User talk:Adamsteckel

Welcome!

Hello, Adamsteckel, 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:

• Getting Started
• Introduction to Wikipedia
• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
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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 your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Grayfell (talk) 22:54, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

January 2014

Hello, I'm Grayfell. I noticed that you made a change to an article, Delta Lambda Phi, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so! If you need guidance on referencing, please see the referencing for beginners tutorial, or if you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Grayfell (talk) 22:57, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Delta Lambda Phi

Hello. I'm not trying to make things difficult for you, but please finish the discussion on the talk page before restoring your material. Simply re-adding the info to the page is WP:EDITWARRING, and doesn't make things any easier for either of us. One thing to keep in mind is the notion of WP:BRD: Be bold, revert, then discuss. It's not about who can keep reverting the longest, it's about coming to a consensus. Does that make sense? Grayfell (talk) 23:08, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Then stop making things difficult. The convention city/year list has been there for many years. Why delete it now? Are you even a member of this organization? If not, then what, exactly, do you want to accomplish? This information is kept in our fraternity's deep files, which are not publicly available on the internet, so how are we supposed to cite it? Wikipedia is the public record of this historic information, posted here so that it can be available to the world and to our brothers in the name of utility and transparency. Why in god's name do you care so much if it's there or not? How does it being there possibly effect you personally one way or another? It feel like you're making yourself feel important by frustrating the efforts of a small organization to track their history. I really don't get it. Adamsteckel (talk) 23:21, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm not your enemy, okay? If you don't agree with my edits, that's fine, but don't attack me personally. That's not a request, that's a policy you can get banned for violating. There is no rush here, I haven't reverted anything, and we can work this out.

It doesn't matter if I'm a member of the organization. The whole point of Wikipedia is that anybody can edit it. After all, you don't have to prove to me that you're a member of Delta Lambda Phi in order to edit the page. Wikipedia works on the principle of WP:VERIFIABILITY, not truth, and not the expertise of editors.

So, if these records are in archives that aren't accessible to the public, then how can anybody outside of the fraternity know they're true? The organization should absolutely NOT use Wikipedia as a hosting service for important historical information. That's a very bad idea for a lot reasons. Here's just one I've seen happen pretty often: numbers and locations and lists like this get vandalized all the time. I'm not talking about obvious vandalism, I'm talking about very subtle changes that happen to be completely wrong. Someone swaps years or cities, or replaces one city for their home town or whatever. It can take months (or years) before anybody notices. Realistically, if I had vandalized the page like that instead of removing the section, would you have noticed? This is especially problematic when there's no source. Maybe I wasn't vandalizing, I were just correcting a mistake. How could anybody know that if this is the main repository of info? The whole point is that the article should refer, at the very least, to a trustworthy source outside of Wikipedia.

You mention transparency. That's a good thing, I like transparency, but taking unsourced info someone posted on a Wiki page who-knows how many years ago as fact is not transparent, it's foolish. That's using Wikipedia as a hosting service, and that's not what Wikipedia is for. WP isn't designed for that, and it isn't very good at that. Read WP:NOT if you don't believe me. If you are involved with the organization, perhaps you should talk to somebody about hosting a website with this info on it. Then you would have a source for this that's not Wikipedia. I still don't think it belongs in the article, but if you have a solid reliable source, I won't fight it. Grayfell (talk) 00:05, 14 January 2014 (UTC)