Uhhhm “articles” you’ll find that most of these are just “copy-and-paste” pieces with some MINOR commentary on it, often copied directly from the source or from another site, that copied it from another site, that copied it from the source. All of these are usually easy to trace online, and when someone says “the internet is not a substitute for your local library” I get angry... though recently I learned that they're quite right (FOR NOW), if I want to research the local history of some neighbourhood in some random German village, chances are that I’ll have to go to that village or the nearest larger urban settlement to find sources about it's history, and with finding sources for numismatic articles it’s unfortunately not that much different. The majority of websites I could find on Asian coinage were last updates in the 1990’s (no joke), and most refer to books 📚 that simply aren’t accessible online.
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Now with the “Ryuukyuuan mon”article I simply mostly used Dr. Roberts’ work and I couldn't find any other English language resources to use, so I had to resort to using more Japanese resources as I can read Chinese characters 🀄 I can easily peruse through Japanese Wikipedia, though Shinjitai is a pain in the... neck, I can still convert it to Kyuujitai in order to convey the message, after that I started to more excessively “migrate” all of my numismatic browser favourites onto Wikipedia. 🌟➡📚
My next article up for expansion was “Korean mun”, simply because for years that article had bothered me, before I started expanding it the entire history of Korean currencies in it were basically just 3 (three) very ambiguous sentences “Goryeo produced some coins” (never specified which coins, when, or for how long, what the inscriptions read, or their denominations, only that they briefly produced coins, then abandoned it), “Joseon made coins before the Sangpyeong Tongbo”, (same complaints as before), and “the Sangpyông Tongbo coins were produced for a long time” (no reason was given as to why, how, barely when, and no information when it started, who started it, and why it remained so popular for so long, or why it was discontinued), of course anyone interested in these coins would learn... That they existed, and that’s about it.
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Well, meet other sources, I started looking for more and more sources on the Korean mun until I could add that back, this is where the beauty of Wikipedia plays very beautifully in, though “I” (the world 🗺, really) gladly didn't lose the mint marks table the article was still missing some crucial information, so I added more sources in order not to become “too dependent” on Primal Trek alone, then I could re-publish the old content (half of which was now in a Wikitable), with lots of new information. This is what I love 💘 the most about Wikipedia, Primal Trek details some things, other sources others, Primal Trek only uses Chinese so I had to add the Joseon’geul (partially because I had become paranoid that if I wouldn't do it that another copyright strike would be given 😰 ), and the article grew even larger than it was before the content was removed.
I started Revisiting the “Ryuukyuuan mon” article after that looking for more sources as I was afraid that the same bot might strike that article too, I kept looking, and looking and didn't find much English language information to I started browsing Japanese language websites and I found a tonne of information I thankfully could use, I inserted (yet another/a) Wikitable, and added more references, and sources to differentiate it from Dr. Roberts’ page.
So why is this on Commons? You might ask, well very simple, I want Wikipedia to be in itself “independent” for direct relevant information 🛈 from other places, mostly because I fear 😱 that the other websites aren’t as durable as Wikipedia but here I would ask you, I added more information 🛈 to the “Korean mun” article than Primal Trek has, and more information to the “Ryuukyuuan mon” article than Dr. Luke Roberts has... ¿Haven't I essentially made both of those obsolete? Information-wise 🛈 probably “yes”, but generally speaking there’s still 1 (one) thing both most unfortunately still do better than Wikipedia. When it comes to a subject like coins an image “speaks a thousand words”, before I used to loathe it when people said that, but... How does a Setaka Tsuuhou look? Or a Chuuzan Tsuuhou just by visiting the article I had created? Well, you don’t know, and even though Daise Tsuuhou, and Setaka Tsuuhou coins are described as “not uncommon”, and “cheap” I couldn't find any on eBay to buy to later take a picture 📷 of so I could “donate” it to Wikimedia Commons to insert on Wikipedia. Now take a close look at the “History of Korean Coinage” article by Mr. Gary Ashkenazy, one thing it does exquisitely is present you with images of every Sangpyông Tongbo mint mark, and every miscellaneous character used, in fact Gary Ashkenazy went all the way to host other people’s pictures 📷 on his website to make sure that his readers will get the most complete information 🛈, now look back the “Korean mun” article, after expanding it information-wise it's easily superior for those that only come to read, but let’s say you own a Korean mun coin and wish to know what every symbol means but you aren’t the best at recognising written Chinese characters? Well, then the work 🏢 done by Mr. Gary Ashkenazy still serves you better. 😅 ... For now. Do you want to know how many images of mint marks of Korean mun coins are there right now (as in July 18th, 2017) in Wikimedia Commons... Take a guess... 1 (one), the are around 5.000 different variants but literally only one (1) is here available for you to see, or use on Wikipedia, sad 😢 isn't it, I personally owned 3 (three) at the time of expanding the “Korean mun” article, and bought 10 (ten) more on eBay for the sole reason of taking pictures 📷 of them for Wikimedia Commons.
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Now let's quickly dive a bit deeper into the mentality behind me wanting to make sure that as much mint mark pictures are available as possible, and for that one needs to smply look at how I store things in my life. As of now with merely 3 boxes 📦 📦 📦 I could move all of my stuff from home 🏠 (not counting that of my spouse or offspring, just myself 3 medium-sized boxes, also excluding clothes 👚), I wrote before about having a myriad of external storages, well Wikimedia Commons & the Facebook plus a few dozen of other Clouds ☁ helped me give those away, closets filled with books 📚? Yeah, in my youth but anything I can have as an eBook I will donate to charity or give away as a gift 🎁, how about personal documents, receipts, other paper? Well, except for a select few I send them all to the government for various reasons. And this mentality extends to my internet browser bookmarks 🔖, my dream is to only put “Wikipedia” in my “Numismatica” folder 📁, and to that end I actually quite accomplished it 😊, this fear 😱 comes out of a phobia for link-rot, or the fear that when the physical administrator of those websites die 💀 that all of the information they had published will be lost forever, to this end I hope that by “storing” all of their words on Wikipedia that in such an event will happen that those interested in those numismatic articles will still find the information 🛈 on Wikipedia. This further leads to me contacting the makers of those websites if they would want to upload their pictures 📷 to Wikimedia Commons with some mixed results...
To all “Deletionists” out there reading this, the content I add is well condensed down enough to be “encyclopedic”, I may find myself guilty of WP:CITEOVERKILL, but not of adding irrelevant details. 📝 With “Deletionists” one can’t argue though, you take them to the talk page and they'll revert your edits there too, many argue that if an account gets blocked that any page and/or image they’ve ever created should get deleted too, they’re bullies that don’t listen to reason, Wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia and doesn't have to be limited to the limitations of its paper siblings but these people do want to reduce it to nothing but that. Excuse me for ranting, I just get angry at the amount of personal insults one can expect on Wikipedia... Some people are used to it like my wife’s best-friend calls her “ugly”, “fat”, “stupid”, Etc. Evety day but I have an (unwritten) agreement with my best-friend that we simply don't insult each other and those different personality types can meet and what would seem normal to them would be insulting to me, sometimes I even avoid talk pages because of bad experiences with editors lime that, so let ne get back to my motivations for editing Wikipedia, and why that immediately affects me here on Wikimedia Commons.
