My wife went to a Presbyterian retreat a few weeks ago where one of the first things out of her group leader’s mouth was how she hated Republicans. My wife’s minister included disparagement for (conservative) incivility in her sermon last weekend. The minister is not a treacherous or intentionally deceitful person, but apparently has had dark glasses or smoky mirrors imposed on her which limit her perception and thought.

I decided to attach a copy of Wretchard’s “Man in the Mirror” essay to a note to the minister. Although I have greatly enjoyed Wretchard’s unexpected (for me anyway) syntheses almost from the blog’s beginning, I went to Wikipedia for background.

I found that the entry for Belmont Club was deleted a few days ago by an administrator named Nihiltres, because it read “like and is an advertisement for a blog/web page. I do not see how it belongs in an encyclopedia. It is neither newsworthy or notable.” This administrator claims to want to be judged “on the quality of my contributions and the cogency of arguments which I put forth.”

His contribution to Wikipedia seems to be deleting work of others, for incogent reasons.

Here is what I found today for the Wikipedia Belmont Club entry:

This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.
• 16:06, 21 March 2010 Nihiltres (talk | contribs) deleted “Belmont Club” ‎ (Expired PROD, concern was: This stub article reads like and is an advertisement for a blog/web page. I do not see how it belongs in an encyclopedia. It is neither newsworthy or notable.)

I looked up the cached version of the Wikipedia Belmont Club entry. Here is the cached entry:

Belmont Club is a weblog that has been in existence since late April 2003. The site focuses on current affairs and public policy, often placing an emphasis on military action and foreign policy issues. The Belmont Club welcomes and supports comments by its readers. The site’s founder and primary contributor is Richard Fernandez, who runs the site under the pseudonym Wretchard the Cat and Wretchard. Fernandez also maintains a website at Wretchard.com. Fernandez is of Filipino background and has Australian citizenship. Fernandez’ interest in history began at Harvard, from where he graduated with a Masters in Public Policy. Since its founding, the Belmont Club site has generated more than eight million hits as of September 2005.
Wretchard is the name of an imaginary cat, in the words of Fernandez, “the symbol of that entire race of stoic, yet somewhat foolish creatures.” [1] Belmont is the name of a suburb Fernandez roomed in while at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
As of 2006, he is a contributor to Pajamas Media.
[edit] External links
• First location of Belmont Club
• Second location of Belmont Club
• Current location of Belmont Club
• Wretchard.com

This article about a blog, vlog, or other internet publication is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

I then clicked on the Wikipedia page for this administrator. He must see himself in a distorted mirror. Is there a self-reflective mirror distortion that magnifies grandiosity?

Nihitrres, the “administrator” who deleted the Belmont Club entry seems pretty full of himself. He claims to be a liberal who wants to judged on contribution quality and argument cogency. Yet his work as a “wikipedian administrator” is “primarily deleting pages tagged for speedy deletion or proposed deletion”.

His description of himself must necessarily be an example of what he does think belongs in an enclclopedia:

I am Nihiltres (pronounced /nɪˈhɪlˌtɹɛs/, ni-HIL-tres), a Wikipedian. I am an administrator, and have been since a nomination in May 2007. I do a fair amount of work as an administrator, primarily deleting pages tagged for speedy deletion or proposed deletion. Aside from my administrative help, I do a bunch of work with templates, cleanup, and occasionally writing articles. I also volunteer answering emails as part of the Wikimedia OTRS team. I’m often on IRC in the #wikipedia, #wikipedia-en, and #wikipedia-en-admins IRC channels, so you can talk to me there if I’m available.

About me
I am a science student living in Pointe Claire, on the island of Montreal. As I am a student, it’s possible to guess at my age: I would discourage people from doing so, because I wish to be ageless on Wikipedia, being judged instead on the quality of my contributions and the cogency of arguments which I put forth.

It should generally be assumed that people are inherently biased—as such, I reason that it would be appropriate to disclose these biases. In terms of political standpoint, I tend to be reasonably liberal: according to the political compass test, I scored as −4.92 on an economic scale of left versus right, and −5.25 on a social scale of libertarianism versus authoritarianism. In terms of spirituality, I am nominally a Protestant, though I abandoned those beliefs a number of years ago and now am largely agnostic, with some Buddhist leanings. I therefore follow the Five Precepts and some other tenets of Buddhism, but am otherwise agnostic. Although I am generally accepting of people’s religious beliefs, I personally greatly dislike dogma, especially those which can be categorized as pseudoscience, although I acknowledge that any argument involving an omnipotent being is necessarily inductive in nature.

