Talk:Kevin Chalfant

Editing does not simply mean deletion

Editing is not merely deleting material that is unsourced or does not make sense. In part, it is caring enough about the material you have chosen to edit to click on a link or two that may already be in the article to find the sourcing or the background, and recrafting a sentence or two (or adding a sentence or two) that gives the clarity, context, or citation that you found to be lacking when you read the article. Sometimes these omissions or this murkiness will be the result of the initial editor overly paring down redundancies in their own verbose first draft; other times it is a subsequent editor (or vandal) who has removed a section or sections.

There was a reference simply to "Ramos" in this article, implying he was a member of The Storm, though he wasn't listed in the opening sentence about that band which mentions those members of the band who were former Journey members. A visitor read carefully enough to catch this yet not caringly enough to click on the Wikified The Storm, which would have taken him to that band's page, where it clearly states in the opening paragraph that Josh Ramos was the lead guitarist for the band in question. Instead, that visitor went in and deleted the orphaned Ramos mention entirely.

Edits should not merely be done from a place of shaving things down, but from a place of bringing clarity and accuracy to an article. The lone, cryptic mention of "Ramos" at the end of that paragraph was obviously an omission of the original editor (writer) of this piece, but removing it was not improving upon that error. It did not bring the article closer to accuracy but further from it (in that it now completely omitted the man despite the fact that he was a featured member of one of Chalfant's most successful endeavors). Such activity is not helpful. Please care enough about the articles you edit to do a moment's research to find the answers to questions you may have, and then improve the article with this additional info. Some material may be so underrepresented on the web that a couple of minutes' search will not call it up, and in that case a query on the Discussion page would seem to be in order, to allow people more interested in or knowledgeable about the subject to undertake the search and/or provide the citation.

Further, the same visitor queried the claim that Chalfant was more recently the voice of the Alan Parsons Project. In this instance, the visitor did click over to the APP Wiki article, and reported in the addition of their citation request that there was no mention of this in that article. Fair enough, when there is a push to source articles; yet a quick Google search for "Kevin Chalfant" and "Alan Parsons," avoiding those articles that just copy the Wiki article in question, brings up on the first page a record company bio for Chalfant which mentions this chapter of Chalfant's and Parsons' careers. Yes, that would take another 60 seconds on top of the time it took to read the article, delete "Ramos," and add the Parsons citation request. But as an editor, do you want the result of your actions to be that nobody notices for a month or three, and so someone else (or you, later) simply arrives to delete the material, and so the article suffers by having easily citable info removed from it?

Editing articles you don't care about, and don't know about, and would not make twenty seconds' effort to research, is in my estimation closer to vandalism than it is to sincere and well-meant participation in the Wiki community. It goes against the spirit of truth, accuracy, and certifiability; as such it goes against the tradition of editors in other media and in doing so denigrates Wikipedia. Abrazame 01:55, 30 July 2007 (UTC)