Gymboot

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. The following links will help you begin editing on Wikipedia:

• The Five Pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Editing tutorial
• Picture tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Naming conventions
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Please bear these points in mind while editing Wikipedia

• Respect copyrights – do not copy and paste text or images directly from other websites.
• Maintain a neutral point of view – this is possibly the most important Wikipedia policy.
• Take particular care while adding biographical material about a living person to any Wikipedia page. Particularly, controversial and negative statements should be referenced to multiple reliable sources.
• No edit warring and sockpuppetry.
• If you are testing, please use the Sandbox to do so.
• Do not add troublesome content to any article, such as: copyrighted text, libel, advertising or promotional messages, and text that is not related to an article's subject. Deliberately adding such content or otherwise editing articles maliciously is considered vandalism, doing so will result your account or IP being blocked from editing.
• Lastly, if you are editing an article about an individual or group of people, please adhere to Wikipedia's Biography of Living Persons' policy.

The Wikipedia Tutorial is a good place to start learning about Wikipedia. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and discussion pages using four tildes, like this: ~~~~ (the software will replace them with your signature and the date). Again, welcome! Dougweller (talk) 04:27, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Removal of cited text

You removed text cited to the Skeptical Dictionary. Various discussions have agreed that this is a reliable source, it is a website but is also a published book. You seem to have removed it because you don't like it's POV, point of view, but that in itself is not an acceptable reason. Please read WP:NPOV. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 04:35, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

December 2012

Please remember to assume good faith when dealing with other editors, which you did not do on Talk:Zecharia Sitchen. If you believe that all other editors are corrupt, you should just leave. Fighting everyone else to "right great wrongs" is not tolerated in a cooperative project. Ian.thomson (talk) 16:00, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

A summary of site guidelines and policies you may find enlightening

• "Truth" is not the criteria for inclusion, verifiability is.
• We do not publish original thought nor original research. We're not a blog, we're not here to promote any ideology.
• A subject is considered notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.
• Reliable sources typically include: articles from magazines or newspapers (particularly scholarly journals), or books by recognized authors (basically, books by respected publishers). Online versions of these are usually accepted, provided they're held to the same standards. User generated sources (like Wikipedia) are to be avoided. Self-published sources should be avoided except for information by and about the subject that is not self-serving (for example, citing a company's website to establish something like year of establishment).
• Articles are to be written from a neutral point of view. Wikipedia is not concerned with facts or opinions, it just summarizes reliable sources. Real scholarship actually does not say what understanding of the world is "true," but only with what there is evidence for. In the case of science, this evidence must ultimately start with physical evidence. In the case of religion, this means only reporting what has been written and not taking any stance on doctrine.

However much you believe in Sitchen's work, that doesn't mean it will be portrayed as truth. Reliable academic secondary and tertiary sources do not accept it as such, and so it will not be portrayed as such. Mainstream science criticizes his work, and so the only mention Wikipedia has to give him is that he is criticized by mainstream science. Wikipedia only reflects the views of mainstream science, and no amount of complaining is going to change that. It has nothing to do with "personal corruption," it is part of a site-wide social contract. If the majority can be blind and corrupt, so can the individual, especially when they're not a trained professional with regard to the subject matter. Ian.thomson (talk) 16:12, 27 December 2012 (UTC)