My username
Userboxes
en This user is a native speaker of English.
fr-3 Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau avancé de français.
la-1 Hic usor simplici latinitate contribuere potest.
{{t|5|c}} This user is a master of all known Wikimarkup.
This user is an advanced TI-BASIC programmer.
vb-2 This user is an intermediate Visual Basic programmer.
Ascript-2 This user is an intermediate AppleScript programmer.
js-1 This user is a beginning JavaScript programmer.
flute-2 This user is an intermediate flautist.
This user is a recent changes patroller.
This user repairs links to disambiguation pages.
This user is a member of the Novels WikiProject.
20,000+ This user has made over 20,000 contributions to Wikipedia.
4 This Wikipedian joined Wikipedia
4 years, 10 months, 18 days ago
as of March 30, 2010.

vn-27 This user page has been vandalized 27 times.
This user wants to be your friend.
My pseudonym is arbitrary: it is Latin for “nothingthree” (nihil → “nothing”, tres → “three”) and does not imply anything whatsoever. Several Wikipedians have at various times questioned me as to its meaning, usually making connections to nihilism. I am not a nihilist, though I do at times value a nihilistic or, similarly, minimalist point of view for its philosophical clarity.
In reality, it was an interesting compromise: I originally wanted to be Nemo, Latin for “nobody”, but the famous captain of Jules Verne’s story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea had ruined the obscurity of the word for me. Further, I tried “Nihil”, but that was taken. I dislike numbers in names, but adding a number as text sounded fine, so I added one of my favourite numbers, three, in the same Latin as my alternate “Nihil”, to form my now epidemic username, Nihiltres.

The strangest connection that has been made with my username to another topic is the “-tres” to Moltres, whose name happens to have similarly borrowed “tres” from Latin, though through Spanish.

I tend to use the same username across the internet, Nihiltres, but occasionally I am known as Shade, a name I will sometimes prefer when it is, rarely, available.

Userspace
In my userspace I have a number of useful pages:

My sandbox, which I use for experimentation and development of things not yet ready or inappropriate for the article or template namespaces. Feel free to edit it, as long as you are constructive.
An archive of a rewrite of the Shade’s Children article I made using the sandbox: User:Nihiltres/Sandbox/Shade’s Children archive
A number of userboxes:
User:Nihiltres/Userboxes/Friendly
User:Nihiltres/Userboxes/TI-BASIC
User:Nihiltres/Userboxes/Super contrib meta
Other subpages:
User:Nihiltres/Click-to-ImageMap, a now unnecessary script written in AppleScript that converted implementations of {{click}} to the better ImageMap format. I used it while {{click}} was still a CSS hack that impaired usability. {{Click}} has since been converted to use ImageMap itself, as a method of bypassing the limitations of ImageMap was implemented by the developers.
User:Nihiltres/ImageMap how-to is now a redirect to the page to which it was moved, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-03/Tutorial. That page is a tutorial explaining how to use the ImageMap feature.
Pages which govern the appearance of my userspace:
User:Nihiltres/Header controls the appearance of my talk page
User:Nihiltres/Archived controls the appearance of my user talk archives.
User:Nihiltres/Nav controls the navigation box which appears on many of my subpages.
My user skin customization pages:
User:Nihiltres/vector.js, which contains a number of various scripts which enhance my user experience by altering the interface slightly.
User:Nihiltres/vector-ipod.js, special scripts called through the monobook.js page if I’m using my iPod Touch and the Vector skin.
User:Nihiltres/vector-ipod.css, special styling called through the monobook.js page if I’m using my iPod Touch and the Vector skin.
User:Nihiltres/vector.css, which fine-tunes the interface appearance for my personal preference, including some minor changes to colour.
User:Nihiltres/monobook.js, the equivalent of the vector.js page while I use the Monobook skin. It implements a couple other changes:
User:Nihiltres/monobook-ipod.js, special scripts called through the monobook.js page if I’m using my iPod Touch and the Monobook skin.
User:Nihiltres/monobook-ipod.css, special styling called through the monobook.js page if I’m using my iPod Touch and the Monobook skin.
User:Nihiltres/monobook.css, the equivalent of the vector.css page while I use the Monobook skin.
I will update this section as needed if more content is created. If you like the layout or design of my userpage, ask me and I’ll create something similar for you.