User talk:HeidiStevenson

December 2011

Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Misha Norland. Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted or removed. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. You keep altering a perfectly reasonable, neutral sentence claiming that it makes no sense. There's nothing wrong with claiming that A says there is evidence for something but B says there isn't, and that's all this sentence says. You leave me with no choice but to call the entire section into doubt andy (talk) 11:43, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A note about your editing

Hello. I'm sorry your activities on wikipedia have got off to a bad start so let me try to explain things:

Your account is single purpose - that's simply a fact, see WP:SPA. That page says "Many single-purpose accounts turn out to be well-intentioned editors with a niche interest, but a significant number appear to edit for the purposes of promotion, showcasing and/or advocacy." So the question is, which sort of SPA are you?

At first I thought the former - you simply disagreed with my edits to the article, which is fair enough. In wikipedia if someone reverts an edit you made it's considered good form to either try to correct the problem or discuss it privately on their talk page. So, thinking that you had misunderstood the text of that particular section, I rephrased it. It is after all perfectly sensible for people to disagree over whether what purports to be evidence actually is real evidence - it happens in every area of life from the Loch Ness Monster through to the Chancellor's Budget predictions.

I was extremely disappointed that although you must have seen that I was acting in good faith and trying to accommodate your objections you simply repeated your edit saying that it made no sense. Wikipedia tries to work by consensus and it was clear that you were not interested in achieving a consensus. Apart from being somewhat rude that is certainly disruptive, something that is seen as a cardinal sin in Wikipedia. Hence my warning to you, which is a standard warning used throughout wikipedia wherever editors come across disruption. The agreed form of words can be found here.

So it now seems to me that your intention as an SPA is "to edit for the purposes of promotion, showcasing and/or advocacy". I'm confirmed in that by your comments on the article's Talk page where:

a) You were attempting to disparage a different point of view (mine)

b) You did not appear to be familiar with the extensive material that I had linked to - the section is about efficacy and the linked material states that "Homeopathy's efficacy is unsupported by the collective weight of modern scientific research". We really can't have one part of this encyclopaedia at odds with related material in another part

c) You are either unfamiliar with or not interested in the requirement that statements in wikipedia must be provable and neutral. Which is better: "Jimmy has sighted the Loch Ness Monster many times" or "Jimmy claims to have sighted the Loch Ness Monster many times despite overwhelming evidence that the monster does not exist"? Most wikipedians would say the latter and, if you're interested, there's a whole essay about it here. Let me draw your attention to the following in particular:

Neutrality requires that each article... fairly represents all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint... articles should not give minority views as much of or as detailed a description as more widely held views...

In articles specifically about a minority viewpoint, such views may receive more attention and space. However, these pages should still make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint wherever relevant and must not represent content strictly from the perspective of the minority view... the majority view should be explained in sufficient detail that the reader can understand how the minority view differs from it, and controversies regarding aspects of the minority view should be clearly identified and explained...''

andy (talk) 15:56, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In response to your feedback

We disagree, Wikipedia follows specific guidelines on original, verifiable, cited, and valid citations to back up contributions. It's true that crazy people get on and add some random stuff, but we're doing our best to revert every form of what that's called, Vandalism. If people give out bogus external links or citations, we remove them. It may take a while, but it gets done.

Abigail was here :D (Need Some Help? Click Me!) 11:30, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]