Now with the Tenpou Tsuuhou I feel(/felt) great shame, in fact last Christmas 🎄 (2016) I had bought 2 (two) Tenpou Tsuuhou coins for my sister, and my best friend. When I wanted to show them information on the history of that coin the only real information I could find was from this video-game blog right here. “That’s not problematic” many would exclaim, well if you would go to the “Japanese mon (currency)” article before I touched it literally no information 🛈 where other than that “tempo” is Japanese for 100 (one-hundred), which it really isn't. So naturally I had to look for more reliable sources because a video-game blog isn't reliable enough for a numismatic article, and I had later found out that some of the information 🛈 she wrote was plain wrong 👎🏻, to this end I had to use Bing a lot, I had one vague memory of fake Tenpou Tsuuhou coins being a collectible gift 🎁 for children in the 1950’s with the fakes being worth more than the real ones but had trouble finding that (rather bloggy) source.. Which I eventually did but that still wouldn't be enough, and since I never do “articles for creation” but also never had any of my articles deleted I felt that I had to look for more sources (my “8 references-rule” I kept from my “Microsoft period” where any Microsoft or Nokia service article I found with a “lacks WP:NOTABILITY” tag would have at least that much references inserted by me from different sources ABD/AND different authors.), thankfully the above video-game blog had some sources, but Wikipedia was 2 of them, and the rest barely talked about the coin, so I began digging on Microsoft Bing to look for English-language sources and found... Some, enough, but barely, many sources I would often never use because they don't meet my criteria but I had to and then I was lucky 🍀 enough to stumble across a .pdf file 📁 that talked about how that coin caused inflation on the Japanese market, and that .pfd was both academic 🎓 and contained plenty of sources in itself for me to use, then I was forced to go to Japanese Wikipedia and find some Japanese sources to find out other stuff what the aforementioned video-game blog was wrong 👎🏻 about, and to find out who the original designer of the coin was, and it was ready for publishing, doing all of that work 🏢 made me hungry to edit some more.
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A quick (little) disclaimer: I did not exclusively start the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” article because I ONLY wanted to publish the Tomb Raider (blog) article, I added an image of a Tenpou Tsuuhou coin to the “Japanese mon (currency)” article and thought to myself, “well, now my work 🏢 here is done on that subject”, it wasn't until I found the article”20 yen coin” that I said to myself “well, precedent has been set, time to work on a Tempou Tsuuhou article”. 😅 In fact the “infobox_coin” I used for the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” article is wholly derived from that one. 📝📜📝
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Now the story of how I found the references I used for the Tenpuo Tsuuhou article is too interesting to leave out, E.g. Did you know that Gotou San'emon’s personal Kaou appears on the Tenpou Tsuuhou? Well, apparently prior to publishing I was the only English-speaking person that knew that. 😒 Now first of all the Tenpou Tsuuhou was the only coin not covered by Dr. Luke Roberts from the University of California at Santa Barbara, second of all I had trouble establishing a WP:COMMONNAME as some sources claim that “Tempou Tsuuhou” is correct, while others swear by “Tenpou Tsuuhou”, I eventually settled on “Tenpou Tsuuhou” after taking note from the “Tenpou” era Wikipedia article having clearly established precedent to lean on. My search for references started at the bottom of the Tomb Raider website/fansite, the blog-post/article states that the Kaou belongs to Gotou Shozaburo Mitsutsugu, or at least his family 👪🏻, she names a source clarifying the Gotou family history and what they’ve meant foR the monetary history of the Tokugawa Shogunate, but though I did use the source to establish the WP:NOTABILITY of why their family 👪🏻 history should be mentioned in the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” article, it didn't mention anything about his kaou being that on the Tebpou Tsuuhou coin, while looking for references I stumbled upon this entry on Charm.ru (linked there also by the Tomb Raider website/fansite) which claims that the kaou is the “Composed signature of mintmaster Hashimoto Mitsuji”, now a quick Bing search 🔍 later and I literally can’t find this name anywhere, and this name only pops up on the Chinese Coinage Website, searching the name in Chinese characters (Kanji) gets me exactly 0 results, though skeptical of the claim I still inserted it (to my regret) into Wikipedia. If one would look at the “Tenpou Tsuuhou”, and “Japanese mon (currency)” articles’ history one would find me engaging in an “edit war” with myself over the mint-master, well the answer was already there on Japanese Wikipedia. Naturally the Japanese Wikipedia article of the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” was where I would find the answer, another English-language source claimed that the Kaou belonged to “the Gotou family 👪🏻” but never specified anyone, so after digging some more I found some reliable Japanese language references that definitively states that the kaou belongs to none other than Gotou San'emon, the contemporary head of the Kinza. At this point I had become more dependent on the Japanese Wikipedia article and started doing more translation work from there than research on Microsoft Bing. While looking on Microsoft Bing literally every other result was just a blog post of someone who doesn't know how to properly spell “Tenpou Tsuuhou” what the coin is, thankfully the people who replied tended to name books and quoted from those books, from a reliable English language (or Dutch language/Belgophone?) source I found the mintage number of Tenpou Tsuuhou coins to be around half a milliard, dubious at first I checked the Japanese Wikipedia ABD/and this claim seemed to hold true. Eventually I dug up 👆🏻 a(n English language) blog dedicated to Tenpou Tsuuhou’s and I finally had enough sources to publish the article with substantial information 🛈 . This time I didn't even need to make pictures 📷 of the Tenpou Tsuuhou I own because there were already plenty on Wikimedia Commons. Upon publishing the “Tenpou Tsuuhou” article pbably became “The most authorative source on Tenpou Tsuuhou coins in the English-speaking/-reading world 🗺”, it’s also the only article I have written about literally just one coin. 💰
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While writing for the “Ryuukyuuan mon” article I stumbled upon another article calles “Ming dynasty coinage”, my whole introduction into the world 🗺 of Chinese coinage was on Wikipedia from a similarly named “Ancient Chinese article” but I had soon noticed that their similarities ended at the name, the “Ming dynasty coinage” article was (and as of July 18th, 2017 still is) hideously sub-par. All it did was list all of the coins with only Simplified Chinese characters, and most of the article was exclusively about post-Ming dynasty, pro-Ming dynasty rebels, though all of the sources (except for one) were bare links to an auction site that didn't work ⅔ of the time 😒 , so I had to “link hunt”, while only adding minimum content as my opinion of it was/is “a cesspool that’s too much work 🏢 for me to fix 🛠”. While adding sources I stumbled upon a source that actually named all of the post-Ming Dynasty rebel coinages, when I inserted that link at a new section dubbed “sources” I had found that a minute later some bot deleted ALL OF MY ADDITIONS indiscriminately, the bot claimed that I was vandalising the page triggered by a certain link I had inserted, I reverted the bot and then placed the “spam’y” link immediately in the text as a “regular reference”, so I appealed to the bot’s creator and eventually my edits were ruled as sound additions, however this made me paranoid in future edits causing me to often change my I.P. address or withhold from editing until I was on a public I.P. in order to not get mass-reverted like that again (though it didn't happen I still behave in this “evasive manner”), judging by the state of things I went back to the “Ancient Chinese coinage” article and found that it had abruptly ended at the mid of the Northern Song Dynasty period for some reason, while in the comment section... Ehhh... Talk page I found out that the author of the donated book (Cast Chinese coins) 📚 Sir David Hartill himself found that the article should end around the year 1000 as nothing afterwards can really be described as “ancient”, I could agree with that logic, but I still had to continue where he left off so I began writing the “Yuan dynasty coinage” article.
