User talk:HREaton

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Hello,, 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 name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place  on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Edhubbard 17:27, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
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Homo floresiensis and WP:NPOV
Hi HREeaton,

I think that you come to wikipedia with the right intentions, of adding infomation, and helping to create a worthwhile online encyclopedia, so I have added this welcome template to your page... please take some time to read over it, and get to know it.

Regarding the H. Floresiensis article, the important aspect of WP:NPOV that applies here is that, unless someone can provide a reference that there is a consensus, we cannot say so. From my own perspective, when the HF article came up for Featured article review (FAR) a couple of months ago, I had been pretty convinced by the early Nature papers, and the Falk paper that there was a new species out there, that we had missed. In working on the entry and reading all of the other articles that have been published (there's only about 20 of them) I became much less convinced, but, and this is the important point, I cannot say what my opinion on the matter is in wikipedia. Wikipedia NPOV means that I can only report what others have said. If there were something that said "the majority of scientists now believe that H. Floresiensis is actually a modern, microcephalic human" or something like that, I could, and would add a sentence very much like the one that you want to add. However, as of yet, there are no such statements. If it's not verifiable then it doesn't belong here. In addition, given that Brown and colleagues are still searching for more skeletons, we'll either find a whole population of microcephalic modern humans, which will teach us a lot about human migration patterns, or we will learn a lot about the hominid family tree. Either way, this isn't pseudoscience... it's what scientists do when they find something surprising and interesting. They work on trying to figure it out, and they debate. Our job here is not to take part in that debate, but rather to report on it. Happy editing Edhubbard 17:27, 22 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi HREaton, A couple of quick things... First a procedural thing.   You should put messages on people's "talk" or "discussion" pages, not their main pages.  I've moved your comments to my talk page, so no worries, but this way they get a message that pops up when they log in, and also they can keep their main page the way they want it, and the talk page fills up with the conversations.
 * As for your question, I'd say that there isn't enough evidence to be 100% certain one way or the other. As I mentioned, I've read all the articles, and I am much more skeptical about the claim that LB1 is a new species than I was before.  However, that is my opinion.  I am entitled to it, as are you, but my personal opinion has no place on wikipedia main pages.  What the evidence shows is that there are two competing accounts of LB1, and, to date, neither one has completely explained everything seen in LB1.  The PNAS paper from this year tries to deal with all of the unusual features of LB1, but it has to assume a statistically very unlikely combination of independently unlikely features to do so (no one has made this point in print, so even though I think it, and can share this thought with you on a talk page, again it has no place on main pages).  What I am hoping for (and probably lots of others who are interested in this debate too) is that more data will make this much clearer (one way or the other, I have no emotinal stake in the outcome, just in getting a good encyclopedia entry).  In the meantime, the best we can do is explain the data, and the controversy about its interpretation.  Best wishes, Edhubbard 22:25, 22 November 2006 (UTC)