Hazanian

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Hello, Hazanian, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of your edits to the page G. Harrold Carswell have not conformed to Wikipedia's verifiability policy, and have been reverted. Wikipedia articles should refer only to facts and interpretations that have been stated in print or on reputable websites or other forms of media. Always remember to provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is likely to be challenged, or it may be removed. Wikipedia also has a related policy against including original research in articles.

There is a page about the verifiability policy that explains the policy in greater detail, and another that offers tips on the proper ways of citing sources. If you are stuck and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on your user page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!  Kateshortforbob 15:43, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

G. Harold Carswell

In reply to your message on my talk page, no I don't have any connection to the subject. As I explained here, I came across the article when working on an unrelated Wikiproject, and the large block of unformatted, unsourced text caught my eye. As you can see if you look at my user page, I live in Northern Ireland, work in computers, and have no relation to the American legislature or any kind of conspiracy. Throwing around baseless accusations that I have is not a great way to get your point across. Additionally, editing Wikipedia is not a "job"; it is a hobby. I, and almost all of those involved in Wikipedia, are volunteers. We contribute to Wikipedia because we find it enjoyable, because we admire what Wikipedia is trying to do, and for myriad other reasons. I have no strong feelings about the subject of this article, but I do want to improve the quality of Wikipedia, hence my edit. You may wish to read some of the links I left for you above, and possibly the article on Wikipedia, to get a clearer idea of what we actually do here. --Kateshortforbob 09:51, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Michael - thanks for your message. (By the way, there's no need to blank previous messages, you can just reply beneath them. You can use a semi-colon (:) at the start of a line to indent it, if you find it easier to read). In answer to your questions, I'll try to explain again.

I recently volunteered for the Military History project which is attempting to categorise all articles relating to military history. The explanation page can be found here. The idea is that volunteers are given a random list of articles which has been made by running a script to find all articles which mention (for example) the American Civil War or the Royal Navy or something similar. This script turned up 165000 articles which may or may not have some association with military history. I chose a section of the list at random, and began reading the articles to see if they have anything to do with military history. If they do, I leave a message on the article's talk page, and more experienced members of the Military History project can come along and further categorise the articles, and improve them if necessary. If the article isn't related to Military History, I put a line through it and move on. You can see the listing for the Carswell article here. If you look at the writing after the article title, you can see that it was put on the list because Mr Carswell has some relation to Georgia. For some reason, the automatic script thought lots of things related to the Southern states had some connection with military history, probably because of the Civil War. In this case, the article didn't have anything to do with military history, so I put a line through it. In the course of reading the article for this task, I noticed your addition. I believed the way it was written (structure, format and content) and the lack of any verification were inappropriate, and removed it. Your edit was not "flagged". You were not picked out. There is no cabal or conspiracy on Wikipedia. I can't tell you whether there is one in the community where the events you describe occurred. What I can tell you is that I spent the afternoon checking every search result on Carswell, and can find no reference to what you have written about. (I realise it was in the 1970s and therefore web searches are not infallible. However, I would have expected someone to write something about it in the intervening years.) I have found sources that say he was a rather unpleasant man; I have found sources that say he was a poor choice for the Supreme Court; I have found plenty of sources that say he was mediocre. Unless the court records you mention can be sourced, and unless they say categorically that G. Harrold Carswell murdered this man (whose name you haven't mentioned) and as you imply, sexually abused boys, what you are doing is original research and synthesis of available facts, not to mention a fairly severe violation of the policy on neutral point-of-view. Wikipedia is, essentially, a place to repeat research that others have already published, and verifiability, not truth, is the threshold for inclusion here.

I'm sorry for the lengthy reply, and all the links, although I would urge you to read some of them. It has been suggested that we request comments in order to resolve our disagreement on this article. The Request a Comment (RFC) process allows other, unrelated editors to give their input, hopefully in order to produce a consensus with which to move forward (Wikipedia thrives on consensus). If you would like to go down this route, I can file the request. If there's anything I can help you with, or you'd like to discuss this further, please let me know. --Kateshortforbob 23:20, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Request for Comment

I have opened a Request for Comment on this article. --Kateshortforbob 11:16, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Michael, can you please participate in discussion, before re-adding your unsourced original research to this article. Three editors (including myself) have agreed that the text as it stands shouldn't be in the article, and the discussion is ongoing at Talk:G. Harrold Carswell#Request for Comment: Information about crime. Thanks --Kateshortforbob 16:41, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Can I add to that request? The text you seek to add contains some highly questionable claims. The fact that Harrold Carswell is dead does not mean that any claim can be made about him: verifiability is the foundation of Wikipedia, and your claims cannot be verified until you provide sources for them. I note your insistence that there are court records that document what you are writing; if so, could you tell us where they are? Sam Blacketer (talk) 22:29, 6 December 2007 (UTC)