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I then began writing the “Yuan dynasty coinage” purely as a means to “fill the gap” between the “Ancient Chinese coinage”, and “Ming dynasty coinage” articles. Originally I bought David Hartill’s book 📚 to write this article, this was both the cause and a subsequence of what I like to call “the David Hartill Cycle 🔂 “ I found David Hartill in MANY articles on Asian coinages on Wikipedia, therefore I started using him in articles on Asian coinages for Wikipedia. However I still have to live by the “8-References rule”, and honestly my prime motivation was “making Primal Trek useless for information 🛈 on Chinese & Korean coinages”, this became my rule after finding this complete outline on he history of Chinese coinages. I mean I respect Mr. Gary Ashkenazy and all, but there’s no guarantee that his site will be up 👆🏻 10 (ten) years from now, Wikipedia will. Another reason was simply that I wanted to have a detailed overview of Mongol coinage in the Yuan Dynasty, at drafting I first started with Primal Trek “for the skeleton ☠ “ of the article, expanding with David Hartill (mostly for the list, and later “rebel (faction) coinages”), and then looking for additional references. 🙂🔎📚
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Finding a reference list for 5000 years of Chinese coinage (in reality this only spans around 2 and a ½ thousand years.), and realising that the “Ancient Chinese coinage” article that contains a lot of material donated by Sir David Hartill made me realise that creating the “Yuan dynasty coinage” article didn't completely “fill the gap”, next up was a new article I would create solely to “fill the gap”, an article exclusively written not out of my own interest in the subject, but by my obsession to make sure that I could use Wikipedia as “a standalone complete book on numismatics” independent from outside sources, or at least that others would not need to check outside immediately for information regarding these subjects.
Originally I had planned to write a single article bridging the “Ancient Chinese coinage” article, and the “Yuan dynasty coinage” article. However my main problem on creating that one article was that I couldn't create a working name, I thought “Medieval Chinese coinage” but the term “Medieval” is exclusively used for European history, “Dark age Chinese coinage”, well China never had any “Dark ages” that’s unique to Europe, the Mayans, and the Khmer/Cambodians and the latter only ended in the 19th century when they came under French protection. So my decision wasn't on the name yet I create a unified formula on how these coinages would function within the same article, half-chronologic, half-alphabetic. The thing became impossible to draft, all the tables looked the same but the Tangut one needed extra characters, while with the Jurchens not all of the same information 🛈 was known, the formula kept in place for the time being but as I started thinking up 👆🏻 a plethora of redirects I placed at the bottom (kind of below the whole “Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.”, but above another “Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.”) I started getting confused 😖 as to where I had to write next, or which part could be filled in, some information 🛈 overlapped while others obviously didn't fit together. The original proposed style was always Lead -> Background -> History -> List, and David Hartill’s Cast Chinese Coins would serve as the main source for all 4 collection of sections (mostly the lists) but eventually my phone crashed too much while working on all of then simultaneously, and as someone who drafts in Microsoft Outlook I often get the annoying bit where my phone crashes and the entire draft is deleted, then I get mad 😡, and rename the (now empty) draft to “I don't like Satya Nadella” (well, a more explicit title) and work all over again from “my last save” which I started doing obsessively after finishing every individual Emperor when I started working on the lists (even if that Emperor only had like 2 coins).
So I started writing around 20 drafts separately, 5 lists (4 for Chinese coins, and 1 for Tangut), 4 Primal Trek history drafts, 4 Primal Trek list drafts, some David Hartill-based drafts, and additional drafts from other sources with the “5000 years” reference list being my first and foremost draft for both the Southern Song Dynasty, and the Jurchen Jin Dynasty, but as that list didn’t contain any Khitan (Liao Dynasty), or Tangut (Western-Xia Dynasty) coins I had to fill those in with other references.
My general drafting style was always to first use the “5000 years” reference list, then use Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek to fill in the history, then use Gary Ashkenazy’s Primal Trek to fill in (the rest of) the (coin) list, then use David Hartill’s “Cast Chinese coins” for additional information 🛈. For both the “Southern Song dynasty coinage”, and “Jurchen Jin dynasty coinage” articles this worked quite well. Originally after searching 🔍 for more sources on Microsoft Bing I found an academic source 🎓 explaining the economic, & monetary systems of China under the Southern Song 🎶 Dynasty, as well as explaining how the different regional monetary systems affected local cultures more than language, resources, and other things, and usable for later the outflow of Chinese cash coins to the Jurchens (The Jin Dynasty). After being quite satisfied with my “Southern Song dynasty coinage” draft I started working on the Jurchen Jin Dynasty’s coinage, first the “5000 years” reference list, then Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek, then David Hartill’s “Cast Chinese coins”, and then the aforementioned source, then look for more, after this search 🔍 I came out quite disappointed, with the Khitan “Liao dynasty coinage”, and Tangut “Western Xia dynasty coinage” articles I did the same process as before but with the Khitan “Liao dynasty coinage” I really couldn't find any additional sources causing me to break my “8 references rule” upon publishing that article. When I was as good as done with the “Western Xia dynasty coinage” article I found Andrew West’s BabelStone and an article regarding Tangut coins, I had already spent quite a lot of time using David Hartill’s “Lee Ndzen” romanisations but now I had to re-configure it. 😅😅😅
So I published all 4 (four) articles simultaneously, though I saw the Southern Song, and Jurchen Jin articles as being “as good as complete”, I saw the “Western Xia dynasty coinage” article as less than desirable, and the “Liao dynasty coinage” article as “ready to be deleted at any moment”, in fact after realising the extreme scarcity in online sources regarding both subjects I dropped creating both “background”, and “History” sections quite early in their development, after publishing I spent days looking for additional sources, now the event that lead to me greatly expanding the “Liao dynasty coinage” article I like to dub “the Miracle of the North(ern Steppes)”, it was in the 4th, or 8th page of search 🔍 results on Microsoft Bing that I found a very long .pdf from an academic source 🎓 that explained the full monetary history of the Khitan Liao dynasty, the ethnic, and cultural compositions of all subdivisions, how regional cultures were (differently) affected by varying monetary system, the relation between nomadic lifestyles and coinage at various points in Liao dynasty history, the individual mintage numbers of every subdivision, how war-time propaganda might have affected historical records, peace-time mintage numbers, why, and how some regions reverted back to barter, and the ethnic, and cultural relations of the regions with copper (cash) coinage. In one go I could suddenly expand the “Liao dynasty coinage” article well beyond that of the Jurchen Jin Dynasty, though tự this day I still check up on the “Western Xia dynasty coinage” article if I could expand it... 😓
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After that I really thought to myself “alright, time to do the Qing Dynasty coinage”, but I openly adopted a “back-seat 💺 policy” for the Qing Dynasty’s coinage because I would have to dive into an ocean 🦈 of sources, references, content, and too much to work with so I started focusing on other projects like attempting to put ALL non-Qing Dynasty-related Primal Trek content into Wikipedia, this brought me to the “Zhou Dynasty coinage” article, and though I was originally fine with simply adding the “5.000 years” reference list, and Primal Trek into external links I later migrated them, and their content into the bodies of various articles (yes, I made it my actual mission to migrate AN ENTIRE WEBSITE written by Mr. Gary Ashkenazy into Wikipedia before even contemplating the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article), this eventually brought me to the Banliang (sic) article. With the Ban Liang there were literally 0 (nill/zero) sources when I first saw it, yet no templates were placed concerning this fact, so I immediately inserted 3 (different) articles from Sir Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek, David Hartill’s “Cast Chinese coins”, and looked for other (sometimes more academic) sources immediately. I inserted another Wikitable (yeah, I know, I’m addicted to composing them 😒 ), and expanded that article.
