User talk:Croftcat

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In an email to me, you said, in part:


 * It appears that my account is blocked, and your name is associated with the notice, so I am contacting you for an explanation. This block appears to be in response to an edit I made on the "Evolution" page.  The changes I made are not major, but are constructive.  Given the controversial nature of the subject I understand that Wikipedia would be sensitive to edits on this topic.  But I thought that was what the review process was for.  For particularly sensitive topics, I can understand delaying making the changes "live" until they have been reviewed, but I don't understand placing a block on my account.  Please expedite a review of the changes that I made.  Anyone with some knowledge of evolution will confirm that the changes I've made are not disruptive, and I think most will agree that they are in fact constructive.

The problem is there's an edit filter, as you discovered and replied to, that bars the edit in question. The edit is blocked because, historically, it has been made only by sockpuppets of a blocked/banned account. I see nothing in your user contributions that suggests that this account is anything but another sockpuppet, so I have blocked it accordingly. —C.Fred (talk) 21:10, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Please do not email me further regarding your block. All discussions about your block should take place on your talk page. —C.Fred (talk) 18:27, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

--- C.Fred,

Per your request, I am communicating my previous message to you via my talk page (although I don't understand how you will be notified of this message).

I am asking you to reconsider your decision to block my account.

I assure you that I am not a sockpuppet. I have only one account on Wikipedia, which is the one I recently created. I have made a few grammatical edits anonymously, but since I was actually improving the meaning in this case I chose to create an account. I felt that was the responsible thing to do. I am asking you to do the responsible thing and review the content of the edits that I made, rather than simply assume the worst.

The text before my edits: These conditions produce competition between organisms for survival and reproduction. Consequently, organisms with traits that give them an advantage over their competitors pass these advantageous traits on, while traits that do not confer an advantage are not passed on to the next generation.

The text after my edits: These conditions produce competition between organisms for reproductive success. Consequently, organisms with traits that give them a reproductive advantage over their competitors tend to pass these advantageous traits on, while traits that confer a reproductive disadvantage tend not to be passed on to the next generation.

Note that my edits have not appreciably changed the meaning of the sentences. My intent in making the edits was to bring these sentences more into agreement with the rest of the article. For instance, enhanced survival characteristics that do not improve reproductive success are irrelevant to natural selection, so my edit simplified the first sentence by "cutting to the chase". I repeated that wording in the second sentence to emphasize the point, and added the word "tend" to improve the accuracy. The original wording implied that advantageous traits are always passed on. This is not quite accurate, since, as stated elsewhere in the article, organisms that employ sexual reproduction inherit one copy of each gene from each parent, and so may not inherit the favorable trait. The last portion of the original sentence is misstated. It says that traits that do not confer an advantage are not passed on, but this is not quite true since neutral traits do not confer and advantage, but are passed on.

So you can see that my edits were reasonable, and were well-intentioned. I am asking you to reconsider your decision to block my account on this basis, rather than basing your decision on my having inadvertently tripped an edit filter.

Regards, Croftcat (talk) 20:01, 17 July 2010 (UTC)