User talk:JustAnotherAcademic

August 2023
Hello, I'm Materialscientist. I noticed that in this edit to Deism, you removed content without adequately explaining why. In the future, it would be helpful to others if you described your changes to Wikipedia with an edit summary. If this was a mistake, don't worry, the removed content has been restored. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Materialscientist (talk) 03:37, 17 August 2023 (UTC)


 * My changes do have an edit summary. I just clicked on the edit and saw my edit summary. JustAnotherAcademic (talk) 18:00, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Welcome!
Hello, JustAnotherAcademic, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
 * Introduction and Getting started
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
 * Simplified Manual of Style

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help. Need some ideas about what kind of things need doing? Try the Task Center.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Mathglot (talk) 17:35, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

On-boarding as an academic
Hi, JustAnotherAcademic, and welcome to Wikipedia! I undid your edit at Papal infallibility, because your reasoning in the edit summary appeared to be, well, just that: "your reasoning". At Wikipedia, we call this "original research". If you are an editor coming from an academic background, that can be extremely valuable at Wikipedia, and I hope you will stay on and contribute, and lend us the benefit of your experience.

Getting on board at Wikipedia and becoming familiar with the rules ("policies and guidelines", in wiki-speak) can be daunting for any new editor, but we are all here to help. Paradoxically, there's a hill to get over for new editors coming from academia, that the average editor does not face. Please allow me to explain. In academia, the summum bonum is groundbreaking new work with original ideas, most often building on previous work, but contributing something completely new. In fact, a significant and original contribution is pretty much required to get your Ph.D. accepted and held in high regard, and to publish in your field subsequently, the goal being to advance the existing body of knowledge in a meaningful way. At Wikipedia, this is anathema. At Wikipedia, we are developing an online encyclopedia—which is to say, a tertiary source—so we are two steps removed from academic publishing. In a sense, we do the opposite of what is required in academia.

In a nutshell, here's what we do here as editors: That's pretty much it. It's very much different than publishing an academic article, where your ideas should shine; here, if anyone can detect what your views are from what you wrote, then you have failed, because you should merely be reflecting the current state of reliable sources—nothing more, or less. So getting on board here as an editor from academia means understanding this crucial point about the very different goals we have. Adding new knowledge to an article, or removing relevant, sourced content based solely on your understanding of the topic will lead to reverts (as noted above, and at Papal infallibility), and a continuing pattern of such edits may lead to having your editing privileges suspended, so I wanted to get you started on the right track early, before this becomes a habit.
 * read the reliable, independent, secondary sources about a topic;
 * distill the essence of it, summarizing the majority view and any significant minority views in your own words (and ignoring tiny minorities);
 * add your summary to the article, along with citations to your sources, and an edit summary.

I hope this helps, and don't hesitate to call upon me if you have questions or comments. You can ask questions about editing Wikipedia at the WP:Tea house and at the Help desk. You can also ask questions here on your Talk page, and include the token  with your question, and an experienced editor will drop by and answer you. I look forward to your future contributions, and once again, welcome to Wikipedia! Mathglot (talk) 18:34, 3 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Ok so if deleting isn't the proper response, what is the correct procedure when a wikipedia editor finds a source that is biased and/or misleading? JustAnotherAcademic (talk) 22:42, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Tl;dr: read about WP:Dispute resolution.
 * The gory details: Deleting may be the proper response, if justified by Wikipedia policy or guideline. They are numerous, but probably the strongest one and most often mentioned in edit summaries along with removed content, is "Unsourced", meaning that the content lacked citations to a reliable source that directly support the added content. Deleting may also be the right response even for sourced content, if the citations provided do not meet the criteria for a reliable source. Irrelevant content may be deleted, even if the information is correct, and so are the citations, if the content simply doesn't belong there; sometimes it's just a matter of topicality and just finding the right article for the accurate, correctly-sourced content.
 * With regard to sources that are biased, Wikipedia has a guideline about this, and biased sources are not forbidden at Wikipedia, and may be used under certain circumstances; see WP:BIASED for more on this. With respect to terms like biased, unreliable, and so on, Wikipedia has its own jargon and not infrequently the use of the word here does not exactly match the common meaning in English, or it takes on additional meaning here. The Glossary may help in some cases; otherwise, try sticking  in front of the term, and searching for it from the 'Search Wikipedia' input box; note that WP:BIASED for example, is a "shortcut" to a section of a guideline about reliable sources, whereas WP:BIAS is another shortcut, which leads to something entirely different.
 * As far as "misleading", Wikipedia has no special definition of this term, and so I don't quite know how to answer as I want to provide you with information that derives from policies and guidelines, and not just my own opinion. It sounds like you might mean what we call an "unreliable" source—check out Reliable sources to see if that's in fact true. If so, there are various ways to deal with it; I would start by checking the table at WP:Reliable sources/Perennial sources to see if the source has been identified already as "unreliable" or partially reliable. If not, you can search the archives at the Reliable sources/Noticeboard, and if nobody has mentioned it before, you can raise a new discussion at the Noticeboard, naming the source and asking other editors to opine about it to see if there is a WP:CONSENSUS whether the source is reliable or not.
 * There's a way that even a valid, unbiased, independent, reliable source can be used in a misleading way, even if the source per se is perfectly fine. That has to do with WP:CHERRYPICKING, that is, choosing sources in numbers that do not represent the view about an issue proportionately to the totality of sources available to choose from. Picking several outlier views about the Causes of the French Revolution to source your favorite cause is misleading, even if the sources are reliable, if they do not represent the WP:DUE WEIGHT of the available sources. (This actually happened, and led to a contentious Rfc about it.) If you meant something else by "misleading", please elaborate. Mathglot (talk) 00:32, 4 October 2023 (UTC)