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Still obsessed with avoiding having to write the “Qing dynasty coinage” article I looked towards the “Vietnamese cash” article, I had long been grateful for that article as the links 🔗 at the bottom had introduced me to Sema’s Art-Hanoi which I have used as a reference for collecting French Indo-Chinese, and Viet-Namese money 💴 since I was a teenager. Upon expanding the article I created (yet another/a) Wikitable, this time planning on first using Ed Toda’s “Annam and its minor currency” (1882), and then using some additional information from a ... Well... Sudoku website (though they do call themselves the “Asian Numismatic Museum”), that had a detailed list of Vietnamese era dates, as well as Dr. Barker’s work. Though I did quite document how I wrote the article there myself, however as I was doing research I stumbled upon a website by a Non-Hispanic Vietnamese-American author who also wrote for the Chinese Coinage Website on his own website exploring Vietnamese history, and culture. Despite the scope of that website it contained detailed chapters on the monetary history of Japan’s copper coinages so naturally this meant that I would have to greatly expand the “Japanese mon (currency)” article, originally I began drafting a new article called the “Nagasaki Trade Coins”, while doing more research for it I found out that Japanese Wikipedia already had an article on it, and only after publishing it (well, I forced myself to both write, AND publish it as at the time I really, really thought “PLEASE LET ME DO EVERYTHING EXCEPT FOR A QING DYNASTY COINAGE ARTICLE” leading me to make that article, then while doing research I had first inserted a full list of Japanese government-minted coins, then regional coinages, after that I greatly expanded the “Japanese mon (currency)” article as well, ironically finding most information from Vietnamese sources.
While doing research for the “Vietnamese cash” article I found that Vietnamese Wikipedia has articles for the individual coinages of every Vietnamese era, unfortunately English language information 🛈 on the subject wasn't so easy to find.
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After “completing” Korea, Viet-Nam, and Japan I went to the “Chinese cash 💰” articles, which are 3 (though technically 4 if you'd count the “Mace (unit) article) articles, at first I started writing more about Chinese Republican cast cash coins, I created (yet another/a) Wikitable, then I greatly expanded the article by adding a whole bit on how these/those coins were manufactured all the way from the beginning to end as I both didn't want to start writing the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article, and thought of a new scope for the “Cash (Chinese coin)” article to be separate from all the other more detailed articles on Chinese (and neighbouring) coinages, this article could more be about the nature of those coins, but as I ran into the machine-struck parts of the article I really did finally begin to realise that I had nothing left to do, and would have to begin writing the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article, so I started doing research and while typing in “Qing Dynasty coinage” in Microsoft Bing this is your first result “proudly” presented on the top, and still is (as of July 19th, 2017), a blog written in really bad English and written in a manner that reminded me of the Chinese people that “ping” me on my QQ that have never seen a foreigner in their life and just want to talk to one at least once, seemed hopeful, cheerful, and most of all peaceful, but not academic and it wasn't until I had already started drafting the “Qing dynasty coinage” article that I realised that it probably wasn't worthy to be oN Wikipedia, but it did provide SOME information, and most importantly images as visual examples (still making it a kind of “useful” external link). Well it was the only English language article etitled “Qing Dynasty coinage” before I started writing one. 😅
After that I finally started (kind of) drafting the “Qing dynasty coinage” article. At first I started browsing the blog by Learner and started checking out what I could write about first, I already built up a vision of how a “Qing Dynasty coinage” article would look like, and I had already envisioned a whole separate paragraph for the Sichuan Rupee after reading this post, and this follow up post, but then after first searching Wikipedia I found it in the Tibet article and eventually I made the redirects I had planned for the Qing article go there, added minimum content to the “Tibet” section, mostly just rewording it here and there and kept it relevant to the Qing while (regretfully) inserting Learner’s entry there. My next objective was adding the “5.000 years” reference list, also because that list actually included some Manchu mint marks. At first I still mostly relied on Learner but then I stumbled upon one “Wu Zhu” coin, and then another “Wu Zhu”coin causing me to first finish the Manchu list, after that I started using Sir Gary Ashkenazy’s Primal Trek for the history, split that into one for “bHistorg”, and one for “Chinese mint marks”, after finishing the “Chinese mint marks”, I merged it with the Manchu mint marks, at first I refrained from using David Hartill until the very last moment to “fill in the gaps”, after first finishing the list I found another (more accurate) list by a more academic source 🎓. This source debunked the existence of a “Guang Xu Yuan Bao” cash coin claiming it was only a struck coin, and added more information on denominations, and even some rarer coins, I kept re-writing, and then re-configuring the same list over, and over again with new information 🛈.
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After that I “took a break” from the main body and started focusing on integrated every last bit of Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek into the article, while beginning to draft an East-Turkestan (“Xinjiang”) section, with East-Turkestan I was extremely lucky, I found a long piece written by a museum that included highly detailed information on every East-Turkestani mint, detailed analyses on the metallic content of every East-Turkestani cash coin from every period from Qian Long until Xuan Tong, it contained mintage figures, separate information 🛈 on regional differences within East-Turkestan (“Xinjiang”), and best of all a looooooong list of academic and highly respected sources in both Mandarin-Chinese, and Czech. Re-wording it wasn't difficult as it relied mostly on archaic terms and uncommon phrases I could easily replace E.g. “Junggar” = “Dzungar”, and I could easily attribute every sentence to the sources they themselves provided causing the “Qing Dynasty coinage” article to have nearly 100 (one-hundred) references upon publishing. Writing this article inspired me to go to eBay to buy the coins described in this article to take pictures 📷 of for Wikimedia Commons, later in the drafting process I finally finished off Gary Ashkenazy's Primal Trek, and then found yet another website I had already used before but now with highly detailed information 🛈, China Knowledge Germany with tonnes of academic sources, and a whole new list of Manchu mint marks, so I decided to merge that one with the ones I had after finishing off the “Later Jin Dynasty coinage” section, what was notable here is that I found that source while looking for Manchu characters to insert into the table there, I could use theirs and suddenly had enough material to start a whole section on silver coinage. Eventually I was near completion of the drafting process, then added David Hartill, and then started looking for a bit more sources, eventually despite my fear 😱 with beginning this article was that you can't avoid Qing dynasty coin information 🛈 no natter how hard you try, which is certainly true for copper coinages， specifically copper cash coins, however with gold coins literally the only “information 🛈” (if one might even call 📞 it that) I found was an image from Wikimedia Commons, as of today (July 19th, 2017) I still haven't found any non-auction site to discuss gold Qing coins. But after publishing the article I felt greatly relieved and began concentrating on other projects than Wikipedia leading me here to Wikimedia Commons.
