Draft talk:Jonathan Rothberg

Comments
Please remove the unsourced content. Everything must be sourced and there should be a minimum of non-independent sourcing. Do not write what you know. Forget what you know.

Please never ask me again to review a draft that has any unsourced content in it. Volunteer time is the life blood of Wikipedia and if you don't respect that, you are going to start hitting walls and people will just start ignoring you.

An easy trick to avoid editing promotionally is to use no adjectives or adverbs. None. Try it!

When you write things like the "first" please be very very sure that this is accurate. Jytdog (talk) 20:15, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Hi Jytdog: I did not see this, but thank you for pointing it out and I will get to work on it. Appreciate the clear guidelines and will adhere to those. -WesWconard1965 (talk) 12:21, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Way too much hard selling PR. This is horrible. I started working this over but I am going to have to redo the whole thing if I keep going.


 * We already went over this stuff at your talk page. I point you again to User:Jytdog/How. Again:
 * Step 0: Check your head. You cannot be here to write about how great Rothberg is.  If that is your goal you will fail and you will likely end up indefinitely blocked. Our mission is, simply, to provide the public with articles summarizing accepted knowledge.  Our goal is to help people learn. Not to sell anything or anybody.
 * Step 1 - Find INDEPENDENT sources that are ABOUT ROTHBERG
 * Step 2: Summarize whatTHEY say, warts and all. It is OK to fill in around the edges with primary sources, but the page should be driven by independent sources.


 * On the Curagen section... what is really sad here is that Curagen story is really interesting and a useful story to tell that would illuminate how the biotech industry actually works. The Curagen story is classic - the hope and hype of genomics in the 1990s and how reality didn't come even close to matching that in a commercial time frame, since it turned out that so few diseases are driven by one or two genes... how curagen and other companies changed their business models to deal with that, and curagen's particular fate (a company once valued in the billions sold for $100M with a cumulative loss of $469 million). People could learn from that story. Just tell the story, and especially here, Rothberg's role in it. This doesn't even note his departure in 2005.


 * You also don't say any where that 454 was spun out of Curagen which is just weird; it was incubated there and spun off (I am guessing) because tool companies are different businesses than discovery companies. Again part of what people can learn from is how Rothberg was able to launch venture after venture.


 * I will check in on this again later. Jytdog (talk) 16:19, 20 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I can't help you if you keep ignoring what I am telling you. We start with sources.  You don't write what you know, or what you want the message to be, and then go find sources to support that. Instead, find high quality sources, and summarize what THEY say.  Sources are first.  Try to forget what you know. Again, this is described in User:Jytdog/How.
 * You added "CuraGen went public in 1999 and in October of 2000 was valued at over US$3.3 billion. [WHAT CAN WE FILL IN HERE]" which shows you are working exactly backward. As long as you continue to work backwards, you work is not going to be use-able in Wikipedia.
 * You also continue to be focused on promotion. Which is never going to be OK. Jytdog (talk) 21:04, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi Jytdog: Thanks for your note. I am going to work on this over the weekend while consulting "How" to get at the points you raise. To be clear, what I meant by (WHAT CAN WE FILL IN HERE) is where can we find a source that addresses this issue? This all took place a long time ago, so it can be challenging to find sources (for instance finding source material about why 454 ended up being subsidiary has been fruitless). But your note helped me understand the summarizing idea, and I think the current rewrite of that section (sourcing a Forbes profile) is more balanced and will help teach people about the events Rothberg was a part of at that time, as you suggested. I will go through the rest with "How" and I think we'll have a much better product. Enjoy your 4th! -W
 * You are writing what you know and then looking for sources for it. again that is backwards. Instead, find good sources, and summarize them. Jytdog (talk) 22:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I do understand why that approach is unacceptable and I am focused now on rewriting the majority of the page through summarizing good existing secondary sources. Looking specifically at the CuraGen section, I did focus on structuring the section as a summary of Herper's 2011 Forbes article--in fact there is almost nothing in this section that isn't directly from the Herper article. Could you confirm that this section more conforms to the style you are looking for? Wconard1965 (talk) 20:07, 1 July 2018 (UTC)