Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 03:11, 8 July 2006

Thanks for your message about the ACIM articles

Thanks for your recent comment regarding the ACIM articles. A followup comment/ reply to your comment has been posted at my talk page.

-Scott P. 12:10, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Say what?

I decide to check out the AfD articles, not something I normally get involved in. I come to an article for deletion, A Course in Miracles (book). I look over it -- I see it's been documented and footnoted almost to the very last comma. I observe a tremendous argument ensuing over one word, "cult", that's being interpreted multiple ways. Multiple editors are squabbling over whether User:Ste4k is being "POV" for using it. I change the wording to eliminate the troublesome word while meeting what I see as the intent of the original author of the quote, Garrett. I think I do an adequate if not very eloquent job. I go to a lot of effort to explain what and why I made the change, citing the dictionary, etc. I do screw up and forget to sign some of my work, which you helpfully catch and fix.

I then vote in the AfD to delete the article but to keep its content and merge it into the main article. I explain my reasoning, but without going into detail as to my views of both articles as they presently stand. If I had, I would have said something along the lines that the main article flows well and is comprehensive; I think it's generally well written. At the same time, it screams out for about 200 {{fact}} tags. It's not clear to me how reliable it is. The book article, by contrast, is not as pretty and, as the principal author herself more or less says, reads like a U.S. District Court decision. There's a reason judges' decisions are not high literature and that's because they're shooting for reliability and precision, not memorable prose. There's considerable overlap between both articles with much discussion as to whether there should be a book article and a movement article or just one combined article; there's even discussion as to whether the word "movement" should be used. It seems to me as it all this talk of different articles is putting the cart before the horse (reliability), so I vote "merge and delete" so that the overall Misplaced Pages coverage can get fixed and streamlined with some sort of consensus built.

Now I wake up and I find that you've spent hours during the night sarcastically mutilating your own article. It appears that one word, "cult", and my good faith editing of its usage may have been your tipping point to go into a frenzy. That or my one vote in the AfD process. If you don't like my cult edit, just reverse it and explain how I got it wrong.

Then there's this message on my talk page:

"I'm not originally from the U.S. I was born in Kharkov. In our country, we beat liars, and if one wants to eat, they work. The only POV in that article I wrote was that I wanted to find out the truth, did research, marked it with citations for verifiability, refused to consider any source that came from some primary provider, and all I found out for my trouble was that this encyclopedia isn't even worth quoting. You should be ashamed to have your familiy member's name on this medium. Ste4k 07:17, 7 July 2006 (UTC)"

What do I make of this? Are you saying that I'm a liar and should (or would) be beaten? That I should be working harder to eat? And what's this about my family?

And as for Misplaced Pages, being flawed, it certainly is that. It is profoundly flawed in terms of the reliability of some of its material. In fact, if so many millions of people didn't use it, I'd say forget about it. But the fact is, Misplaced Pages is very important and growing in importance everyday. Every day, more people abandon traditional sources of reliable information such as Britannica and turn to Misplaced Pages. Every month, Misplaced Pages's Google rankings move up higher and are often in the top 5 for a given search. The fact that so many other sites such as answers.com mirror the content makes what's written in Misplaced Pages seem all the more "reliable" since to the undiscerning, it looks like other sites are agreeing with Misplaced Pages.

So like it or not, Misplaced Pages is here to stay and further grow in importance. You can fume and I can fret, but our children and grandchildren will use it more and more as their first source of knowledge, reliable or not. That almost pessimistic view of Misplaced Pages's growing role is what motivates me -- not some idealistic, Woodstockian notion that "information longs to be free" or so much of the other idealistic stuff that motivates thousands of mostly earnest, smart but very young editors on this project.

--A. B. 13:32, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Color scheme

I accidentally clicked on this page in my watchlist, and the red-on-black color scheme blinded me. A trained parrot is typing this for me, which is very inconvenient, because the parrot only understands Spanish and my Spanish is quite poor. Please send replacement eyeballs. :) Kickaha Ota 17:54, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

snide

I was not trying to be snide, but I am startled to discover you have signally failed in understanding the point I was making. THe point is this: the Saihya Akademi Award exists to honour the most prominent cultural figures in various Indian vernaculars. This would have been apparent - or at least suggested - by reading the google results for the award. Next, the fact that 757 ghits exist is pretty decent. "Ramdhari Singh Dinkar", the most famous modern Hindi poet of all, gets a mere 1000 or so. This is known as WP:BIAS. There are certain cultures not as much on the internet as yet, and the world's most populousn nation is one of them. This should have been apparent to even the meanest intelligence.

I was further making a point that, even if you had doubts about the notability of a subject, if you are unwilling or perhaps incapable of carrying out even basic research and coming to simple conclusions, be a little humble when you recognise that you know nothing about the particular cultural, social, or political context that allows you to place this person. It means that this is definitely a BAD WP article; but you seem to have assumed it was an UNENCYCLOPAEDIC article, and that leap was unwarranted.

Finally, I pointed out that on WP we are all both readers and editors. That is the point. If you are capable of bringing this article to AfD, you should be capable of the basic research that everyone else put in. If not, dont bring articles to AfD and waste our time and energy. Hornplease 03:11, 8 July 2006 (UTC)