User:CruiserBob/sandbox

WP:MIRROR WP:PRESERVE WP:NOCITE WP:LIKELY

Your revert on Christian Communism
In the future, don't be so quick with the revert button. The revert button is not a citation tag. Regarding the edit you reverted, I want to point out a few Wikipedia policies that may have escaped your attention, the latter two of which your revert seems to have been in violation of. These are WP:LIKELY, WP:PRESERVE, and WP:NOCITE.

I'll start with WP:LIKELY. I didn't include a citation for including religious orders in the list because, in the words of WP:LIKELY, "If, based on your experience, a given statement has a less than 50% chance of being challenged, then inline citations are not required for that material." Given that the sentence I added it to already included monasticism without a citation (which, I'll note, you didn't remove), and I didn't feel the material was in any way controversial, I thought it highly unlikely that it would be challenged. WP:MINREF says, "Technically, if an article contains none of these four types of material, then it is not required by any policy to name any sources at all, either as inline citations or as general references. For all other types of material, the policies require only that it be possible for a motivated, educated person to find published, reliable sources that support the material, e.g., by searching for sources online or at a library." Unless you consider yourself to not be a motivated, educated person (which, if you're taking the time to edit Wikipedia, I would hope is not the case), there's no reason why it wouldn't be possible for you to find at least one "published, reliable source" by spending ten seconds with Google. Using the most obvious search string "catholic communism religious orders" the fourth hit provided by Google was to the Catholic Encyclopedia entry for communism, and the text provided by Google with the hit was "Most of the religious, that is, ascetic and monastic orders and communities which have existed, both within and without the Christian fold, exhibit some of the..." The Catholic Encyclopedia would certainly be a reliable source to cover the relevant portion of church history.

Moving to WP:PRESERVE starts by saying: "Fix problems if you can, flag or remove them if you can't. Preserve appropriate content."

Not far afterward, it says: "Instead of removing content from an article, consider:
 * Requesting a citation by adding the citation needed tag, or adding any other Template:Inline tags as appropriate
 * Doing a quick search for sources and adding a citation yourself"

Shortly thereafter, in the section headed "Problems that may justify removal" it includes: "Wikipedia:Verifiability discusses handling unsourced and contentious material"

Did you attempt to fix the problem? If you had, you would, as I previously mentioned, easily found a source. If not, you probably shouldn't move on to "remove them", unless you are almost certain that the material you are removing is false. Did you consider adding the citation tag?

Which brings us to WP:NOCITE. Do you feel that the material I included in my edit to the article appeared to be false, or an expression of opinion? If so, wikipedia policy is:


 * If the material added appears to be false or an expression of opinion, remove it and inform the editor who added the unsourced material. The template may be placed on their talk page.

But it seems likely that you didn't think it was false, given that your edit summary asks the question "Which religious orders?" If you didn't think it was false or opinion the policy is:


 * In any other case consider finding references yourself, or commenting on the article talk page or the talk page of the editor who added the unsourced material. You may place a or  tag against the added text.

So even if the information appeared to you to be false (and if you did, why did you not feel the same way about monasticism?), removal should be accompanied by appropriate notification (as referenced by the text I bolded in the above quotation). You did not provide any such notification. And if the material didn't appear to be false, rather than removing it, adding a citation tag, or making a comment on my talk page is the appropriate course of action. You also didn't do either of those.

I will be providing a citation, even though it seems as if your "challenge" was reactive, rather than a considered decision. In the future, please give a little more thought when looking at edits on subjects that you don't know enough about to make an informed decision. Especially since removing accurate information makes Wikipedia worse, and annoys the editors who included the information.

CruiserBob (talk) 07:29, 18 January 2021 (UTC)