User talk:Mgilles

Please discuss changes to the article Montclair Art Museum
Hi Mgilles,

You seem to be well informed about the Montclair Art Museum, a subject that also interests me, and I see you've made some good edits to the article Montclair Art Museum, although I disagree with some of your most recent changes to the article. Please take a look at my comment on the talk page at Talk:Montclair Art Museum. Let's see if we can come to an agreement on what information should be in the article. I notice that another Wikipedia account that has recently edited the article has a name very similar to yours. If you have been editing under different accounts, that's acceptable in some circumstances, but it should be declared on the user pages of each account so that other editors know about it (you can find an explanation of what's allowed and not allowed concerning alternate accounts at WP:SOCK). I'd be happy to answer any questions about that or direct you to other editors who can give you information on it if you have any questions. If you do have any questions about that, if you ask them here, I'll respond here, and please discuss the article with me on the article talk page. Regards, JohnWBarber (talk) 04:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Sourced material
Hi Mgilles,

I'm hardly a heavy contributor to Wikipedia but I've been working on various museum and other articles for a few years. There are not very many reasons to remove sourced sections of articles in their entirely. If I added a section about the Newark Museum to the Montclair artcle, it would be appropriate to remove it. And there are some sources that are not credible but those are less common. (One weird but common example is that the large majority of editors object to user created content like blogs because they're unreliable even though Wikipedia is itself user created.)

So most developed articles kind of take you were the sources lead you. Now this can lead to a distortion for an organization that has been around for a hundred years because the recent deaccessioning and Cezanne exhibit will be readily available online while older stories like the grand opening and the 1931 renovation would have been reported but those sources would require more local research to dig up. That "presentism" or whatever you want to call it can mean that recent events are given more space that more important but older events and I'm sensitive to that. Sometimes it might be appropriate to shorten such a section but more often the older sections just need to be flushed out.

Up until now, the only time I've seen editors repeatedly remove well sourced, on topic material is on corporate articles where employees of the firm are trying to suppress bad news. You may want to sleep on it and review your approach on the Montclair article.RevelationDirect (talk) 01:31, 6 May 2010 (UTC)