User talk:Cijohn

Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. As a member of the Wikipedia community, I would like to remind you of Wikipedia's neutral-point-of-view policy for editors, which you appear to have violated at Helicopter parent. In the meantime, please be bold and continue contributing to Wikipedia. Thank you! Daniel Case 01:24, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I asked nicely above. You seem to have completely ignored our neutral point of view policy. If you continue to reinsert that material, at least phrased that way and without any direct citations, it will be considered vandalism and reported as such to administrators. Daniel Case 16:20, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Please refrain from undoing other people's edits repeatedly, as you are doing in Helicopter parent. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing Wikipedia under the three-revert rule, which states that nobody may revert a single page more than three times in 24 hours. (Note: this also means editing the page to reinsert an old edit. If the effect of your actions is to revert back, it qualifies as a revert.) Thank you.Daniel Case 17:34, 14 July 2006 (UTC)


 * OK. Thanks for getting in touch with me. I like it when even a little good faith is borne out.


 * Yes, I can be emailed via the "email this user" link on the left side of the page below the search bar. But here at Wikipedia we generally prefer to use our user talk pages (like this one), and I've taken the liberty of moving your message to mine.


 * As for "appealing" an article, I generally think the solution to that is to properly edit the article. But if you're not sure how to do it right, you can go to Template:NPOV and put the appropriate template on the page or section. I don't think that should be done, however, without going to the article's own talk page (click "discussion" under the tabs up top) and going into more specific detail about what your complaint is. If you go to the one for helicopter parent, you can see someone else thinks the article is too US-centric.


 * Now as to your specific complaint that the article should reflect also the views of parents who think the whole thing is cooked up by school administrators to disparage them: I created, and continue to add to, the article based on what I can find in Google searches (OK, a lot of it isn't adequately referenced yet, but it'll get there). I have not yet come across anyone expressing this perspective on the phenomenon ... in fact, I find more and more posts on blogs and online fora (which we tend to shy away from using as sources as they are not of the greatest reliability) where parents, as you suggested, proudly accept the label and say "What's wrong with that?" (In that light, you may find this blog post and the followup comments interesting. And the last comment on this discussion thread).


 * Of course, most of the articles I have used as sources tend to be written by reporters who talked to school administrators (mostly in college, where the phenomenon seems to be concentrated these days ... I bet it lets up in the next few years when baby boomers no longer parent the majority of school-age children) and can't confirm the accounts with the parents in question as school personnel can't give their names out. There is a potential systemic bias there, I grant, but that's what we have to work with.


 * Wikipedia cannot be used to create reality. We can only reflect it. And I have not yet found any good sources to support the material you've been wanting to add. If you find a good published article supporting your view or considering it, by all means put it in with an appropriate reference. If you want to put a tag on the article from the list I linked above in the meantime, do it and put your complaint on the talk page. Maybe that will get someone else to help. Daniel Case 14:23, 15 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I did, in fact, look at what you added and decided that we could keep it with some softened wording.


 * Funny you should mention journalism ... it was (and I guess still is to some extent) my longtime field. It certainly came in useful when I started editing here as I had already learned a good deal about writing readably, in a balanced fashion and proper style (Having started as a copy editor, I still tend to default to AP style in a lot of writing I do here and elsewhere, although I'm slowly adapting to ours). It's been very useful experience in working on current-events articles, obviously. I recently started the one on that plane crash in Russia, and I was about the second person to do Sago Mine disaster. Both articles have evolved considerably and others have done more with them than I could, but it amuses me that I can still find sentences I originally wrote in both articles.


 * I feel we could use more journalists here. With people who've been in the field for a long time at least, you don't need to teach them about NPOV. And as they say, when you write for a living, you know the importance of keeping your audience awake. By comparison, there are a lot of devoted and otherwise talented editors here who could use some remedial writing ... as an aspiring teacher (OK, I admit it) as well, I see more than enough overused passive voice and other tenth-grade writing sins as it is without even looking here.


