Aklys Erida

User:Aklys Erida

Interested in arts, history, humanities, fashion design across the world. I self-identify as an evidence-based practitioner and emphasize on the importance of good citations and verifiability of articles. I never write things out of my head or my imagination, all information are paraphrased and can be found in written somewhere else.

As a rule of thumb, I prefer and favour scholarly articles, but info from scholarly articles are usually rare and specific; therefore, I do go through books published by universities or from reliable organisation (e.g. museums) or encyclopedias. I use published university thesis only when there is a newly form of interest in academics, and it is sometimes so new that it is has not been formally published in scholar journals (of note, sometimes no scholar journals accept those types of paper due to their own publishing policies on subjects). Casual books and websites, even government websites, are sometimes reductionist and (occasionally) biased and inadequate in terms of info description content, I really only use them on last resort if little information in english can be found, but these ones need to be validated with better sources. Newspaper is only used for a punctual event or to denote the date of a new trend.

As an editor who mainly add content, I use an inclusive approach; i.e. I prefer that we have some info than having no info at all (even if sometimes, the sources is unfortunately from lower quality sources). Why? Here are some reasons:

1) I am not writing a systematic review or an RCT - those are higher level of evidence papers in academic, but I do make sure that information can be verified from a source (see my approach above).

2) Sometimes people are looking for info, and if we are restrictive that person may never know that there is some info out there being studied or even being think about it.

3) Many info from other countries are not written in English, and the information on that subject in English is limited, but it does exist. While the quality of those sources however are debatable, it can be verified from better sources in non-english sources.

4) It gives a skeleton for editors to work on and edit the text based on updated information and better sources.

Indeed, I also remind that all info (even from primary sources and secondary sources) can be biased or outdated. But at the very least, it can be double-checked further from sources. On the other hand, if there is no information then it may mean that the info was never there to begin with and people may think that it does not exist when factually it does exist - I take the example of on simple basics on how healthcare professionals have to chart their patients' medical file; i.e. "if you don't chart it, it never happened" approach.

Even when there is a need for a subject in the present field to be studied further or if there are many hypothesis which are being generated, it important to note that it is being investigated. It is a fact that a topic is being studied or need to be studied further. In scientific articles, researchers and scholars sometimes write it : "this topic needs to be investigated further" for other interested potential researchers and scholars to pick on the subject and work on it in order to bridge the gap in knowledge.

To all people who just delete things out of the blue because the sources is unfortunately substandard or just because they love to delete things as editors (without actually doing anything constructive) and are only deleting things because the info does not suit their personal tastes; instead of deleting, I suggest the following to be productive and constructive:

(1) If you can look for primary or better sources, simply double-check the info from other better sources (even from other languages or primary languages) and add the proper citations if needed (when info is limited and you spent 12 hrs looking for info, it is rude to delete everything without having done an exhaustive research on the topic yourself),

(2) Paraphrase the sentences that you do not like instead of deleting entire paragraph while making sure that it is still reflective of what is written in the source,

(3) If there is info content that you do not like in a Wikipedia page, but it would benefit to another Wikipedia page, just move it to that Wikipedia page instead of deleting it (when you simply delete info which could have benefited from another wikipedia page, you just make another editor lose much of his time having to research the info again and paraphrasing it again when it could have already been done);

(4) Please use the tag or to bring awareness of the subject to other editors.

I believe that those suggestions will lead to a more respectful communication and prevent conflicts; it will also be much more constructive for other Wikipedian editors to gain awareness on the subject and contribute further.

On a side note, when I see editors using blogs (which happens), deadlinks, links with 404 errors, and poor paraphrasing which is not reflective of the original source at all, but "deletionist" editors do not remove those ones out of their personal tastes but decide to remove info from scholarly journals and books ... I do have some reservations on that.