User talk:Gilbert Hardwick

January 2024
Hello, Gilbert Hardwick. We welcome your contributions, but it appears as if your primary purpose on Wikipedia is to add citations to sources you may be affiliated with.

Editing in this way is a violation of the policy against using Wikipedia for promotion and is a form of conflict of interest. The editing community considers excessive self-citing to be a form of spamming on Wikipedia (WP:REFSPAM); the edits will be reviewed and the citations removed where it was not appropriate to add them.

If you wish to continue contributing, please first consider citing other reliable secondary sources such as review articles that were written by other researchers in your field and that are already highly cited in the literature. If you wish to cite sources for which you may have a conflict of interest, please start a new section on the article's talk page and add Edit COI to ask a volunteer to review whether or not the citation should be added.

Graham87 (talk) 16:10, 3 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Hi Graham, the contribution arose from discussion with descendants of the Bussell family on Facebook yesterday on use of the word 'massacre' to describe skirmishing over land with local people during the very early settlement period. It is a small isolated settlement, not very well known or studied aside from family and local history records. You have made no comment here on whether the information is factual and reliable, only on your Wikipedia rules. The question arising is on what evidence are the engagements interpreted as massacres, and who wrote that? The word is not used in the sources cited, and nobody appears to have checked. I am retired, I have no real interest in the matter beyond querying the allegation, happy to engage the person who made it in the first place. I do not want to engage tit-for-tat political confrontation bickering over Wikipedia rules when we already have academic peer review, and would much prefer to collaborate with contributors to ensure fair and reliable articles are presented to your readership. Your further advice and assistance is welcome. Gilbert Hardwick (talk) 22:56, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Just to add, Graham, both citations have already been reviewed, the book by my collaborators and publisher, and the article by academic peer review. How is that process construed as conflict of interest? Please let me know who is your volunteer and what qualifies them in this field. I am being fair and open, hoping to collaborate to ensure Wikipedia articles are fair, accurate and reliable. Kind regards. Gilbert Hardwick (talk) 23:19, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Graham, hope you don't mind but I have received no reply from you and I wish to have this matter settled promptly and equitably.
 * My question becomes on what basis you consider a conflict of interest to be present in this matter at hand? By that I mean, conflict of interest established in fact, or to quote you here above only that "it appears as if your primary purpose on Wikipedia is to add citations to sources you may be affiliated with."
 * What is there to establish that my primary purpose on Wikipedia is to add citations to sources I may be affiliated with, and not simply to clarify facts on the basis of evidence?
 * What is there to establish conflict of interest beyond mere appearance?
 * What qualifies you to make such determination?
 * I wondered where you might be located, maybe somewhere in the US since failing to exhibit clear knowledge of Western Australian history, but your profile reveals you are from Perth, now living in Busselton, Western Australia. That means you are accessible, and I would trust available to discuss this matter.
 * Your entry, however, further states that you are totally blind, causing me to wonder how you came to read my edit in the first place. That is no comment on your blindness, only on how you were able to discern what I wrote in order to arrive at your idea of what I appear to have written, sufficient to send me this admonition on conflict of interest.
 * I have two Honours degrees from the University of Western Australia; Bachelor of Arts 1989 with Honours in Anthropology, Bachelor of Letters with Honours in English 2011, and a Masters in Criminal Justice from UWA Faculty of Law. I have over 12 years residency in the Lower SW of WA, three of which I spent as an external research candidate with the Centre for Irish Studies, Murdoch University.
 * I have numbers of peer-reviewed articles, conference papers, non-fiction, novels and novellas to my credit, primarily focused on the Australian early settlement period.
 * I know what copyright is, I know what professional ethics are, and I know what conflict of interest represents. Should you still harbour concerns as to my integrity I am happy to cite your own Wikipedia entry on the matter; namely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest
 * I will continue to look you up and attempt to make contact toward resolving these arbitrary 'appearances' you assert. Failing sensible resolution I will initiate a process of public enquiry into your methods and how you arrive at your assertions.
 * Thanks, and kind regards,
 * Gil. Gilbert Hardwick (talk) 07:56, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