After I was done with the Qing I started expanding the “Pul” coins article as it was a laughable stub 🎫. Now we've reached the end of the journey on Wikipedia, below I’ll write down how all of it relates to what I wish 🌠 to achieve here on Wikimedia Commons.
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Primal Trek (primaltrek) by Gary Ashkenazy (גארי אשכנזי )
In response to what's written below I had acted hostile towards Beetstra, I see that my response wasn't how I should have handled it and apologised. I preserve what's written below for historical value.
I am not a spammer, and verifying content isn't. “adding spamlinks”. 🤨
I saw lots of stubs, I knew of a website that had tons of information 🛈 on those subjects, and I added that website as inline references to various articles including 7 I had created (published) by myself... Then I got blocked and the first thing that was concluded is that I was a spammer. 😒
Libel and slander.
And the worst part is that I am being incorrectly accused of being a spammer. 😖
I have never in my life received any money or compensation for any edit I’ve ever made I simply do not get paid to edit Wikipedia, on the contrary I pay to edit Wikipedia (no not through donations, no offense but I prefer to donate my time to research articles and expand them). I have bought several books including David Hartill’s Cast Chinese Coinage to expand or create articles on Chinese numismatics, I did use Primal Trek (the website I'm being accused of having a COI with) a lot but if you divide it among a dozen Chinese coin articles and 7 new Chinese coinage articles I had created it barely adds up to 2 links a page, in fact the “most excessive” examples being Southern Song dynasty coinage, and Cash (Chinese coin) where it was I think around 5 links, but in all cases those links were related to content and to source them, I don’t just go around randomly adding Primal Trek links in articles (what I’m being accused of), I simply wanted to expand all content and obviously I use sources and since Primal Trek simply is “a more trusted name” and a very big website I milked that website dry to make sure that the Chinese and Korean monetary history articles would be as well expanded as possible. Years ago I did the same with ZDNet, PCWorld, MSPowerUser, WMPowerUser, WinBeta, On MSFT, Etc. to Microsoft-related articles and there are articles with 10 links to Engadget in a single section, but only because Primal Trek was more rarely used the COIBot had a false positive. All my actions concerning mainspace editing were purely for the benefit of the readers and to make Wikipedia articles as complete as possible, in fact on my user page I even claim that if it weren’t for the images I had made “Primal Trek obsolete in favour of Wikipedia”.
Speaking of images the only contact I had with Gary Ashkenazy was me e-mailing him to donate his images to Wikimedia Commons, and do you know what I did concerning that? Well, I have spent hundreds of euro’s on various coins that Wikimedia Commons doesn't have pictures of just to make pictures.
Now let’s check the facts…
What I did in Beetstra’s twisted bad faith fantasy:
I went around using sockpuppets to randomly add spamlinks for a website I work for across 4 projects.
What I actually did:
I sourced material (you know what you SHOULD do when adding content to Wikipedia) using a highly trusted and reliable online name in Chinese numismatics, I saw that literally every article except for “Ancient Chinese coinage” was either unsourced or a stub, largely only David Hartill’s book inserted by the author himself (yes, there is an account named DavidHartill operated by the writer, this is an actual COI but let’s only focus on me because I used sockpuppets for something completely unrelated) so I used a well-known source in this field, also note that it was only on articles related to Chinese and Korean coins as Primal Trek doesn't cover Japanese coins unless it's a hoard and barely mentions Vietnamese coins at all, so using a trusted source on Chinese and Korean coins in articles about Chinese and Korean coins is not “spamming”.
And outside of English Wikipedia, well I didn't add it to Serbian Wikipedia that was added years before I registered as Donald Trung (my real name), nor did I add it to German Wikipedia that has also been there for years. I did however include 2 links at Dutch Wikipedia sourcing an article and judging by how very few articles on Dutch Wikipedia cite any references or sources at all deliberately removing sources seems to only be putting salt on that very old long-infected wound, in fact I have even told him that I only planned on using Primal Trek a total of 3 times with ⅔ being in “w:nl:Chinese kèpèngs” and ⅓ in “Koreaanse mun” of course his only reply was “you’re a COI spammer”.
His libelous claim that I just randomly added spamlinks is nothing short of a personal insult.
How Beetstra phrased the question and what it implies.
“So you added spamlinks out of what, altruism?”
(could be paraphrased, hij had het in het Nederlands moeten schrijven zodat ik het makkelijker kan onthouden.)
This question basically implies a few things, 1) I simply went around randomly adding a link to a website in various articles for no reason, it’s not like I expanded the content of those articles while doing so. 2) It implies bad faith, at no time did he actually look at where or how I added the links he just called it “spamlinks”, admittedly Beetstra says himself that he doesn't care what gets linked and where it gets linked to, he just looks who links something how much his definition of “spam” can include anything from a random blog about images of ceiling fans by a guy named Micheal to a well-researched and well-respected scientific journal. 3) He probably didn't even look at the content supported by the links in the first place, remember that at all times he keeps insisting on me being a spammer and at all times he doesn't care about the actual content of any article, just what's linked there. 4) Maybe he shouldn't be at the global spam project in the first place, this is not an attack on Beetstra it's an assessment and my conclusions from it, if you remove references simply to spite someone you call “a spammer” even if they weren’t placed there by that person then maybe you should be re-thinking your life and what you’re doing with it, I’m serious because the whole deal with w:en:WP:SOURCE is that content at Wikipedia should be verified at all times and if your crusade against what you consider to be “spam” allows for you to indiscriminately remove links then Wikipedia isn't the right place for you. Why should one person be the arbiter of what we can and can't link 🔗 to? Even if so, then multiple people should be able to judge that person’s actions and uninvolved editors should be able to criticise them.
DISCLAIMER: The above statement is in no way an attack on Beetstra, I am simply criticism his way of operation, I do not want anyone to leave Wikipedia who can make themselves useful here (unlike what he believes), and I am simply saying that his current way of looking at things might be more harmful than it is helpful.
And to give a not-so-stupid reply to this very stupid question, “Yes, I did it out of altruism” (remember that Wikipedia exists to educate others, if you learn new things by researching articles it's fun 🎉 and all, but the articles themselves get published for the readers).
What I know about Gary Ashkenazy.
Gary Ashkenazy (Hebrew: גארי אשכנזי) is an American citizen who lived for 13 years in various w:en:Asian countries such as w:en:South Korea, the w:en:Republic of China, w:en:Thailand, and w:en:Mainland China, his hobbies include amateur radio, w:en:Morse code, wire antennas, computer technologies such as the w:en:OpenBSD operating system, riding motorcycles 🏍, and collecting Chinese charms, amulets, and coins, he frequents coin fora (forums?) under the handle of “Manymore”. As a child his grandmother used to refer to him as “Skinny Rooster” 🐔, and he started collecting Chinese good luck charms and coins while he lived in w:en:Beijing. “Wow, you really know a lot about the owner of the website, you clearly are connected with the owner of the website and spammed his site out of your personal relationship with him” Well, no I can simply name these things because he (Gary Ashkenazy) noted them on another website unrelated to Primal Trek, in fact the only thing I have in common with him (Gary Ashkenazy) is the fact that we both volunteer for the w:en:Red Cross.
