User talk:Whatisron

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Hello, Whatisron, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions, especially what you did for List of repetitive strain injury software. 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! Mirokado (talk) 15:56, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
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List of repetitive strain injury software
I have made "quite a lot" of changes to List of repetitive strain injury software, to make it confirm a little more closely to commonly accepted Wikipedia style guidelines. Your addition of Google hits is interesting, but this is not the way Wikipedia establishes notability, so these counts may well get removed, by someone else if not by me! We need reliable sources for all the information in the article. Some can perhaps be inline references to the two bulleted references already provided. Independent reviews of the mentioned software would be good too. --Mirokado (talk) 16:01, 22 October 2011 (UTC)


 * (reply moved here, outdent as an example, please remember to sign your posts with ~ )

You have correctly surmised that I'm a newbie at wikipedia editing.

When I now visit the list of RSI software page, the "Google Links" change that you made appears to be broken. Every software has the same value listed -- 18. Of course, the value is now also inconveniently located apart from the application -- pretty ironic for a webpage that is essentially about ergonomics and human factors software.

Here's the issue... Listing 20 or 30 or 100 injury prevention applications is kind-of a waste of space if it provides no guidance or comparison between the applications. Google provides far more information in a search result.

Some of the applications listed offer solutions that most injury prevention experts/risk managers/ergonomists agree are essentially useless/worthless. Some of the applications listed are extremely well-designed and supported with teams of engineers and researchers (or volunteers) and offer benefits supported by research. And some lie in-between these two points. How is a regular human visitor to the site supposed to differentiate? Well some of these apps have been around for a decade, and large companies who have done substantial professional investigation have standardized on them. In fact, 4 or 5 of the apps probably account for about 95+% of all use by experts in the field. But you can't tell that from a gentrified list that lacks any comparison. It's like listing word processors and putting "MS Word, Open Office, and Notepad" all at the same level.

To me the Google hits was an objective comparison. Rather than fussing with all the debate that might ensue if someone wrote: "App X is great" or "here's a grid of feature comparison" that would be open to debate, I used something objective and indisputable, but still provides some insight that if you have finite time you might wish to start with some well-established apps. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Whatisron (talk • contribs) 23:52, 22 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for responding. Although not everyone agrees, I think it is better to keep a conversation on one talk page, so I've moved your reply to your page along with this response (I am watching your talk page and will see your replies). The convention is to indent each reply using a leading colon as in this para, and go back to the start if the indentation gets too big (you can use the template to indicate that prettily as above).
 * Each reference now ends with a sentence such as "7 Google hits 18 August 2011." with 7, 11 etc being the number of hits. The 18 etc is the date on which you did the search. It would be better to say "7 Google hits on 18 August 2011." etc, I will do that to let the punishment fit the crime.
 * Newcomers to Wikipedia are often not familiar with the implications of reliable sources. This means that Wikipedia must report what reliable sources say, not what its editors think, or know as the result of their experience or profession or whatever. We can report what an evaluation by a reliable organisation, or a comparison in a computer magazine, preferably online, has determined about these programs, for example, but we cannot evaluate them ourselves. Thus those figures will certainly be removed sooner or later anyway.
 * It is in any case notoriously difficult to interpret Google search results and I personally would not use those figures for anything. Even when we use them in discussions about what is the best name for an article, they are regarded as a last resort.
 * I suggest you look for such comparisons and evaluations. --Mirokado (talk) 00:30, 23 October 2011 (UTC)