User talk:Neilaveritt

A belated welcome!


Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, Neilaveritt. I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:
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Again, welcome! — Paleo Neonate  – 21:54, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Conflict of interest
I have just noticed another editor reverting some of your edits. A reference (Averitt, Neil (2015). The Single Gospel. Wipf and Stock. pp. xiii–xiv. ISBN 978-1-4982-2158-0) appears to cite your own work. In some cases that is appropriate if the source is considered already notable about a topic. I also now see this at Gospel harmony. Wikipedia is not a platform for promotion and editors are strongly discouraged from editing about themselves, their business, people they know, their works, etc. I'll leave a standard COI notice below. Thanks, — Paleo Neonate  – 02:39, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Hello, Neilaveritt. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a COI may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:


 * avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, company, organization or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the request edit template);
 * disclose your COI when discussing affected articles (see WP:DISCLOSE);
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
 * do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation (see WP:PAID).

Also please note that editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. — Paleo Neonate  – 02:39, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Hello PaleoNeonate --

Thank you for your useful message about COI policy. I can see that this is a topic about which I need to know more, and my apologies for any shortfall so far.

Here are a couple of specific observations and responses:

1. Please feel free to delete any or all of the citations to my work, The Single Gospel. I'd be saddened if you took them all out. I like to think of this book as one of the few good modern examples of the genre of "Gospel Harmony," and one that is well regarded within the theology community. But as you think best!

2. Regardless of what you do with the citations to the book, I would urge you to consider retaining the edits that I made in the introduction and "Overview" sections of the article on Gospel Harmonies. I think those edits deepened the substance of the section, and significantly improved its readability and balance. Before I began my edits there, this section devoted rather too much time to criticizing harmonies as a device by which fundamentalists could argue for biblical inerrancy. The discussion did not recognize equally important alternative uses, such as producing a readable text that could recover the gospels as a work of literature and philosophy for the general public -- including the secular public.

3. The separate Wikipedia article on "Gospels" is a different story. There I had just put in a few small entries and citations as an initial marker of my areas of interest, to see if anyone would raise an objection -- as indeed they did. I had not started on any kind of systematic editing of the text. That can wait for another day, and for a time when I am more familiar with the COI policy. Let me suggest to you in a preliminary way, however, that some sections of that article have serious problems with balance. For example, the section on "Contents" is devoted almost entirely to a list of divergences among the four gospels. That's a real issue, of course, and deserves discussion. However, many divergences are merely differences in emphasis rather than actual contradictions. More important, the divergences are just one (smallish) part of the gospels' contents, rather than the key feature. (This is something that a harmony can demonstrate . . .)

To be continued, and I hope in ways that advance Wikipedia's work. ..

Neil Averitt — Preceding unsigned comment added by Neilaveritt (talk • contribs) 20:59, 9 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Possibly that a reason for the point of view of Gospels is that Wikipedia attempts to reflect the current academic scholarship (academic bias and reliable sources). Conflict of interest in this case is in relation to your own works and does not prevent you from otherwise editing Gospels relying on third party sources.  About your works, if they are notable they may possibly eventually deserve their own article and if such article existed and subsisted (passing WP:NBOOK) then citations using it may likely be better received as well.  On the other hand, when a work or person is notable, other editors would usually have written an article on it already.  This is of course nothing personal, there are no Wikipedia articles about me (only my user page) or about my works (although there exist articles about notable software I contributed to).  This doesn't prevent me from editing on topics I like and to help improve the encyclopedia; similarly, your contributions are welcome.  — Paleo  Neonate  – 23:37, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Conflict of interest at article Gospel
Neil, I do believe your edits on Gospel are probably well-based, but on Wikipedia we can't quote our own books. Nor do I think others can use your book, as you're not a qualified biblical scholar (although I don't doubt you know a great deal about the subject). I suggest you use your sources (reliable academic books by scholars) instead. All best. PiCo (talk) 08:24, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

PiCo Thank your for your suggestions, both here and on the Talk page for the Gospel article. They will surely help to make my contributions more useful, and a better fit with Wikipedia procedures.

In the next few days I plan to put an additional entry in to Gospel talk section, to explain how I propose to respond to suggestions from you and from Editor2020. I'll then plan to leave my post up on the talk page for another week or so, to see if other comments come in. If no objections materialize, then I plan to make the edit as outlined. However, I'm entirely receptive to suggestions for other approaches.

By the way, two thoughts on your specific suggestions: First, I'll beef up the footnotes to other academic material, as you suggest. You will notice that my current draft paragraph for the Gospel article does not cite my own work. (A previous edit did, but that is now removed.) It cites instead to Metzger, a recognized authority. I think that's a good cite, but I'll add some more.

Second, and something you might ponder for the future. You might want to reconsider the types of expertise that are relevant for gospel harmonies. A skill at Greek or bible studies is clearly relevant for the passages where different gospels diverge, and for the type of harmony intended to facilitate the study of such passages. But harmonies can also be written for a different purpose: to produce an accessible and readable consolidated text for the benefit of laypersons and the general public. The task there involves arranging material more than it involves dealing with inconsistencies. The relevant skillset is more likely to involve editing and the ability to mesh separate narratives. I'll claim some expertise there. I am an academic antitrust lawyer by trade, and have spent forty years engaged in editing and in trying to tease out the meaning of divergent court opinions (four opinions, sometimes) that are all equally authoritative. This is all just something for the future, and something relevant only if some other editor wants to cite my work. But I think that the range of legitimate purposes for a harmony have been historically under-appreciated within the academy, and merit some thought.

Neilaveritt (talk) 20:55, 15 August 2018 (UTC)