User talk:72.225.212.67

Your recent edits
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Socialist Equality Party(United States). Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Repeated vandalism may result in the loss of editing privileges. Thank you. Wikipedia is not a place for people to push narratives. Articles on political parties are meant to portray their historical and current actions and beliefs. General Lemarc (talk) 04:02, 6 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Every word that I wrote in my edits is true. I don't know how it constitutes vandalism -- the article on the SEP was both factually inaccurate and woefully incomplete.  What would I need to do to edit an article in an acceptable way?  If you want me to cite sources, fine.  But I've been reading about the ICFI since 1980 and know about it from personal experience and from reading extremely well documented articles about, mostly published by the Spartacist League.  Yes, not an unbiased source, but neither are the writings by Healy, North and Wohlforth. 72.225.212.67 (talk) 21:11, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
 * The point of a wikipedia article is to provide facts, not to explain how we feel about said facts or our personal speculations behind them. You wrote like you were posting in a forum, complete with parenthetical sarcasm. I'm honestly not entirely sure you're being genuine rn about not having known better due to how blatantly unprofessional those edits were-you've read hundreds, if not thousands of Wikipedia articles in your life. You know they're not written like that. There is a citation generator built into the editor that allows you to input the information of your source and generate a citation that you can then paste into your edit-that's how you cite things. However, the Spartacist League is an extremely biased source. The kind of source you trust to be accurate about its own movement about as much as you trust Fox News to give you an accurate portrayal of a Republican. This is not to say you can't use biased sources-alot of political party entries will link to the party's own website for describing things like their platform, because the best place to know what they stand for is to hear it from the horse's mouth. But that only works because there's almost never a reason for a party to misrepresent its principles-everything else is a major pitfall trap in terms of bias.
 * But let's focus in on what you did. "But it's true" is meaningless if you can't back it up with a source that's either objective enough to pass muster, or meets the rather specific criteria I mentioned above to where it can be used even if it is generally biased. If you're going to add assertions that aren't backed up, they're going to be reverted. And this is the least appropriate place for editorialization, which is what you were doing. It is not our job to tell people what to think about the subjects of an article-it's our job to tell people the facts and let them use those facts to decide for themselves. You were very clearly trying to create a narrative surrounding the SEP, which is a serious no-go. If you want to actually add constructively to this article, you'll separate your personal feelings on the subject and limit yourself strictly to the facts. If you're going to say something, cite it, and make sure it's relevant to the article(this is not a place to list off every minor failing of the SEP, or whoever else in the group you dislike). If you're going to include criticism of the party within the article, make sure it serves its purpose in providing an alternative viewpoint beyond the one the party gives of itself, and phrase it in such a way that it's clear that the article itself, as a whole, isn't taking any sides. "Here's what the SEP said about xyz. But abc said the SEP was actually harmful to xyz because pickle fish lips." I'm afraid I don't actually have any specific articles I can point you towards to learn this-I picked it up because I have an autistic hyperfixation on political parties and have, at this point, visited the articles of nearly every party in every legislature in every country in every continent except(most of) Africa.
 * If you want more specific writing advice, I'm not the person to ask. Most of what I do is removing bias and improving accuracy, instead of adding whole new segments. But if you only take one thing away from all this, let it be this: your job in writing an article is never to tell people what to believe. It is to tell them the objective facts, and then let them decide for themselves. General Lemarc (talk) 09:15, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
 * There is no view from nowhere. Of course my edits reflect my opinion about SEP and ICFI.  How could they not?  Clearly the person(s) that wrote the original article either are fairly ignorant about the SEP and its history, or quite biased in their writing.  All Wikipedia articles are written from a point of view.  Since the Spartacists were almost fetishistic about documenting their history, including all of their interactions with Healy, ICFI and ACFI, supported by transcripts from their unification meetings in Montreal in 1965, I see no reason to doubt their veracity.  It is true that ICFI and the WL accepted funding from Qaddafi and the Baathists in Iraq according to their own documents at the time of Healy's ouster in 1985.  How are the Spartacist sources more biased than Wohlforth's writings about his own involvement?  It is important that anyone interested in socialism and Trotskyism learn the actual history of the movement, including the past of the SEP.  Perhaps the main issue is citing sources?  In writing about a political group or historical event or historical players there is no such thing as not having an opinion and having it be reflected by the writing.  See E.H. Carr's "What is History," Chapter 1 for an overview of why "simply giving the facts" about historical events does not in the slightest remove bias.  72.225.212.67 (talk) 20:19, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
 * " All Wikipedia articles are written from a point of view." No they aren't. They are written to be as objective as possible, and that's not up for debate. You're not going to convince me, or anyone else, that it's somehow impossible to not be biased when covering history. But it's not my nor anyone else's job to convince you of that; believe what you want. Unlike in a communist system, it's a free country. But if you're going to try and write articles based on this nonsensical assumption that because everything is some form of biased you can be as biased as you want, you're going to keep getting reverted and warned until an admin starts taking action against your account, because if you repeatedly do what you did before you're going to be seen as vandalizing the article, leading to mods getting involved and you potentially getting banned if you keep trying to do it. All I'm trying to do is stop that before it starts. General Lemarc (talk) 21:45, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm belaboring the obvious by saying that there is no such thing as history or news presented from a neutral point of view. It is a foolish pretension.  I really do recommend you read Carr's "What is History?"  An excellent historian (in spite of not being a Marxist) he spends an entire chapter discussing the issues of "Facts versus points of view."  Now, you might argue that my position is so biased as to do violence to the known facts -- I know that is not the case, but I'm likely far more familiar with the SEP and its history than you are.  But to argue that one can write about history or a political movement(!) without (consciously or unconsciously) it reflecting the writer's perspective is, at best, misguided. If the idea is that if you only include facts, no bias will emerge, that is also a mistake.  Which facts among an almost limitless number of facts does one include?  The ones that the BELIEVE are pertinent.  Thus, a bias comes into play even thought the facts are veridical truths.  Nothing I wrote in my edits is counterfactual.  It's all true.  Do I have an opinion?  You bet. Perhaps you would be more approving if I removed my judgmental adjectives and let the readers draw their own conclusions? There's something disingenuous about that in my mind, but at least it suggests a way to make edits that won't elicit this kind of self-righteous indignation.  Oh, and thanks for educating me about the "communist system." 72.225.212.67 (talk) 16:07, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
 * "I'm likely far more familiar with the SEP and its history than you are" until and unless you can back that up with sources of sufficient quality, that means next to nothing. I'm likely far more familiar with the Prohibition Party than you are, but unless I'm sourcing what I say it doesn't belong on this site.
 * "Perhaps you would be more approving if I removed my judgmental adjectives and let the readers draw their own conclusions? There's something disingenuous about that in my mind, but at least it suggests a way to make edits that won't elicit this kind of self-righteous indignation." The fact that you seem genuinely unable to conceive of why you shouldn't have written an encyclopedia article like a forum argument is not a good sign. General Lemarc (talk) 22:40, 12 February 2023 (UTC)