User talk:Kiwimystic

May 2013
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Thanks for the advice. I've been trying to figure out the protocols. I expected the editing technicalities to be easy to figure out (having been a professional editor most of my life) and didn't realise so much programming would be required, so I may be out of my depth! I have copied the draft article to my sandbox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kiwimystic/sandbox since the protocol seems to require that I don't put it on my user page, deleted it from the user page and replaced it with some explanation of why I'm providing it. Please read that if you have time.

If it is possible for you or someone to make whatever corrections are necessary to enable publication, please do so and advise me when done! Alternatively, if you have time to advise me what I need to do in order to get the result myself, I'd really appreciate it. In the interim I will invest time in trying to figure out what else must be done to get there. --Kiwimystic (talk) 08:35, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Things to work on at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Mythistory
Hello, a few points about your draft (which has not yet been formally reviewed due to the backlog of articles)
 * First, please see Referencing for beginners for some great advice on how to do automated footnotes (the little blue-linked footnotes]], so you won't have to just type "[pg4]" into an article. That way if you or someone else moved text around, the footnotes will automatically renumber, whereas your "[pg4]" will remain "4" no matter where it's pasted in the article.


 * Secondly, if I understand right, the draft includes your own personal observations about the neologism Mythisory. This is WP:Original research and not admissible on Wikipedia. OR is fine (and generally required) in academic journals, news articles, etc., but Wikipedia is a WP:Tertiary reference, that is a compilation of already-published concepts, not a place for new insights and interpretation.

Just a few pointers that may help your article get approved further into the process. It's also help your case greatly if you can put in some footnotes to other books that explore the term, to show it's not just one or two authors who use the word. MatthewVanitas (talk) 20:37, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

....................................................................................................

Thanks, Matthew. I checked out the Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners page as you suggested but did not find a section for "automated footnotes": could you be more specific as to which section on that page explains the procedure? I read it carefully to try and discern which applied but it was too obscure. I'm willing to try - I did do computer programming at university back in the archaic era (1969) but didn't expect to have to learn another language here to get the page up & running.

I'm concerned about your second point. Naturally I'm not intending to breach any protocol, but not sure how to proceed. I did publish the essay I wrote on the topic on my website before importing it here. Is that not acceptable? Further, there are only two academic source texts available in print form and I have quoted from both extensively to do justice to the topic. Other writers have published online just like me, but rather than addressing the topic itself (mythistory) they have merely applied it to particular ethnicities or situations.

Are you meaning to imply that online publication is unacceptable as a source?? Are you meaning to imply that only academic are allowed to participate in Wikipedia?? I'm puzzled. I thought Wikipedia was a crowdsourcing design. Am I wrong? I've been using it more often the last couple of years as it seems so useful and helpful. I would be rather a disillusioned fan if I couldn't publish the page as intended!

Of course, I understand that original opinions and insights can be too subjective to include here. However the relevance of mythistory to the general public cannot be delineated by historians writing for an audience of other historians. Neither of the two source texts explains the social psychology involved when people in a group are moved in political action, religious fervour, or cultural development by the particular mythistory that collectively motivates them in unison. Social psychologists apparently have yet to spot the import & relevance of the concept to their field. I just happen to be the first cab off the rank. If someone else was better-positioned to get the job done I would happily defer to them as my time is valuable.

My degree was in physics - totally irrelevant - but I developed the skill in transcending subjectivity in writing when I had to produce multiple drafts of different group constitutions years ago. I've worked hard on the essay to eliminate all non-essential subjective views. In providing my essay here I'm hoping to perform a public service. If the explanations I have provided that make the concept of mythistory intelligible & relevant to non-academic readers of Wikipedia, I'll be successful. Any editorial amendment from others that serves that purpose is entirely appropriate. I'd be surprised if my explanation of the relevance of the concept is flawed but I'm open to the possibility. If you can see something that ought to be changed, why not specify the section concerned? I assume others will if necessary... Kiwimystic (talk) 08:58, 15 June 2013 (UTC)


 * No worries, happy to help.
 * A much simpler explanation of specifically the footnotes code is here: Footnotes
 * It's not that online publication is unacceptable, or that only academics can participate, but the issue is that information has to be WP:Verifiable, so information should be traced to somewhere with some kind of authority. If an item is published online on BBC's site, or some online collection of presentations from a UCLA symposium, etc, then we have a presumption that an established content publisher has reviewed the material and found it to be correct within their guidelines. If, however, there's a PhD-style paper on someone's personal Geocities page, no matter how great the paper is we have no evidence that it's been peer-reviewed, fact-checked by a publisher, etc.