Unlike Gary Ashkenazy I really don’t have an interest in Chinese charms, in fact I loathe the idea of “good luck 🍀 objects”, and by extension I loathe Chinese charms because they’re nothing but imitations of real money, they’re not government-made items designed for circulation they’re non-sensical items designed for superstition, if you may notice a pattern in my editing I only ever use Primal Trek on Chinese coinage-related articles (with only one exception), and to that end I used a several other websites in similar amounts too, these include Charm.ru and Zeno.ru and unlike Gary Ashkenazy I did in fact have a conversation with Vladimir Belyaev (the owner of the aforementioned websites) and the conversations with that person can be found at the archive of the OTRS team in w:en:Wikimedia Commons where I had pasted them, and the only attempt at contact is the e-mail in the section below here.
My personal suspicion is that Gary Ashkenazy either died or retired in 2016 because as of August 20th, 2017 the last entry on his multi-weekly updated monograph site still states November 16th, 2016. (I am not going to update this either, this purely serves to debunk any libelous claims of conflict of interest against my person.)
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The only e-mail I have sent to Gary Ashkenazy.
This is the only e-mail I have sent him since; on June 6th, 2017 to which I have received no reply (as of August 20th, 2017).
“Dear Mr. Ashkenazy,
I am here to request something of you if you’re interested, I want to write more about Chinese coins, and charms on Wikipedia and have already started referencing your work, unfortunately there aren’t that many images available so I would kindly like to ask if you are willing to upload pictures of all of your Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Ryukyuan coins and charms to Wikimedia Commons so the Wikipedian community could share your work and knowledge with the world.
Thank you for your time.
Yours faithfully,
Mr. Trung
Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.”
To this end I would like to state that not only have I no conflict of interest with the subject at hand, I have absolutely no communication or relation with Primal Trek. The possibilities are simply this, 1) I am in fact Gary Ashkenazy or a hired goon who got paid to edit w:en:Wikipedia by Gary Ashkenazy, or 2) I am a person with a love of Chinese numismatics and monetary history and saw that there is a website with a lot of information on the subject and added as much information 🛈 from that site into Wikipedia as possible because I want others interested in the subject to find it here on Wikipedia.
Obviously paid editors go around insulting people with sockpuppets because it's not like their livelihood or anything is at stake, and obviously I must be a COI spammer because everyone knows that the worst form of spam anyone can add is writing information to educate others on a subject and daring to verify that information with a source, I mean those vandals. 😒
The numbers.
Now let’s look at the numbers, the link was added slightly more than 40 times across all wikis, I had used it once for reference on my Userpage on Wikimedia Commons to show the images I wish to upload after buying those coins myself, and once in my own user page on English Wikipedia to show where I had attempted to contact Mr. Gary Ashkenazy, it was used twice on Serbian Wikipedia once as a source on Ancient Chinese coins and once in a draft by a user named Neboyshka87 (not me), and once in German Wikipedia as a source on Korean coins. Twice on Dutch Wikipedia in an article I had created containing almost 20 sources (if I had a COI I wouldn't bother with other sources at all? I don’t know I don’t get paid to do this and never look how paid editors edit), on English Wikipedia I did use it several times in talk pages often asking legitimate questions if such material on hoards and modern finds could and should be added, the article “Zhou Dynasty coinage” named no sources, I used Primal Trek as one of 4 different sources, “w:en:Knife money” and “w:en:Spade money” both were either unsourced or dependent on one source (you’ve guessed it, David Hartill), “w:en:Ming dynasty coinage” only contained either David Hartill or 12 links to a random auction site often linking to closed auctions (clearly an education website here is “spam” and an auction website is a reliable source), I have created 6 articles named “[X] dynasty coinage” that all included Primal Trek of which the most excessive one has 4 links to Primal Trek and “Qing Dynasty coinage” an article with over 100 references only contains 3 links to Primal Trek. “w:en:Cash (Chinese coin)” is probably the only article where the link is used disproportionately compared to other sources but every time that I added Primal Trek I was sure to add at least 1 or 2 other sources to back the claim up.
Per article.
The article w:en:Ban Liang was previously unsourced, I added a total of 13 sources of which one was David Hartill's book 📚, and 12 were external links 🔗, of those external links 3 were Primal Trek, and yes by far the majority of the content (simply the words and not the links) came from Primal Trek, removing Primal Trek here because it’s “spam” would basically reduce the article back to the stub it was when I first found it, but obviously let’s not care about the encyclopedic content of Wikipedia and just insult users and punish them (and most importantly let’s punish the readers) for an unrelated insult to an uninvoled user concerning an issue on a completely different page, surely the admins of Wikipedia care more for the encyclopedia than they do for punishing people, yeah blocks are totally meant to be penal, everyone knows that the readers of the articles the punished person contributed the most to also deserve to have less content, it’s not like Wikipedia is just a hobby and people write about what they’re interested in, and the onl reason people are here is to build an encyclopedia, nah let’s just assume that people are only here for self-promotion and money. 😒
The first article I created on the subject of Chinese monetary history was actual about a Mongolian realm, it was the w:en:Yuan dynasty coinage article that only contains a single link to Primal Trek, at no time did I ever intent to write more articles in fact at w:en:User talk:DavidHartill I even requested him to make a Qing Dynasty coinage, I then looked at the Articles for Creation page only to find out that simply requesting a title doesn't make an article happen, you have to fully draft one first and since no article I have ever created in the 10 years I am here on Wikipedia (this includes w:en:West Frisian Wikipedia, and w:en:Dutch Wikipedia) has ever been deleted, and only once nominated by a user who harassed me for some years (the reason I started over with a new account before) which was then argued to be worthy to be on Wikipedia, I simply avoid going through extra non-sense as making an article for Wikipedia is as simple as clicking a red link.
I made 4 (four) articles very specifically to bridge the w:en:Ancient Chinese coinage and w:en:Yuan dynasty coinage articles filling a 300 year gap, I only made those articles because I don’t want Wikipedia to “be incomplete” and Primal Trek barely contained any information 🛈 on the Khitans, Tanguts, Jurchens, and Mongols so never did I use Primal Trek more than once in ¾ of them, but since Primal Trek does have a lot on Chinese coinage from that period I did use it more there, but then again I found an essay by a history professor that had even more information 🛈 so the majority of the content again can be ascribed to other sources.
At w:en:Qing dynasty coinage it is (as far as I can remembered) only linked 3 times in an article with over 100 references that I (as of August 20th, 2017) wholly wrote the content (excluding the mark-up) of myself, the fact that I didn't use Primal Trek that often here is very simple, Qing Dynasty coinage extends beyond cash coins and though I did in fact use Primal Trek as “the skeleton” of the article in its early concept the majority of the content is (as usual) from David Hartill's book 📚.
