User talk:Alkillian

Welcome
Hello Alex. Welcome to Wikipedia. I look forward to seeing your contributions. John.Farquhar (talk) 02:59, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Welcome
Hi! I just wanted to stop by and quickly welcome you to Wikipedia. I'm helping out a bit as the online Ambassador for the "Reality Check" course, so if you need any assistance just give me a yell. You can leave a message on my talk page, or send me an email - both should work well, and I'm really happy to receive questions. I'm in Australia, so our time zones will be out of sync a bit, but I'm normally online during the mornings and evenings your time. At any rate, it should be an enjoyable course. :) - Bilby (talk) 05:43, 29 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Just want to second that. Welcome to Wikipedia, if you need help please just ask.  My area of interest is psychics and their history, so really looking forward to what you end up coming up with on Direct Voice.  Sgerbic (talk) 06:33, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Mediumship
Hi! I noticed that everyone in the course was on to the next stage of adding content to articles, which can be a tad challenging, and it seems you ran into one of the problems with sourcing. I gather you were adding:
 * Some theories proposed to disprove the idea of direct voice include hypnosis, auditory hallucinations, and ventriloquism. Psychic researchers claimed that mediums, specifically Leslie Flint, produced voices through both hypnosis and mass auditory hallucinations used on the sitters. This was disproved by evidence of actual voices through recordings reviewed later. Flint was then accused of using ventriloquism to create the illusion of another presence. This was disproved by a microphone being attached to his throat that would magnify even the slightest sound made through his larynx.

to Mediumship? If so, it was reverted on the basis of not having a sufficiently reliable source. With fringe topics, which you're being asked to work on, I find that Wikipedia often has some strict standards, mostly because these are topics where there is a lot of suspect material floating around. Thus the general rule is that we stick to what Wikipedia defines as reliable sources. Reliability, in this case, isn't as strict as what you would need to use for most academic work, but the preferred order is peer-reviewed academic papers as the most reliable sources, followed by academic texts, books from major publishers, major newspapers and media outlets, local papers, and online sources with editorial control. What we need to watch out for is anything that is self-published, as they are almost always discounted.

In this case you seem to have used a self-published source, and thus it was reverted by another editor. The content you are adding is good, though - so the next step would be to improve the sourcing. Looking around, I found a paper at: http://thegroundoffaith.net/issues/2010-10/10Neppe.pdf that says pretty much what you wanted to say, and it appears to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It isn't my first choice, but it would probably be ok with the other editors. A search on Google Scholar yields a couple more possibilities, and you might have some luck with Google Books or News (in the case of Google Books, though, watch out of publishers like Lulu, as many of their books are self published).

The other small thing to keep in mind is Wikipedia's policy on editing from a neutral point of view. Especially with fringe topics, you need to be cautious about the wording. Yours looks pretty good, but perhaps "disproved" is a tad strong - I'm not sure in this case, though, so you might want to ask on the discussion page of the article.

Anyway, nice work for a first edit. I'll be keeping half an eye on everyone in the course, so I'll help out when I can, but if you want to reach me don't hesitate to leave a message here, email me, or contact me on my talk page. :) - Bilby (talk) 02:55, 24 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Alkillian. Neppe's essay contains a bunch of WP:REDFLAG assertions, so we don't cite it blankly as if it were scientific consensus, however I added a bit of attribution and think it's fine. Good work. - LuckyLouie (talk) 00:29, 15 November 2011 (UTC)