In terms of the primary issues with the draft:


 * You quote extensively from the published works, which brings us uncomfortably close to copyright violation. Whole paragraphs in a row are just "So-and-so said:" followed by a large block of copyrighted text. Even aside from the copyright issue, it doesn't really help readers to just have big swathes of a book: an article has to summarise key points, with the occasional short and very evocative quote as appropriate.
 * It's written like an essay, not an article. You've added a lot of your own interpretation with phrases like "irony perhaps intended",
 * So far as WP:Original research (a policy worth at least a quick skim), there are parts that seem heavily OR, such as when you discuss Nazi mythistory, but you don't provide any footnotes claiming that Mali or McNeil ever labeled Nazi beliefs as "mythistory". Maybe they did, and that'd be useful to cite, but it is totally OR for a WP editor to decide "hey, this mythistory paradigm really applies to the Nazis". Such an observation would be great in an academic journal, magazine article, etc., but it doesn't fit into a WP:Tertiary source like Wikipedia. Fundamentally, encyclopedias are not places to put forth new ideas, they are there to summarise existing thought.
 * The article is also not written in an accessible encyclopedic way. It's very dense, with long sections on concepts, etc., and many long quotes. An article about an academic theory should present a) what it is (and who/when/where/why), b) some brief summaries of what the theory entails, and then very importantly c) the impact, criticism, effect/legacy of the idea.
 * As in the preceding, the article needs to be about the concept of mythistory. A short article but decent example is Herstory. The article explains what the concept is, who coined the term, some examples of its usage, criticism of the concept, etc. The article Orientalism (book) leans a bit towards OR, but overall gives a decent view of Said's historiographical theory.
 * Glancing around GoogleBooks, there seem to be a number of authors who have used the term, so I think the concept does rate an article. There's some criticism piece on the Kenyon Review, various articles in JSTOR (if you have access to a university that has free JSTOR for faculty that makes it easier). The idea appears to be worth writing about, but has to be written as an article similar in feel and structure to other WP articles. And it has to be free of personal interpretation: event X can only be labeled as "mythistory" if it has been documentably described as so by/in some authority, for example.


 * Here's my overall suggestion in rough outline (and the examples are just made up, not binding or anything, just giving a feel for composition):

Mythistory is a theory of historiography which states that ????????????. The term was first coined by McNeil in 19?? at a symposium about ??????. The theory was later used by authors such as ????? and ????, applying it to the studies of social phenomenon such as ???????. [optionally] While the theory has found currency among the ???????? academic community, the opposing ?????? movement discounts it in favour of the ??????? theory by Competing Academic So-and-So. Despite the controversy, the concept of mythistory has had an impact by ??????????.

--Concepts-- McNeil, and later Mali, defined mythistory as ????????. This can be broken down into ??????? basic components. ---Later developments--- In 20???, sociologist ????? proposed adding an additional factor to the defintion, due to ?????. Mali, however, rejected this addition because ???????.

--Usage-- Among the academics who have applied the label and theory mythistory to their work are ?????, ?????, and ?????. The have used it to help explore the concepts of ???????, during times and places such as ????????. --Criticism-- When McNeil first announced his concept, it was derided by Dr. ???????, who alleged "it is simply a ??????", and wrote an article in Annual Journal opposing the idea, leading to a rebuttal my McNeil in the next edition.


 * Does the above give some sense of what we're aiming for? MatthewVanitas (talk) 17:57, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

It does. My instinctive reaction was that I'm not the right person to do the job. I decided to think about before responding to see if I could overcome that feeling. I think not. The procedure you outline threatens to render the topic irrelevant to readers, so while I accept that you are motivated by fidelity to the Wikipedia editorial process, I cannot accept that it is in the public interest to be that minimalist.

It's like removing all the soft tissue from a person and presenting the skeleton to an intergalactic court as being the essence of a human being. I understand that reductionism is the traditional path to objectivity, of course (I was brainwashed according to that prescription before graduating with a BSc in physics long ago) but practitioners often fail to notice when the baby vanishes with the bathwater.

Thus I could never agree that "mythistory is a theory in historiography" as you put it, even though you are quite correct! It is so much more. It is what people do collectively, to represent their collective identity. The mass psychology is tacit more than explicit. Wherever political or religious propaganda is active at the interface of the history of a people and their view of themselves as a tribe or nation, you can see a mythistory functioning to mediate between particular myths and particular versions of their history.

So I suspect I am too much of a natural advocate of the concept to be able to advance the page through Wikipedia's in-house publication process. Can we post a notice to Wikipedia contributors who are accomplished at using the process, in the hope that one of them has a background in history, and is sufficiently open-minded to be able to transcend normal academic specialisation and tunnel-vision, and redraft the page suitably to make the content widely accessible?

Kiwimystic (talk) 08:20, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation
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Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Mythistory concern
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Your draft article, Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Mythistory


Hello Kiwimystic. It has been over six months since you last edited your WP:AFC draft article submission, entitled "Mythistory".

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Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. HasteurBot (talk) 14:06, 4 February 2014 (UTC)