Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Wikipedia

Morgans leaking!!?? This must be fake news put out by a bad, bad company Bad media will be saying White House leaks next. BAD!!.

Thanks Tim.

Although I guess deciding what is a legitimate source for published information could be a bone of contention.

You are correct, but I don't know why you think that's a bad thing. It is what an encyclopedia is supposed to be, a reference. Original research should be published appropriately.

Not at all, Wikipedia clearly defines what is acceptable as a source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Acceptable_sources

I came to the conclusion that I was engaged in conversation with deaf idiots and that there was no point shouting. I just gave up.

So, if you had a personal entry because you were famous and there was an inaccuracy in your entry based on your biography.... You couldn't put it right because that was a published source and your first hand knowledge is only unsupported heresay .... Just saying. :-)

K

Wikipedia's policy on original content is focused on the concept of "Original Research." There's a whole load of guidelines and principles that govern contributions to Wikipedia - they're outlined in a series of articles on Wikipedia itself, unsurprisingly. The one I think is being referred to here is the "no original research" principle, that states that every assertion in an article must be backed up by a reliable secondary source (i.e. facts must have been published somewhere else first, and be referenceable as such). Much of the Original Research policy is aimed towards limiting the challenges - especially in potentially contentious articles - of preventing bias within articles: the much-vaunted Neutral Point of View.

Editors of Wikipedia (it's free and easy to become one - there are enough knowledgeable and sufficiently pedantic people on this forum that I encourage you all to sign up for an account!) end up talking to each other in so much jargon, usually an acronym or abbreviation for one of these guidelines or principles - so, for example, a comment on a "talk" page for an article may say "hold up, that looks like [WP:OR] - what's your [WP:RS] for that assertion? If you can't provide one I may have to revert your edit as it sounds a bit [WP:NPOV] to me..."

Aside from anything else, editing Wikipedia is great fun. I got into it in part because I wanted to learn about how to write a good Wikipedia article, as it had been suggested to me that I should write one about my dad - he just about met the "notoriety" requirements, so I thought it would be a good 21st century way of commemorating his life.

In case anyone's interested, and for those of you particularly from the LogMog Centre who may remember him, that article is here - sadly I couldn't work out how to include a reference to Morgan in the article, as I couldn't think of a reliable secondary source. But thinking about it now, I'm pretty sure he had a letter published in Miscellany many years ago, so maybe there's hope for an additional edit if I ever find a reference to that!

The guidelines I refer to, incidentally, are searchable by anybody, not just those with editor accounts. Some examples:

reliable sources

original research

neutral point of view

I, too, make regular modest financial contributions to Wikipedia and to this forum.

You jest (I think!) but there are exemptions to the policies when it comes to articles that fall under the "biographies of living people" category, that give the subjects of the articles additional editing/correcting rights. So if even if there were a false story in a published source, you could still correct a Wiki entry.

You could always have corrected the error yourself - that's how Wikipedia is supposed to work. There's no "team" as such that chases edits that others think ought to be made. Almost all the editors are volunteers who just happen to think it's an interesting way to spend a bit of spare time

I had a section rejected because they said it infringed copyright being almost a word for word copy of another source published at a certain site on the web. I was able to get it reinstated when I was able to show that I was actually also the publisher of the original source