User talk:Hecnevill

February 2019
Please do not add commentary, your own point of view, or your own personal analysis to Wikipedia articles, as you did to Warrenton, Virginia. Doing so violates Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy and breaches the formal tone expected in an encyclopedia. Thank you. John from Idegon (talk) 20:10, 16 February 2019 (UTC)


 * This was not a point of view or commentary. Wikipedia's entry on Lynchings in America reads: "Lynching is the practice of murder by a group of people by extrajudicial action...The purpose was to enforce white supremacy and intimidate blacks through racial terrorism."


 * The intent of the edit was to keep the terminology of what lynching is in keeping with contemporary understanding and scholarly research. If I change the edit to read "this act of racial terror" and cite the wikipedia page, would that be allowable?

Hecnevill (talk) 22:36, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia articles are created by paraphrasing reliable sources. You cannot use Wikipedia as a source and you cannot interpret anything. If it isn't in the source, it doesn't go here. If you disagree, start a discussion on the article's talk page and attempt to gain consensus for your change. What, by your own account, you've done is called WP:SYNTH. There is reliable sources saying there was a lynching. You believe (and whether your belief is accurate or not is irrelevant) you have another source that says lynching is terrorism. You made a change to the article characterizing the act discussed in the article as terrorism. You cannot do that, no matter how good your sources are that characterize lynching as terrorism. That is simply not what an encyclopedia (any encyclopedia) is for. All we do is report on what the sources say. We do not infer anything. John from Idegon (talk) 22:54, 18 February 2019 (UTC)