User:DavidSeim

Good Day!

I am a professor of history. I have taught college-level history since the year 2000. I find, increasingly, that my students rely heavily on Wikipedia. Even if I ask that they draw upon other online sources as well, very often they stick solely with Wikipedia. Hence I became a Wikipedia editor in August 2014 - primarily to help my students, which in turn helps all of us.

My main objective is to help ensure that existing encyclopedic content is accurate and precise, and definitely better cited. In addition, sometimes we find articles on important topics that are both very lengthy and evidently the work of primarily just one person; this is not right. Such articles typically do not get flagged as incomplete or wanting, primarily because they have many citations, even if all to one person's own work. It could even be that one individual effectively simply has uploaded or cut-and-pasted their own extensive piece, which is merely their own viewpoint. As such, Wikipedia content of this type can be highly deficient. The problem is that it takes much effort to even begin redirecting such lengthy and flawed articles; but rather than somehow delete such important if flawed articles that seem to be mostly by a single contributor (an action which also would not be right), we do indeed need to correct such pieces. We can only do so with marginal adjustments. My second main objective is to be focusing on this necessary undertaking.

Best regards, David