PHD-teacher

July 2011

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute to Wikipedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the edit you made to Pistol has been reverted, as it appears to be unconstructive. Use the sandbox for testing; if you believe the edit was constructive, ensure that you provide an informative edit summary. You may also wish to read the introduction to editing. Thank you. ℥^nding·start 22:42, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

The recent edit you made to Pistol constitutes vandalism, and has been reverted. Please do not continue to vandalize pages; use the sandbox for testing. Thank you. ℥^nding·start 22:46, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at Pistol, you will be blocked from editing.
Your edits have been automatically marked as vandalism and have been automatically reverted. The following is the log entry regarding this vandalism: Pistol was changed by PHD-teacher (u) (t) ANN scored at 0.857475 on 2011-07-17T00:41:18+00:00 . Thank you. ClueBot NG (talk) 00:41, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

On real or perceived verbosity

I appreciate the spirit of your edits aimed at removing wording that by your definition is verbose; I see that your definition probably aims toward a vision of the encyclopedia as an extremely simplistic overview for beginners, where no content can remain unless it has a reference. Valid concepts, as far as they go. However, some of the material you removed from the handgun and pistol articles has value for providing historical context. Perhaps most of it belongs in the article on the history of firearms rather than those articles. That may be; and I don't have time to really devote my efforts to that article right now; but I just wanted to put in a plug here for being conservative about slashing material that, while not needed by fifth graders, nevertheless has value to some other audiences. Sometimes a brief (e.g., one-sentence) mention of historical context is good even for fifth graders (or clueless adults), because it helps them to digest and comprehend the cold list of facts that they are reading. Thus it gives some hope that the list of facts will have some meaning, relevance, and memorability to them. Without which they are bored to death, and they think that what they're being forced to read just to jump through the hoop of doing their homework has no application to any part of life that they care about. Just wanted to share this side of content development for your consideration. Not saying you have to embrace the historian's worldview; but keep in mind that when you slash these articles down to "just the facts", you may also be slashing them down to "a list of boring trivia that doesn't tell me why I should care", at least for some of our audiences. Thanks. — ¾-10 17:13, 17 July 2011 (UTC)