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Welcome to my talk page. I prefer to collapse old discussions instead of using User:MiszaBot.

Welcome[edit]

Welcome message.

Welcome...

Hello, Ninthabout, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like this place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there.  Again, welcome! Regent of the Seatopians (talk) 13:28, 12 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Gunpowder[edit]

Old discussion about one of my first edits on Wikipedia. The wrong page number of the book was cited, and I naively copied the ref. The ref was later fixed, with the correct page number cited. The lesson: Never trust Wikipedia.
  • I'm sorry you are a new user and some of the work that you did on gunpowder looked like WP:Vandalism. Gunpowder is a article that is regularly vandalised and has suffered severall edit wars. I'm aware that some of the text that you added came from elsewhere since you provided an edit summary for two edits. However, if you look at the revision history of gunpowder (see [1]) nearly 50% of your changes have no edit summary; and the majority of your edits on wikipeida (see [2]) have no edit summaries.
  • Your gunpowder edits also appear to be biased, you appear to be selectively adding content that gunpowder has a pro-Chinese bias and downgrading text which indicates that some scholars belive that gunpowder may have been co-discovered. You are also making significant changes to material which was provided with a citation and which the citation does not verify, for instance you changed:

"This discovery led to the invention of fireworks and the earliest gunpowder weapons in China. In the centuries following the Chinese discovery, gunpowder weapons began appearing in the Arab world, Europe, and India, although there is a dispute whether this was a spread of the original Chinese inventions, or inventions independent of Chinese contact.<ref name="Jack Kelly 2005">Jack Kelly ''Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World'', Perseus Books Group: 2005, ISBN :0465037224, 9780465037223: 272 pages</ref>"

  • to

"The consensus is that this was spread from China, through the Middle East, and then into Europe, although there remains some dispute over whether the inventions were made independent of Chinese contact.<ref name="Jack Kelly 2005">Jack Kelly ''Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World'', Perseus Books Group: 2005, ISBN :0465037224, 9780465037223: 272 pages</ref>"

  • Since you are claiming that this is a summary taken from Jack Kelly's book, please provide me with the page or number pages so that I can check the validity of your claims. Note: Kelly does not have 272 pages, the text stops at page 250, and pages 250-260 are the indexes, so page 272 is not a valid ciatation.
  • I suggest that you provide edit summaries of all of your edits, you are less like to be regarded as a potential Vandal. Pyrotec (talk) 10:01, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • As a follow up you added the following paragraph today: -

    "Gunpowder was, according to prevailing academic consensus, discovered in the 9th century by [[Chinese alchemy|Chinese alchemists]] searching for an [[elixir of life|elixir of immortality]].<ref name="Buchanan (2006), 42" >[[#Buchanan|Buchanan (2006)]], p. 42</ref> This discovery led to the invention of [[fireworks]] and the earliest gunpowder weapons in China. In the centuries following the Chinese discovery, gunpowder weapons began appearing in the Arab world, Europe, and India. The consensus is that this was spread from China, through the Middle East, and then into Europe, although there remains some dispute over whether the inventions were made independent of Chinese contact.<ref name="Jack Kelly 2005">Jack Kelly ''Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World'', Perseus Books Group: 2005, ISBN :0465037224, 9780465037223: 272 pages</ref>"

  • Well page 42 of Buchanan (2006) is an article by Asitech Bhattcharya entitled "Gunpowder and its Applications in Ancient India", it certainly does not state "Gunpowder was, according to prevailing academic consensus, discovered in the 9th century by Chinese alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality". If you look at that page, the nearest statement is: "While most sources credit the Chinese with the discovery of gunpowder a number of studies point to the erly development and use of gunpowder in ancient India. Here we examine the various reports of and controversies over this subject." Pyrotec (talk) 10:46, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Gunpowder is and was a controverial subject, you are perfectly entited to make edits to it, but you edits should be WP:verifiable and some, like the one above are false, i.e. the information claimed does not apper on the pages of the reference that is quoted (or, probably more likely, that you copied from elsewhere). Pyrotec (talk) 10:46, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The information was taken from the History of Gunpowder article, I apologize if I didn't check the sources to the original content, but I assumed the article was reliable and was just trying to help by moving some of the content from that page to the main Gunpowder one.
About "The consensus is that this was spread from China, through the Middle East, and then into Europe, although there remains some dispute over whether the inventions were made independent of Chinese contact." The first part of the sentence ("the consensus is that this was spread from China, through the Middle East, and then into Europe") is the mainstream scholarly opinion, and is from Buchanan, page 2, who states that "With its ninth century AD origins in China, the knowledge of gunpowder emerged from the search by alchemists for the secrets of life, to filter through the channels of Middle Eastern culture, and take root in Europe."
The second part of the sentence, "although there remains some dispute over whether the inventions were made independent of Chinese contact" comes from Easton's book on Roger Bacon, that credits Bacon with the independent invention of gunpowder, although this claim is controversial, and is disputed among scholars. The sentence "Gunpowder was, according to prevailing academic consensus, discovered in the 9th century by Chinese alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality" comes from Kelley (Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics), on page 2-5. I think I may have mixed up the sources from copying and pasting off other wikipedia articles, since I am new to this and not sure how to correctly reference. I am not trying to make any controversial claims, only ones that represent scholarly consensus.
So can I add the content back, with the right references, if you are willing to show me how?
P.S. I did not know that edit summaries were needed. I have read the help article and will write them from now on.--Ninthabout (talk)
By the way, you forgot to sign your comments on my talkpage: it's done by added ~~~~ (without the "nowiki"). Returning to your orginal question, wikipedia is not regarded as a WP:Reliable source since anyone can add, subtract and vandalise pages. I have no wish to stop you adding information that is reliable (the criteria is "reliable" not "True"). The first part does indeed appear on page 2 of Buchanan (2006).
I'm happy to help and I have no objections to you undoing some or all of my last changes, but I'm not sure precisely what is meant by "if you are willing to show me how", could you clarify? Pyrotec (talk) 11:20, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I am not sure how to format references. Where can I find out how? Is there a help page?--Ninthabout (talk) 11:33, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Most of the Gunpowder citations are either added in full to the Notes section, or put in the Notes in "Author/year/page" shorthand and added in full to the Biliography Section. They are in Harvard no brackets (Harvnb) style. There is a template for books at {{cite books}}, also found by going to "Template:Cite books"; you don't, if you are uncomfortable, have to use the template, just copy the style but the template does make life easier once you get used to it. If you get stuck, drop me a note. Pyrotec (talk) 11:57, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Help[edit]