The only article where one could say that I might’ve “spammed” Primal Trek was also the last English language article where I used to some excess, but if there is an authoritive source that (used to have/) has more infor
Note: Used to because as I had stated on my Wikimedia Commons user-page, “I made Primal Trek obsolete”, if anyone is interested in information 🛈 on Chinese coins or Korean coins then Wikipedia has officially superseded Primal Trek by early July 2017 (and this is not an insult to either Gary Ashkenazy or Primal Trek), if you want images and illustrations then you could go to Primal Trek but as you can see in the above e-mail 📧 I want him to “donate” those to Wikimedia Commons, also I tend to buy Chinese and Korean coins simply to upload them to Wikimedia Commons so maybe a couple of years from now I can say that Primal Trek is “100% obsolete”. 😈
“Cross-wiki spam”
As I already said above I only added 2 links to the Dutch Wikipedia site to Primal Trek and the article contained a dozen links, at no time did I add Primal Trek anywhere else and the ironic part is that even before I got blocked for Sockpuppetry I had stopped using Primal Trek on the English Wikipedia for a very simple reason, there was literally nothing left to link to, I had already used any “useful” link I could, and the rest of Primal Trek covers Chinese charms which I personally have no interest in writing about in general (let alone on Wikipedia), however I did add it to Dutch Wikipedia and as Beetstra can't understand Dutch (I think) he just saw the link and assumed that it was spam, heck I might be lucky that he isn't an administrator (Dutch: moderator) at Dutch Wikipedia because he might’ve deleted w:nl:Chinese kèpèngs as “a spam article”.
📚📚📚📚📚 “Bookspam”. 📚📚📚📚📚
On another note 📝 of excessively adding a source I did however add David Hartill’s Cast Chinese coins, in fact while David Hartill has an actual COI with the book he added it to numerous articles, do you know who added it to even more articles? You’ve guessed it, me. It’s not like David Hartill pays me £ 100,- for every page I cite, the opposite is true I had to pay him money in order to use it (and rephrase it) on Wikipedia, but I did use the book on literally every article with a subject described in it (remember, there are many Chinese numismatic articles about pre-1912 coins), and to no extend did I ever expect to see my money 💴 return to me, I only bought his book to share the knowledge with the world, isn't that what Jimbo Wales dreamed of when he made this website?
Of course there is no “Bookspam” project because a double standard exists that you can blacklist websites, but you can’t blacklist books 📚, and boy/girl am I happy that David Hartill hasn't been blacklisted. 😅
Conclusions.
Under any other circumstances a rational human-being would've looked at the situation and see that in fact all I was doing was sourcing and verifying content but the Bermean Hunter and Beetstra assumed bad faith on a Sockpuppetry case clearly unrelated to any articles I have written or expanded and globally blacklisted a reliable source, in this instance Wikipedia itself has become collateral damage, the community has no say of what Beetstra does and doesn't consider spam and going around multiple wikis removing inline citations would be nothing short of vandalism if it were done by anyone else, imagine if any new user would come here and just randomly started removing references from articles we would immediately revert them simply on the fact that it hurts the encyclopedia and we all know it. The main reason I was even protesting my lock is simply because this slanderous accusation of COI upon my person has hurt the month of hard work and the work of other editors, I never did anything to harm the article content of Wikipedia, Beetstra did when he started removing references from articles I have never edited on Serbian Wikipedia.
My conclusions on WikiProject Spam.
Well let me first explain my motivations behind my persistent socking before I will address the WikiProject Spam, this serves only for a (possible) comparison of motivation, when Commons admin Daphne Lantier/INeverCry found my sockpuppets at all times did they delete the user- and talk-pages (even if those didn't contain any disruptive texts), and then deleted any image uploaded by them as “Copyright violations”, also later deleting some categories I had created after removing those categories from images and then claiming “empty category”, in fact the whole reason INeverCry was discovered to be a sockpuppeteer was because they went looking for old unused accounts, and then delete any personal pictures 📷 of them citing “abandoned account” regardless of the reasons that user had left Wikipedia, nor is there a rule or guideline on Wikimedia Commons that states that personal pictures 📷 of people must be deleted after they have become inactive, imagine if a person had died, they only had digital pictures of themselves, their survivors “cleaned” all their disks, and no other picture 📷 of that person exists other than the one in Commons, well “though luck” according to INeverCry. In fact one of the main reasons I appealed my global lock 🔒 is because this (ab)user just deleted my Commons user page citing “locked account” (again, there are no rules or policies regarding this) and after they were de-sysopped they bragged about almost getting half a million admin actions, which makes me suspect that all the above mentioned actions were purely motivated to get an arbitrary number of admin actions rather than an actual interest for Wikimedia Commons, who would benefit from educational images being deleted? Who would benefit from useful categories being deleted? Who would benefit from deleting user pages and pictures of inactive/blocked users? Well, 1) not the users of these services, 2) not the readers, and 3) not the website itself, all it does it increase a number without value by removing things that do have value.
Now the reason I cite the above example is very simple, this admin has been doing it for years, how many useful images have been incorrectly deleted as “copyright violations” because some admin either wanted to stack up their admin stats or assumed that anything uploaded by a blocked must be deleted (from an e-mail 📧 exchange with a Commons admin the man claimed that images by blocked users at all times need to be deleted even if they are free, donated, and used on Wikipedia because “the Foundation should not host images by users who ignore the rules”), the community never decided on any of these actions, and other admins never review them because there are millions of users and only hundreds or thousands of admins, on paper admins are accountable for their actions but in reality this is rarely true.
Update: Credit where credit is due the admin I complained about looked at the situation and undeleted the category deleted by Daphne Socktier, despite his aggressive e-mails towards me he did take an objective look at the situation and did the right thing for Wikimedia Commons.
Which brings me to WikiProject Spam, how many good and useful sources have been deleted because the COIBot had a false positive? Let's be honest if something is blacklisted most users will probably assume that it is so because the source was deemed unreliable, or maybe because the website itself was questionable, if I found out something was blacklisted I didn't go to request its removal because “it must be blacklisted for a reason, right?” who actually checks what and where things get deleted, on Wikipedia the general rule is that if content is unsourced that it should not be on Wikipedia, if a previously commonly used source suddenly becomes “spam” then how much information should be deleted? Well, simply put the members of this project don't care, they never actually look at the content or where it gets linked to, they only look at how much it gets linked, and by whom it gets linked, is it just a good faith contributor who happens to read this website more than others? Well, that’s a question they never ask, is it an obscure but otherwise quite resourceful website for a niche subject? Again, they simply don't care, their definition of “spam” has nothing to do with how or if it would benefit Wikipedia, they simply don’t care about the content.
Now ask yourself this question, imagine if you like me are just someone who likes a subject, you know that there’s lots of information on this subject on the internet but all the Wikipedia articles are just unsourced stubs… You know this one website that has lots of information on the subject and it doesn't matter what website that is, but only 4 or 5 other people used it very sparsely, how often can you use a source to expand Wikipedia’s content with it, 10 times? 20 times? 30 times? 40 times? The answer is that It’s simply not your choice to decide, others in bad faith will decide this for you, they don’t want those articles to expand, they don't want you here, it doesn't matter if you use lots of other references, you just used that one website “too much” and they don't care that it to expand or source content, in their minds you are now “a spammer”, all the work you did out of the goodness of your heart is seen as “spamlinking” and all the content you added may get deleted not because it's wrong, not because it doesn't benefit either Wikipedia or its readers, but because someone else decided for you that your content is “spam”. An example below is exactly how Wikipedia looks like if we do not criticise their actions:
The problem really lies with how inefficient the COIBot is designed.
The COIBot only shows who added the link where, it doesn't show Diff’s, I think that the human checking where the links were added should see the full edit to know if it were just a link being added, a link replacing another link (a common form of spamming), or a link being added with content, the COIBot simply doesn't discriminate and if you add a whole paragraph of educational content and properly source it someone reviewing the bot might delete the reference you used, this is the antithesis of verifiability.
