Wikipedia talk:Creating controversial content

"excessively wordy and over-personalized"

(The following post is copied in relevant part from User talk:Nick Levinson#February 2013 and replied to here. Nick Levinson (talk) 19:50, 2 March 2013 (UTC))

.... You are obviously a skilled writer ... (though I cannot say the same for the excessively wordy and over-personalized one WP:Creating controversial content--consider whether it would be more effective if shortened. DGG ( talk ) 01:23, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

That's possible, but, short or long, it's probably going to be of serious interest to relatively few editors, and the difficulty of a project it would encompass is part of what I wanted to convey. I also don't know how much work I want to put into it, as long as it's editorially functional. I'll think about restyling it. It may be that writing a longer lead could provide a more concise version of what the body says. Nick Levinson (talk) 19:50, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Done; I expanded the lead. Nick Levinson (talk) 22:46, 9 March 2013 (UTC) (New edit summary: 23:03, 9 March 2013 (UTC))

Space kittens example wrecks the whole thing.

The reader expects useful advice about how to present something reasonable, and instead you insult him/her with fantastically hyperbolic example, and worse yet's it's something that should not actually be written about in WP at all, so you shouldn't be advising them how to get away with it. It would be much more useful to change this example to something sane, and which probably does actually happen, such as discovery of a new species by a biologist, still awaiting publication in peer-reviewed journals. Frankly, I just stopped reading after I reached the space kittens.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:57, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

I wanted to discuss fringe theory propagation for people who think they really have something, and I wanted an example that would be generalizable, was at no risk of turning into something real in our lifetimes (or ever), and wasn't already burdened by claims of truthfulness having been previously established. A proposed new species gets into a whole other set of controversies that are too specific to a particular field, and other reasonable claims may be too close to being proven or disproven to let the essay become stable. It was inspired by at least one other editor's (appropriately) failed attempt to include fringe content in at least one article.

No getting away with it is provided. Readers are told how to establish that their subject can meet Wikipedia's policies and guidleines, such as by proving it well enough for publication in a secondary source elsewhere and then, after declaring a conflict of interest, seeking coverage in Wikipedia based on the secondary source. That helps Wikipedia.

I avoided calling the subjects fringe, because, almost by definition, fringe theories are unproven or have been disproven, since those that are proven true are considered nonfringe, and proponents of a hypothesis that most of us call fringe probably don't think of their claims as fringe. I wanted to write something they'd read and maybe use as a guide.

I'll consider widening the scope to cover what may be soon to be proven true, although not to the same depth, given the above.

Nick Levinson (talk) 19:15, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Done. Coverage now also includes more common types of subjects. Nick Levinson (talk) 20:03, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Martian channels

It turns out that Martian channels are already the subject of a Wikipedia article, thus notability is already established. Better to use an example that's less likely today to fit Wikipedia without a lot of work. I'm not going back to a prior example but will use the recent one about Martian channels as an inspiration. Nick Levinson (talk) 21:19, 12 September 2015 (UTC) (Corrected by adding the sig, a few minutes late. 21:19, 12 September 2015 (UTC))