User talk:Arthurborges

Unjustified deletions of Gavin Menzies 1421 and 1434 books
It has recently come to my awareness that the individual pages for Gavin Menzies books 1421 and 1434 have been deleted by a couple of troublemaker vandals who are attempting to call it a "merger" which is just a lie because all of the original information in the 1421 and 1434 articles have been deleted. The articles themselves are extremely biased and contain alot of personal attacks against Gavin Menzies, despite Wikipedia's policy of Biographies, that they must not be libelious against the said person. If you look at the history of both 1421 and 1434 as well as the Gavin Menzies page you can see that there are a couple of misfit vandals who consistently edit war until the article itself retains a biased bigoted stance against Gavin Menzies and his books. Virtually no neutral point of view has been established in these three articles as it seems there are a small minority of troublemakers who want to suppress and prevent Gavin Menzies information from either going public or gaining legitimacy.

I propose that all the said deleted articles must be restored to their former glory and that the three articles be edited in a good faith manner to maintain a neutral point of view. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.68.249.69 (talk) 01:30, 13 May 2010 (UTC)


 * This guy was a troll, writing stuff like "we simultaneously represent the collective sentient cerebral function culminated from the populous of our infinitesimal minute planet Earth. ". Dougweller (talk) 11:02, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

====

I fully support inclusion of text on 1421 and 1434. Obviously, if correct, his first book's theory robs Christianity of the credit it takes for discovering the entire world and reduces the likes of Columbus and Magellan to piggybacking on Zheng He's exploits. Meanwhile, his second book undermines the credit Christianity takes for jumpstarting the Renaissance, a term that, by the way, nobody used until the 19th century. --Arthur Borges 07:27, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree that Menzies' theories are attractive from an iconoclastic perspective, but because they are based on weak assumptions and inaccurate data it is highly unlikely they are correct. There may be some who feel threatened by the theories' challenge to cultural and academic assumptions but the theories' lack of support in the academic community is well founded on methodological and logical bases. As many of his readers have discovered, Menzies is a poor historian. The question of merging Menzies' books with the biographic article has been discussed at length on the talk pages. Joja lozzo  13:47, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

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November 2009
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May 2010
Thank you for your contributions. Please remember to mark your edits, such as your recent edits to Gavin Menzies, as "minor" only if they truly are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes, or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Thank you. ''Hi - this was in no way a minor edit. Editors should be able to ignore minor edits on their watchlist knowing that Minor edits do not include changes in content. Some of your changes may have been acceptable (although some needed sourcing), others suggested that it's only Western academics who agree with him which is simply not the case. In addition, Menzies doesn't present archaeological evidence, he presents alleged archaeological evidence, a lot of which is just rubbish.'' Dougweller (talk) 10:59, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

I had not read the Wiki definition of "minor" and apologize for the inconvenience caused. I am now informed and shall strive to apply it.

In reply to your assessment of Mr. Gavin's work, I would like to think you read 1421 and 1434, which run to 629 and 345 paperback pages respectively, not counting the indices. Of course, bits of old wood, stone towers and pottery shards definitely qualify as rubbish in the eyes of your average beachcomber, but beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and archaeologists are notorious for writing long articles on bits and pieces of rubbish found here and there.

The trouble with Mr. Menzies' work is that he has opened a can of worms and each requires individual treatment for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. That will take time.

Moreover, Mr. Menzies is out to share a personal adventure and writes like an explorer, which obtains style and anecdotal add-in content foreign to the rules of academic writing.

Finally, when it comes to extraneous content, the inclusion of the anecdote about the accidental collision of HMS Rorqual with a USN vessel is entirely irrelevant to the man's thesis: the only purpose it serves is to discredit the man. Indeed, every bit of feedback I receive on him here at Wiki invariably ends with putdowns on the man.

Rewrite it as you will, but while we're throwing around value judgements here, I'll quietly contribute my opinion that some NPOV content here is simply WASPcentric POV.

Your recent edits
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Thank you for your understanding and happy editing :) Editing on behalf of User:Jarry1250, LivingBot (talk) 22:26, 14 March 2011 (UTC)