User talk:Discias

Welcome!

Hello, Discias, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! -- WikHead (talk) 14:40, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
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Re: your email
Firstly, welcome to Wikipedia! You sent me an email, in which you wrote: "I disagree with the removal of my update to the wiki of Robert Gurney as it would be useful to many scientists, the time and effort to retrieve all of the papers was a useful set of information, showing Gurney's status as a taxonomist. Unfortunately, as you have removed this, his page remains undetailed and therefore does not allow any insight into his achievements.

As I see you have "RV. unsourced" the work I have contributed I suggest you look at the links I have provided, all of which relate to a paper he has published, most with links to the actual paper, which in itself, provides citation.

As for Wikisource, this is not as easily accessible when using Google to search for an author."

There are several points here worth addressing.


 * Although each paper is a citation in itself, a citation is needed to demonstrate that there are no other papers that have been omitted, or if it's only a selection, to detail who made the selection and how (in order to avoid original research). It is also needed for contentious claims, such as the claim that Gurney was still publishing 22 years after his death. I'm not specifically doubting that claim, but it is surprising, and it does need a citation for that reason. Similarly, although no-one doubts that the papers exist, I can find papers on aquatic biology by "Robert Gurney" that weren't written by "our" Robert Gurney (e.g. ). How do we know that all the papers on your list are by the same person?


 * I don't accept that Wikisource is less accessible. It is easy (and would be desirable) to add a link to the relevant Wikisource page from the Wikipedia article, using a template like Wikisource. Take a look at the featured article Thomas Henry Huxley. That article is not burdened with a long list of publications, but does link to a Wikisource page with a long list. Wikipedia is meant to be a generalist encyclopaedia, "not an indiscriminate collection of information", which means that such material belongs elsewhere, and fortunately, Wikisource is available for precisely that purpose.


 * Gurney's importance as a taxonomist may well not be fully conveyed by the article. WoRMS lists around 100 taxa he named, but that activity is not explicitly mentioned in the text (many readers will not appreciate that a monographer will almost certainly describe new taxa). The solution to that is not, however, to add a list of publications, but to add a prose description of his importance, with an appropriate reference.

In short, I think the list of publications is valuable and useful; I just think it belongs somewhere else. --Stemonitis (talk) 14:43, 26 January 2012 (UTC)