At 13:37 02/01/03 -0800, Zoe wrote:
Please review [[New Imperialism]] and its edit history. 172 has made this dense, what-looks-to-be-copyrighted article with his/her own idiosyncractic markup and tons of oblique references to other items without explaining those other references. I attempted to do some markup correction, not at all changing the content except for spelling and grammar fixes and a couple of NPOVing attempts, very minor (I took out a characterization of Theodore Roosevelt as racist, for example). This took about half an hour of work. 172 cavalierly reverted the entire thing without comment.
I asked several questins in Talk, and 172's only answer was, "Look it up in a high school history text."
Zoe
[[J.A. Hobson]] was also started by 172, is in a similar style, and even duplicates some material from [[New Imperialism]]. The first paragraph of Hobson is lifted with only minor changes from
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0823869.html
I'm not sure about the rest of it, but it seems too poorly written to be stolen from a pro - I'm never sure when it's paraphrasing Hobson and when it's introducing its own analysis. It also makes attributed quotes from other authors without giving references. I suspect that it's some sort of (undergraduate?) essay that has been dismembered badly.
I've not mentioned this on talk yet because I haven't made sense of it all in my mind yet, and I don't know Hobson well enough.
172 seems to lack perspective on what makes good encyclopedia material, and to be unnecessarily combative, though I've not had much experience with him/her.
Rob Brewer [[user:Rbrwr]] payment: [[Gordon Brown]] at 13:30 GMT