User talk:Peter Ingle

New Material
Hello Peter, thank you for helping expand the article on the Fellowship of Friends.

I would like to make a few suggestions on how you could review your contributions in order to keep the article closer to Wikipedia standards.

Fourth Way. It seems that much of the material you added refers to what are the teachings of the Fourth Way. This might be better used to expand the Wikipedia article on the Fourth Way, which is fairly short at the moment. So you might rephrase what you have written so as to make it clear what beliefs and practices (or which of their aspects) are specific and unique to the Fellowship of Friends, and which parts are shared with the general Fourth Way teaching - in this latter case you can just write a short summary and use a link to point the reader to the Fourth Way article for more in-depth treatment.

Copying. Please make sure that when you are quoting, you make it clear that you are quoting entire paragraphs from a website and that this was not written by you. Put the entire quote in quotation marks and say (in words) where you are copying it from. Better yet, avoid copying entire paragraphs - Wikipedia is supposed to be written by its editors. Rephrase/summarize the source or sources in your own words, making sure that you do not alter the meaning.

Factual information. Please avoid persuasive and emotional language in Wikipedia entries. Do not address the Wikipedia reader directly (e.g. "You may be thinking: Can I not remember myself...") This is an encyclopedia. Think of what you would expect to find in an encyclopedia. The Fellowship newsletter is a different text type altogether and is written in an appropriate tone for a newsletter. That is why it cannot be copied here directly. Wikipedia is not the place to engage the reader in experiments with divided attention, the newsletter is. For example, you cannot write in an encyclopedia: "Esoteric schools of the past have always emphasized self-remembering as the way to awaken higher centers." This is not referenced, not a fact that has been (or is likely to ever be) independently researched and proven. It presupposes a Fellowship of Friends world view not shared by the majority of Wikipedia readers. It is an opinion: please present it as such. It is fine to include it in the article as long as you say something along the lines of "One of the central tenets of Robert Burton's teaching is that there have been a number of esoteric schools in the past (you can list them here if you have the appropriate references), which have always emphasized self-remembering as the way to awaken higher centers."

Terminology. Your contributions use terminology that is specific to the Fellowship/Fourth Way and not explained elsewhere in the page on in Wikipedia, which makes the article difficult to read and understand for someone not acquainted with this language. (E.g. I's, divided attention, higher centers, lower centers...) If you decide to keep that terminology, please expand the Terminology section of the article (including appropriate references), and change unknown words into links to the Terminology section. Better yet, in as far as that is possible, try to write the article in such a way that it will be understandable to the average person without prior knowledge. You might also want to think of it as a coherent whole running from the beginning to the end: so for example do not talk about self-remembering before you have defined self-remembering. Perhaps the terminology section could also be moved higher up in the article.

In the end, thank you again for your contributions, I see that you are indeed trying to be objective. Wine-in-ark 18:12, 25 March 2007 (UTC)