User talk:Snake Pliscon

Welcome!

Hello, Snake Pliscon, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

You may also want to take the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit The Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Ian.thomson (talk) 11:30, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A summary of site policies and guidelines, as well as some articles, you may find useful

"Truth" is not the only criteria for inclusion, verifiability is also required.
Reliable sources typically include: articles from magazines or newspapers (particularly scholarly journals), or books by recognized authors (basically, books by respected publishers). Online versions of these are usually accepted, provided they're held to the same standards. User generated sources (like Wikipedia) are to be avoided. Self-published sources should be avoided except for information by and about the subject that is not self-serving (for example, citing a company's website to establish something like year of establishment).
Articles are to be written from a neutral point of view. Wikipedia is not concerned with facts or opinions, it just summarizes reliable sources. Real scholarship actually does not say what understanding of the world is "true," but only with what there is evidence for. In the case of science, this evidence must ultimately start with physical evidence. In the case of religion, this means only reporting what has been written and not taking any stance on doctrine.
We do not give equal validity to topics which reject and are rejected by mainstream academia. For example, our article on Earth does not pretend it is flat, hollow, and/or the center of the universe.
Occam's razor is the principle that when presented with two potential explanations, you should favor the one that makes fewer unnecessary assumptions. For example, if you have to choose between believing someone who stands to make a profit and has holes in their story, or believing multiple unrelated people who gain nothing either way and have very few holes in their explanation, you should probably believe that the first person is either mistaken or lying instead of accusing the latter group of being part of a conspiracy.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to look only for evidence that favors a position one holds, while ignoring or downplaying other explanations. For example, if someone supports a disproven claim, refuses to look at the evidence disproving that claim, and then argues that the people who disproved it never really considered the evidence, that person is exhibiting confirmation bias.

Ian.thomson (talk) 11:30, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]