User talk:LarryFisherman23

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Hello, LarryFisherman23, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Elysia and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Elysia (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:57, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

feedback
Hi, I wanted to let you know that, unfortunately, I had to undo all of your contributions to Molecular anthropology. You added content but you did not add any sources to support the content you added. Per Wikipedia policies, when you add or change anything, the burden of proof is on you to support your edits with citations to reliable sources. If you continue to edit in the future, please keep this policy in mind, or your contributions will likely get undone again. Thanks, Elysia (Wiki Ed) (talk) 06:04, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

For me being completely new to the topic of genetics, the content added was EXACTLY the sort of background info I needed in order to parse the article efficiently without needing to read other articles first in order to understand this one. Desirable toward an encyclopedia's purpose, yes?

Unfortunately, the addition of such basic background info was UNDONE by an editor, and was not just left in place while simply noting a perceived need for citations. This happened despite the clear contribution of that the new edit made toward user UNDERSTANDING of the topic.

It should be noted that many of those undone edits seemed to contain basic and well-established information on the topic that should require no citations. If one writes, for example, that Einstein was the person who arrived at E=MC2, would a citation be necessary? No, the info is now part of widespread consensual knowledge.

Explaining processes in cells that I forgot from 40 years ago in some biology class is similar. It's always a judgment call about what requires citation, yet it should be obvious to both scholars and non-experts that only unique or potentially disputed statements need sourcing.

Meanwhile, other portions of the same topic page also contain no citations whatsoever, while additionally being essentially unreadable because of extremely poor grammar. Yet those portions remain untouched. (See my comment on the talk page.)

In any case, edits and deletions of edits should be weighed on whether they enhance or detract an article's ACCURACY and CLARITY. The ultimate customer is the reader, not some editor's momentary perception of conformity to some always-changing ruleset.

Beyond a vaguely and inconsistently applied application of one person's subjective interpretation of Wikipedia policies regarding "burden of proof" (especially when helpful fundamental information is being contributed), there was no real help to us USERS by undoing the new clarifying information. In fact, the opposite occurred. 47.12.251.109 (talk) 20:42, 15 August 2021 (UTC)