I just got these messages; I don't get a notification when you write here so I had to check manually. To automatically notify me, use the ping template and sign your message with four tildes ( "~" "). Um, you're citing your own work and at the time I sent my message, that was your only edit with this account; that's about as clear conflict of interest as there is, in Wikipedia terms. Also, if you can't figure out how I can use Wikipedia, perhaps you need to check my user page a little more closely? Graham87 (talk) 16:05, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
 * As for the issue at hand, yes, all three incidents described at the Alfred Bussell article fit the definition of "massacre" described (and heavily cited) at the List of massacres of Indigenous Australians article, as at least six people were killed in each incident. I didn't add this content; the person who did was User:Mary Blight NYS|, who hasn't edited here for a while. Graham87 (talk) 16:17, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Beyond my reasonable curiosity about how humans interface empirical reality only through technology and still have a reliable grasp of said reality, and how we are to protect ourselves from it, I am not interested in how you use Wikipedia.
 * I am very concerned that Wikipedia like all encyclopedia of knowledge is true to reality; that it reliably reflects real world incidents and events not just loop endlessly through it's own closed 'terms'.
 * My first edit on a particular page under a new account name does not mean my only edit, merely part of an ongoing collaboration to correct plainly misleading edits as they come to my attention. As you live locally you are quite as free to get to know me personally, know my work, as above directly not through technology; to find I am really a very nice guy, very professional and well-regarded both locally and internationally.
 * Having said that, it's not hard to figure out how you use Wikipedia, that's not the question either, but that as an editor, from one editor to another, your obligation is to check your editing against empirical facts and evidence not political ideology. Proofreading and editing are old professions, nothing new there at all.
 * In the matter at hand I opened the new account name because I'd forgotten my old login and decided to start afresh, but that doesn't mean I suddenly appeared from under a cabbage leaf. There are several Wikipedia references to my work over a long period, long before Wikipedia even started, cited without triggering some new guy popping up insisting my sole purpose in using Wikipedia is to pursue my own self interest.
 * So, yes, I know Mary Blight, I know Bill Webb, I know the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Curtin University, and I am thoroughly familiar with their ideological position. We are both right to consider their use of Wikipedia as clear conflict of interest, not efforts to correct their ongoing propaganda campaign.
 * Accordingly, 'massacre' is not defined by the number of people killed but by the indiscriminate nature of the killing. The unprovoked, indiscriminate Hamas attack on Israeli citizens on October 7 2023 as a good example was a massacre; people defending themselves from attack, seeking to prevent further massacre, to prevent further crimes being committed, is not massacre. The Israeli response in this example cannot thus be defined as massacre, but retribution for massacre.
 * Your arbitrary deleting of reliable information I provided as only wanting to use Wikipedia to pursue my own self-interest is objectionable, unjust, and I will pursue the matter to its resolution.
 * My fair and reasonable request of you in the meantime is that you stop taking sides in ongoing conflict over how our early history is to be interpreted and written, and collaborate instead with professional, accredited historians with considerable field research and peer-reviewed papers to their credit.
 * So you are aware, I am archiving this exchange and circulating it to affected parties living in and around Busselton, hoping they will raise these matters with you separately, that together we might see justice done.
 * Thank you. Gilbert Hardwick (talk) 22:58, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Should you care to check even Mary Blight's references, you will see that she cites me as well. You still need to establish in what way my sole use of Wikipedia is in my own self-interest.
 * https://maryblight.com/2023/02/22/1829-onwards-colonial-violence-on-wadjuk-pibelmen-and-wardandi-country-western-australia/
 * I have plainly and obviously been an active participate in these exchanges for over 30 years, instrumental in restoring the remains at Port Geographe we know to be part of the events of 1837.
 * Again, you might care to join the ongoing discussion out here in the real world, and edit your Wikipedia on the basis of empirical evidence not political ideology.
 * Thanks. Gilbert Hardwick (talk) 00:32, 5 January 2024 (UTC)