User talk:HartleyTom

Note for editors
My real life name is Tom Hartley.

I am a neuroscientist and lecturer in Psychology at the University of York, UK.

Please note, I previously edited Wikipedia from a pseudonymous account, and I have created this one to comment on pages on topics related to my research in an identifiable way. My understanding of wikipedia policy (fairly vague) is that directly editing pages linked to research I have published could be perceived as problematic, and I want to make sure that I can thus be identified where this might be an issue.

If it becomes an issue I am happy to confirm my identity and you can contact me at the email address on this page.

HartleyTom (talk) 14:05, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

HartleyTom, you are invited on a Wikipedia Adventure!
 The Adventure

Welcome and thanks for your comment at WT:WikiProject Neuroscience
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! I'm especially happy to see a fellow neuroscientist editing here, and I also appreciate your care in adhering to WP:COI. There are a couple of other editors who are more directly hippocampal experts than I am, so for the moment, I'm going to keep an eye on the discussion and I'll step in and make the expansions if nobody else does. But I do want to explain that "importance" rating to you, because it's a question that arises often. It's not a disparagement of the importance of the subject, even though it kind of sounds that way. Rather, it's a classification that every WikiProject on Wikipedia uses, in order to prioritize editing. The highest level of importance is reserved for topics like brain, human brain, nervous system, neuron, and synapse; an individual type of neuron would be very unlikely to include there. Please feel free to get in touch with me on my user talk page any time, if you have any questions about editing here. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:35, 29 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks Tryptofish. That's very helpful. HartleyTom (talk) 10:39, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Some edits
As part of the wikipedia policy I am obliged to wait 4 days and make 10 edits before uploading a figure. So here are some edits. I may as well use them to make some points about why, after joining wikipedia with a pseudonym in 2004 and being a relatively early adopter and enthusiastic wikipedian, I came to abandon editing here, why I am back under my real name, and how wikipedia's policies (and their interpretation) discourage editing and contributions from academics and researchers.

Wikipedia is really, really one of the coolest things that human beings have ever done. The fact that it has been built collaboratively is, frankly, amazing.

When I started I understood the basic idea of wikipedia's principles. These are now listed as The Five Pillars. I found again and again the spirit of these principles was not embraced by some of my fellow editors, who tended to be among the more active. Many of them seemed to have difficulty with items 4 and 5:
 * Editors should treat each other with respect and civility - this part especially: "... avoid edit wars, and never disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. Act in good faith, and assume good faith ...";
 * Wikipedia does not have firm rules - they didn't understand the injunction to be bold, they weren't sufficiently flexible in the interpretation of the policies

There was then, I felt, a tendency for very active editors to go around like 'traffic wardens' and unappointed 'referees' of wikipedia exercising their own idea of authority and damaging the project while actually not writing or contributing very much. I think the officious tendency have tended to deter others from making more positive contributions. In the long run this has had | bad consequences for the project as a whole which is very sad.

December 2013
Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=585117376 your edit] to Boundary cell may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "{}"s. If you have, don't worry: just [ edit the page] again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=User:A930913/BBpreload&editintro=User:A930913/BBeditintro&minor=&title=User_talk:A930913&preloadtitle=BracketBot%20–%20&section=new my operator's talk page].
 * List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:

Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 12:35, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Burgess and O'Keefe groups developed a computational model (Boundary Vector Cell - or BVC - model) of place cells that relied on