 * But by the same token there are some journalists who ought to print out WP:NPOV and put it over their desks. I'm not saying they do it deliberately, but that they aren't sufficiently aware of the ways you can betray bias in your writing without consciously having it. Here it gets caught more frequently.


 * Maybe more journalists should work on wikinews (where you are allowed to do reporting of your own) on the side. We can cite articles there as sources, and I've always wondered if you could get original research into an article by doing an article on wikinews first (Since we're allowed to cite any of our own work published elsewhere in a reliable source when editing and writing, I don't see why not. If I went through Stewart International Airport and added references for everything, I know I'd have a lot of my own name in the footnotes).


 * As you say, and as I heard often enough in newsrooms, journalism is indeed the first draft. I would add that encyclopedias are usually the second, and some of the rules are the same but some are different (mainly that we can't do any original research here, no matter how much we want to). We should all remember here that it is inevitable that what we write will be taken as gospel by too many people since it will invariably come up at or near the top of Google searches on the subject in question (And that's a good thing. I do mean to put something on my user page or a subpage about this, but I think one of the great things about Wikipedia that hasn't been mentioned is that it takes all the stuff about something or other that floats around the Internet that you used to have search through at least several and sometimes several dozen Google hits for and puts it all in one place, with competing and conflicting information resolved. If it's done right).


 * I know exactly what you mean about the boilerplate claims that everyone props up stories with ... one thing I think Wikipedia should definitely do is gently debunk them. See one of my watched articles, New Coke. I actually liked it, I think more people did than are willing to admit it now, and I started doing some serious research a couple of months ago on that. It turns out that the popular myth that it was widely reviled is not exactly borne out by the evidence, and there was more to the story than we knew at the time. And I have meticulously sourced as much of it as I can (I added every single footnote in that article) and the worst part is that there's more to come since I realized there's a lot more I should look at (business press from that period, like the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes etc., that may have interesting tidbits). There, also, I think, the media coverage created a narrative that wasn't really real but became real.


 * I also expanded The Miracle at the Meadowlands from a redirect to pretty much its current form partly to clear up some misconceptions that have persisted about that one play (I don't know if you're a football fan or not), and did it with all the articles mentioned in the references section (yes, they will be footnoted one day).


 * And at some point when I've gotten everything I want to be in both of those articles (mainly images, but there's more research I'd like to do on both topics), I will submit it for peer review, and only after that will I consider my ultimate goal for both of them (as well as some other pots I've been stirring) nominating it for featured article status (I sometimes review nominations at the former, and it amazes me how many people here don't seem to consider what should be in a featured article. Fortunately for the project I'm hardly the only sometime FA reviewer who's a stickler about these things. But it makes better articles (I did a lot of rewrite work on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Western Front (World War I) during their nominations that helped. Both have been on the Main Page, and while I certainly don't take credit for the hard work on the articles I can take a little appreciation).


 * I see you read our policy about using blogs as sources, and paraphrased it nicely. And you have a point ... I think I can get away with citing a bunch to support an assertion that some parents feel the concern is sort of overblown and what's wrong with what they're doing. I probably can't quote any of it in the body of the article though, unless some notable writer or columnist weighs in with a similar subject.


 * It would be interesting to see what the results of any serious research into the phenomenon would be. From my experience in faculty rooms I know some such parents exist (at least in the pester-the-teacher's-inbox mode), although the reverse phenomenon, what I would call the black-hole parent (as in, every note you send, every call you make, might as well be going down a black hole since you'll never get a response) is encountered by just about every teacher; but as a parent (especially of a high-functioning autistic child I probably hover quite a bit, to the point that I'd roll eyes if I were watching myself sometimes. I can see both ends.


 * Don't worry about taking too much of my time ... that's what these talk pages are for. For my part, I'm glad this led to this, that instead of having to report you for a 3RR violation we were able to have this exchange instead (And I think this is the longest message I've ever left on a talk page, anywhere here). Daniel Case 03:29, 16 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Oh and you can and should sign anything you write on talk pages by typing the usual four tildes

~

afterwards to leave your username and the time and date. Makes it easier to get to your talk page, for one thing.