User talk:71.115.235.175

What should I do now?
I understand your concern. Let me describe what I did and why, and ask what you think I should do.

Someone told me there is a “List of Cartographers” on Wikipedia. I was curious about who was on it. When I discovered the list includes several people I know personally as well as several other contemporaries I know by reputation, and also noted that I was not on the list, I added my name, which I think should be there. I included my country (United States), year of birth (1943), and two items of arguable prominence (“wrote How to Lie with Maps and created the Monmonier Algorithm”). People on the list have one, two, or three such items. Both of my two items are on the “Mark Monmonier” Wikipedia page, which I did not create, and which I have no recollection of having edited. I certainly would not have inserted the word “important.”

But I did edit my page, mostly to promote a uniformity of style, by capitalizing all the words normally capitalized in a book’s title and by removing unnecessary and inconsistently placed periods.

I did make a few further changes, all of which are issues of fact:

1) I added the title and publisher of a book (Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address), slated for release in early 2022 by a university press. I see that I screwed up by ending it with a “4” rather than a closing parenthesis. At this point I am reluctant to go back in and correct the mistake. Because the physical book has not been formally released, perhaps it should be removed.

2) I removed a computer program bulletin that is hardly a book and arguably should not have been there. It’s in WorldCat, I think, but it’s hardly a real book.

3) I organized the remaining book publications into three groups: Single-authored, co-authored, and “Edited Encyclopedia” (I was the editor but most of the 500+ entries were written by my 300+ contributors.)

4) To the list of awards in the box at the upper right I added “German Cartographic Society, Mercator Medal (2008),” which is on par the Miller Medal, awarded by the American Geographical Society. This I explained when a window popped up, calling for a justification.

5) For several of the books with editions in languages other than English, I added the language of the translation and its year of publication.

So what do you think I should do now? Should I attach this memo to the entry in a note of some sort? Would you or another Wikipedia administrator like to revert the entry back to September 17, before I altered it? And then suggest that someone else consider making the changes I had made?

Were I strongly motivated to enhance my reputation I could have added stuff about NSF grants, literature citations, advisory committees, editorial positions, and various elected or appointed positions, but that seemed a bit over the top. I do understand that a selection of facts affect public opinion.

One thing that I would like to add is the preference that renderings of my name not include my middle name “Stephen,” which I haven’t used for a few decades (except where the government insists, as on my passport)—hardly necessary because that aren’t the many Monmoniers on the planet, and as far as I know, no other Mark Monmonier. Aside from an interest in concision, I dropped it long ago after a dispute with my then young daughter over the intended recipient of a piece of mail addressed to “MS MONMONIER.”

Is there a board that adjudicates these issues?

Mon2ier (talk) 01:27, 20 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Hello Dr. Monmonier,
 * Thanks for taking time to write a detailed reply to my comment. Please note that the reply should have been posted on your talk page, but I assume that this is simply an issue with you being new to wiki-editing. Please find more help at WP:HELP.
 * As for you editing your own page, this is not considered kosher per wikipedia standards. Even Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales attracted controversy by editing his own page. see here.
 * The best way to change something when you have conflict of interest is to add a comment on talk-page of the article. Please see more details on Conflict of interest.
 * I welcome you to wikipedia and hope you will contribute by editing in areas of your interest. Thanks. GreaterPonce665  (TALK) 17:20, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Preferences to certain part (e.g. name) are not something you can have control over. Since it is your government name, it will stay. GreaterPonce665  (TALK) 17:25, 20 September 2021 (UTC)