User:Merlinme

My interests are quite broad, including history, warfare, indie music, fantasy/science fiction writing, and anything else that takes my fancy that week (physics, religion, etc.) I can claim to be an expert in very few areas, so I will rarely change substantial information, unless I know for a fact that it is incorrect or misleading. However I do have quite a strong interest in making Wikipedia more readable, too often it feels badly edited. I will correct spelling, punctuation and grammar, and I will sometimes reorder sentences and paragraphs if I think it helps the meaning. I am sure I will make occasional mistakes doing this, despite my best efforts, and I apologise in advance for doing so; but I think too often people wait for an expert to write a definitive article, when really quite small changes would make the current material more readable. I will be happy to reply if you wish to communicate with me via my talk page, although I logon to Wikipedia quite erratically; sometimes you might get a response in five minutes, sometimes not for a week or more.

A relatively recent hot button topic I've got involved in is climate change. For what it's worth, I broadly believe that global warming is happening, that it is largely caused by humans, that it is a Bad Thing, and that we should be making fairly strenuous efforts both to reduce it and to mitigate it. However I like to understand what areas of climate change are still under active research, in other words, what we know less about; and to some extent leading on from this, I support the right of scientists to be contrarian. I would hope they are acting in good faith, but even if they're not, I tend to think the debate itself can be useful. It is however unfortunate how small numbers of scientists highlighting specific areas that require further research can be endlessly recycled in popular media and even in political discussion, as if they bring into question the entire vast body of research which confirms that yes, the planet is warming up, and yes, most or all of that warming is caused by humans.

One of the formative episodes in my time as a Wikipedia editor was the User:Jagged_85 cleanup, for example with Alhazen and more recently, Al-Biruni. The influence of Islamic writers on medieval Europe is a fascinating subject, but Jagged_85 had the unfortunate habit of writing text which supported their position (that basically everything was invented by Islamic thinkers) and then providing references which were misleading. Strong claims along the lines of 'person X invented Y' invariably failed verification. Sometimes the references had almost nothing to do with the article text which was supposedly being referenced; on some occasions the reference said close to the exact opposite of what the article said. Some of the references were very hard to check. After damaging dozens of Islamic history related articles in this way and receiving a topic ban, Jagged_85 moved on to damage dozens of computer games history articles and eventually received a community ban.

Ten years on, there are still articles which bear the scars of Jagged_85's misuse of sources. This has instilled in me the habit of actually reading the references in Wikipedia articles. If they are used misleadingly I don't hesitate to delete or rewrite the article text as necessary, and, if I have the time, to find better references.