If you still believe that I’m a spammer... 🤨
The COIBot simply had a false positive because I'm passionate about expanding Chinese numismatic articles, nothing more and if anyone is daring to make a claim that I am here to spam then please leave a message at at my talk page so I can cuss at you. 😡🤬
Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
“Unsubstantiated accusations of canvassing or conflict of interest, labeling an editor as a point-of-view pusher, or accusing them of being a sock puppet or meat puppet of a banned user are common false narratives.”
1) Well, the claim that I have a WP:COI certainly falls under this, no evidence just accusations, never was an objective look at any of my edits been exercised, they were simply retroactively seen as “adding spamlinks”.
2) Beetstra concluded that Javierfv1212, Dwarwinci, and Neboysha87 were all my sockpuppets, not based on any evidence but since they used the same reference I used they must sockpuppets because no-one else in the world 🗺 would ever use this “spam-site”.
POV railroading also occurs on a one-to-one basis and may involve a condescending, patronizing, sarcastic and insulting tone.”
3) Obviously the above question by Beetstra can be seen as this, the fact that at no point he was even considering the fact that his false WP:BADFAITH narrative was wrong and only replied in sarcastic insults proves that he is not here to build an encyclopedia.
Addendum (added September 2nd, 2017). The many issues with the “spam-fighting” bots”
XLinkBot
XLinkBot has got to be one of the worst designed bots on Wikipedia, it operates completely on bad faith and even if it were designed to fight “spam” it does a pretty lousy job at it. First of all the way it reverts is completely unrelated to the context of the edits it reverts, it simply targets a user and then undoes all of their revisions on a page where they have inserted a blacklisted link, this can be quite evident in my first encounter with Beetstra where the XLinkBot indiscriminately removed numerous sources, content additions, and illustrative images (as can be seen here) not because any of my edits were bad but simply because I had inserted what Beetstra defines as “a spamlink”, for context all the “sources” cited in the article before I added more appropriate references are links to a random auction site, how accurate is the information from those auction sites? Well, I don’t know because 75% of the coins in those auctions were sold when I began with my edits in July 2017 there at Ming dynasty coinage and those bare-link “references” were added years ago. The trustworthiness of a source or it's value to Wikipedia isn't something Beetstra or the XLinkBot ever look at, the context as to how and why links were added are also completely ignored.
As a scenario, imagine a new inexperienced editor finds a stub about his/her favourite subject, this new editor knows a dozen websites about this subject and starts expanding the stub into a great educational resource that any reader would appreciate... Oops, the new editor added a source that was blacklisted and all of their edits have no been reverted, imagine the impression this would give to that user, also a(n automated) message has been left on their talk page “You are a spammer, if you continue to do edits like that you will be blocked from editing”, this would also give them the impression that all of their edits were bad while in reality the link they added could've been blacklisted for literally any reason.
“But, hey…” you might be saying, “that’s just a minor risk in combating the prevalent issue of spammers, right?” well, no that brings us to another issue with the bot… it simply doesn't work, as of Semptember 2nd, 2017 Beetstra proudly proclaimed that he “removed any reference of Primal Trek from Wikipedia” and he personally removed many links claiming “XWiki spam” from other wiki's… of all the links he added… only one (1) was actually added by me (and you've guessed it, a reference), so I can only assume that he programmed the XLinkBot to revert my edits and remove a total of… zero (0) links, I’m not even joking, all the links in English Wikipedia placed by “I, the master-spammer, the spam-master, Spammy McSpammington, Spam McSpamz, the Spamming Spamster” are sill there (as of writing this), this is good news for Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, but bad news for BadFaithBot… I mean XLinkBot, the moment any other editor makes literally any edit the XLinkBot simply doesn't function, so how can mass-spammers circumvent the XLinkBot? Very simple, just add the spam-links as an IP/named-user, then sign-in/-out and make a few minor edits, and there’s absolutely nothing the XLinkBot can do against this, it has to be one of the easiest bots to game, and it is not uncommon for Wikipedia itself to become collateral damage of its antics, so basically we have a bot that removed educational content but no spam…
I am not calling for this bot to be out right abolished, I think that the “External Links” sections of articles should be patrolled to some extend but in the end a human (who actually objectively looks at the link-additions) should judge whether or not an edit or a series of edits harm or help Wikipedia, “a war against links” is a war against verifiability which is more harmful than helpful, which brings me to a bot designed with the same level of neglect and bad faith…
COIBot
COIBot has got to be thought out by someone who clearly doesn't understand how Wikipedia works, its tasks seem to be based on bad faith and COI-paranoia, and not on any practical means to build an encyclopedia, so what is my issue with COIBot? Well, very simply it doesn't actually look at edits, no I'm serious it just lists links, it doesn't care where the links link to, how the links were added, or why the links were added, it just looks at who adds what link (not a source, reference, or external link, just the link to a website) and how much that person adds that link. The assumption before a single person has even looked at the edits is of bad faith, the COIBot doesn't ever show Diff’s which are great for context it only shows links additions.
Here is how the WikiProject Spam thinks “These links were added by/used by a spammer, hence they need to be removed”, this also includes links that people completely unrelated to “the spammer” added (just think of the people other than myself that added Primal Trek), and also notes that Beetstra and others consciously delete references, if a spammer would let's say replace an existing source with their website reverting that would be the better choice, if a spammer excessively adds links to the “External Links” section of every article even vaguely related to that it could be obviously a conflict of interest (case in point would be Sema from Art-Hanoi who did this, but as I added the link 🔗 probably more than he did the COIBot might see me as “the spammer” rather than the owner even though I mostly used it as a reference). The COIBot should be updated to include diff’s for context, even if someone has a conflict of interest if their edits still help build an encyclopedia then why remove it? Remove them from the “External Links” sections sure, but why as references if the website actually properly references the added content? Well, this is another way how “the war on spam” basically became “the war on Wikipedia” but by people who sincerely believe that they’re protecting the thing they’re destroying. (See, unlike them I hold the moral high ground and assume good faith)
What’s even worse is that for us mobile-users there simply are no warnings, when I tried to launch the article w:en:Yuan dynasty coinage I couldn't, on my mobile browser I got an error message that only read “Error, couldn't save page” with no explanation given, when I was forced to switch to my “Desktop view” I got a message that China Guide or something was blacklisted, now imagine if Beetstra’s idea of indefinitely blocking anyone who tries to add a blacklisted link in any way with no talk page access, imagine the huge collateral damage this would have on not just new- and mobile-users but on Wikipedia itself, the Wikipedia definition of “spamlinks” isn't based on the source itself (the “target” website) but on an earlier bad faith assumption regarding the links, I have absolutely no idea that that China Travel or China Guide or whatever website was blacklisted or even why it was blacklisted, if I pressed save twice with this idea I could've been blocked on the bogus assumption that I'm a spammer, and at the time I was unaware where or how one could remove links from the blacklist, I can only assume that many others may have also run into this problem and very few people actually know where the SpamBlacklist is so blocking anyone before they could save an edit because of “a bad link” (what a handful of people deemed “bad”) basically shows that the current “anti-spam culture” is very harmful, I do not comment on the actual spammers but indiscriminately combatting “links” while not evaluating the edits is a bane on the idea of building an encyclopedia.
Drafted from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
Sent from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱.
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Done.