A question about editing from a public computer.

Why am I unable to edit some pages? Is this is a glitch?

I don't know what your problem is. You may want to try the Wikipedia Help Desk. Hope this helps. Regent of the Seatopians (talk) 14:00, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Your recent edits[edit]

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Land navigation (military)[edit]

An article was split into two, one for scouting and one for military uses.

Hey, you may want to check to see if articles that link to Orienteering (Scouting) should link to land navigation instead. You also posed the question, why were the two bunched together? Well, because the two have a lot more in common with each other than either does with sport orienteering. Orienteering is taught in Scoutcraft because land navigation is taught in the Army. And when I created the article, I didn't foresee enough content for two articles pbp 13:19, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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Please see Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard#Hinduwisdom.info and nationalist pseudoscience – Fayenatic London 21:04, 12 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

History of psychological testing in China[edit]

Hi, Rurik,

I see you have a deep interest in history. My undergraduate studies included specific study of Chinese history while I majored in the Chinese language. My current research deals with applied research in psychology of human intelligence and the history of that subject. I checked the cited source for your several article edits based on a claim about the use of the tangram in ancient China. I see the English-language source (which I have at hand) relies on a Chinese-language source, and that both are by Chinese psychologists. I adjusted the article language a bit, as I have not found any other reliable source at all that backs up the historical claim about the tangram, which is made only tentatively in the source you kindly cited. I'll keep looking for information about this topic--I have encountered a lot of scholarly controversy over the years about the dating and contemporary significance of inventions that are first known from China. 祝 平安 -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 20:21, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Good work. I support your improvements to the article. I'm generally skeptical of ethnic technology claims as an editor who has done extensive work cleaning up dubious or misused sources in Indian, Chinese, and Islamic history articles. Reviewing the source in question, The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence is a reliable text written by leading researchers in the field, listed and starred on your userpage as one of your recommended citations for psychology. But to reiterate what you've said, the problem then is not reliability but verifiability. The handbook may be a reliable source for psychology, but unverifiable as a source for sinology. If there are no Western sinologists making the claim, then it's likely spurious and must be removed. Your research and background as a sinology major has been immensely helpful.--Rurik the Varangian (talk) 23:17, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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  • I don't understand this comment of yours. With that personalisation you seemed to be insinuating that I was behaving disruptively, and I resent it. Do I need to explain to you that my universal disdain for such blind rhetoric is related to my hatred of the propagandistic comments I hear/read about every day from the Propaganda Department? -- Ohc ¡digame! 07:38, 6 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Another move request regarding Ukraine and Crimea[edit]

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Interview request[edit]

Hi Rurik the Varangian :)

I'm a PhD student at Oxford University and long-time Wikipedian studying breaking news articles on Wikipedia and am working on a new paper about how Wikipedians decide which sources to add to breaking news articles with User:Madcoverboy. I would love to talk to you in general about your wiki work and about sources and references in particular since you have done such great work on the Crimean crisis article.

We're testing out a new methodology for visualizing a user's sources over time and will show you some network diagrams of all the sources and the ones you added in particular to the 2014 Crimean crisis article as a way to discuss source practice.

Do you think you could spare 30 minutes over Skype next week - preferably Wednesday or Thursday? I'm in Oxford (GMT) and you can email me from hfordsa at gmail dot com. Many thanks! hfordsa (talk) 19:22, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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