User talk:Sproffit

Welcome!

Hello, Sproffit, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome!Jytdog (talk) 00:03, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
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ok, so into it!
Hi Sproffit

As I said above, welcome to Wikipedia! I appreciate that you are trying to help improve the Genetically modified organism but you are off to a rocky start. A few things - first of all, please always feel WP:BOLD and edit articles, but be ready for your changes to be reverted, as you have been now, several times. If you are reverted the wikipedia-appropriate thing to do is open a discussion on the Talk page of the article (you can find a link to the Talk page in the upper left hand of each article), about the content and why you would want to include it.... be ready to hear why others do not think it should be included! There is a useful guideline describing this, called "bold revert discuss" that you can find here WP:BRD - please read it, and please follow it. What you are doing, by simply putting it back, is called "edit warring" (please please see WP:EDITWAR and especially the section WP:3RR) -- edit warring can get you blocked from doing any more editing, and this would indeed be a very bad way to get started.

There are two issues with the content you want to add, both of which were described in edit notes, which are very good things to use to communicate to other editors what you are doing. One of the issues is that the content is non-encyclopedic in tone. The 2nd of the 5 pillars is that we write things in a neutral point of view, which means we avoid colorful and exaggerating language. Someone else noted that. My edit note asked (as I often must do) that this section not be expanded. There is a lot of history here. Briefly, about a year ago, there were several articles describing genetically modified stuff - there was GM food, GMOs, and genetic engineering. There was no article on GM crops. All three of these articles were pretty much full of the same content - namely, the whole range of reasons why people don't like GMOs. There was no information anywhere in Wikipedia on what food was actually genetically modified! I decided at that time to take all the content on the controversy, and put it in a single article, create a GM crops article, and then have each of the remaining articles actually describe their topic. This was done in dialogue on the relevant Talk pages. What are GM crops, what food is GM, what is a GMO, how are these things made (genetic engineering); Wikipedia now explains all that. And all the controversy stuff is now concentrated in one article, where it can be discussed with nuance and at length. Each of the non-controversy articles has a stub giving the high-level overview of the controversy and pointing them to the main article. The controversies article is very very long -- there is almost no end to how those stubs could be expanded if we start expanding them! Please believe me, we have a lot of people come through (mostly IP addresses) and are just bombers - and most of whom want to add lots of negative stuff - much more rarely are there people who care enough to stick around and actually ask what is going on and help improve on the work that has already been done. So that is what is going on.

If you want to discuss expanding this section, please bring it to Talk. The link is here: Talk:Genetically modified organism. New discussions go at the bottom of the page, not the top.

Again, welcome, and please avoid edit warring! Jytdog (talk) 00:16, 2 August 2013 (UTC)