Hi Chaps.
Thanks for reading and thoughtful comments. Should I try to send to wikien-1 or wikimedia-1? Haven't joined. Don't know if I can.
Cordially,
John V. Jackson.
I had a look through the added material. It seemed to lack a lot of sourcing and didn't really fit the tone of a summarising article. Sadly, I'd have to say its removal (pending discussion) was the right decision.
I can absolutely appreciate the frustration of contributing to a field where publishing new or radical theories is met with huge resistance. But on the other hand Wikipedia is not really a place to right those wrongs (for what I hope is obvious reasons :)).
There's really no good answer here: Wikipedia blurs the line between academic research and encyclopaedic coverage, to the extent that it is tempting to bring new material directly to Wikipedia.
Tom
All could be sourced from my book... which might be the best ever written on the subject. And the illogicalities and violations of basic thinking skills that I fixed? You also didn't mention the claims I removed because they were violated by the accompanying photo.
Whatever else happens, rubbish cannot be left on the page. I will follow advice and go to wikimedia-1 though.
:-(
JJ
On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 1:28 PM, Thomas Morton morton.thomas@googlemail.com wrote:
I had a look through the added material. It seemed to lack a lot of sourcing and didn't really fit the tone of a summarising article. Sadly, I'd have to say its removal (pending discussion) was the right decision.
I can absolutely appreciate the frustration of contributing to a field where publishing new or radical theories is met with huge resistance. But on the other hand Wikipedia is not really a place to right those wrongs (for what I hope is obvious reasons :)).
There's really no good answer here: Wikipedia blurs the line between academic research and encyclopaedic coverage, to the extent that it is tempting to bring new material directly to Wikipedia.
Tom _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On 2012-10-26, at 9:04 AM, John Jackson wrote:
Whatever else happens, rubbish cannot be left on the page. I will follow advice and go to wikimedia-1 though.
I don't think the wikiMEDIA list is the right place at all.
This is a en-wikipedia problem, not something to do with the software.
It's wikimedia-L (not 1), FYI, and it's really for cross-project and movement wide discussion. The best place to raise your concerns is on-wiki. On to the subject...
I think everyone with enough experience with Wikipedia has heard this story before. We read it with a sigh and a sense of resignation, because there are a number of different problems at play and no one has really made any progress teasing them out, let alone solving them individually or collectively. I'll state the bottom line in two parts:
* First, Wikipedia is not an ideal forum for presenting new or not widely accepted knowledge. A full explanation of this would be familiar to most readers and take many paragraphs, so I'll leave that there.
* Second, improving content on Wikipedia can often be an exhausting battle; resolving disagreements is frequently a match of wills taking months or even years. It's crucial to involve other people and to adopt a gradualist, pragmatic approach.
It's these two things that often trip up experts, especially those with esoteric knowledge or confidence in new research. When you encounter resistance, you might interpret it as Wikipedia not wanting your help; that's not the case - so keep trying!
2012/10/26 John Jackson strangetruther@gmail.com:
Hi Chaps.
Thanks for reading and thoughtful comments. Should I try to send to wikien-1 or wikimedia-1? Haven't joined. Don't know if I can.
It's wikien-L and wikimedia-L; "l" as in "List", not as in "one" :)
The first one is about the English Wikipedia and the second one is about the general Wikimedia movement, and very frequently about Wikipedia in general.
You can find link to both of them here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo
And yes, of course you can join. The Wikimedia movement tries to be open to everybody, and that includes its critics, as long as they are not tasteless.
As a bit of personal advice, I have to say something brutally honest: The problem of amateurs/experts dynamics in Wikipedia is one that I care quite strongly about, and I would really like to see productive discussion about it. However, threats of retiring or deleting own contributions never help move such discussion forward. As much as I understand the feeling, expressing it this way simply doesn't work. Again, it's a pattern that repeated itself with academics from USA, Portugal, Israel, Russia and other countries, and from fields as diverse as Political Science, Education and Engineering. It would be much more useful to understand the current policies and practices, to try to identify particular flaws in them and to propose constructive changes.
-- Amir
On 26 October 2012 14:51, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
As a bit of personal advice, I have to say something brutally honest: The problem of amateurs/experts dynamics in Wikipedia is one that I care quite strongly about, and I would really like to see productive discussion about it. However, threats of retiring or deleting own contributions never help move such discussion forward. As much as I understand the feeling, expressing it this way simply doesn't work. Again, it's a pattern that repeated itself with academics from USA, Portugal, Israel, Russia and other countries, and from fields as diverse as Political Science, Education and Engineering. It would be much more useful to understand the current policies and practices, to try to identify particular flaws in them and to propose constructive changes.
It also helps to understand the reason for the "no original research" rule and not citing oneself: the crank problem is real, and vast. As a working academic scientist, you would have a green ink file *this* big. It's worse at Wikipedia. Hence the citation culture.
- d.
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org