User talk:DLWyer

A summary of site policies and guidelines you may find useful

• Please sign your posts on talk pages with four tildes (~~~~, found next to the 1 key), and please do not alter other's comments.
• "Truth" is not the criteria for inclusion, verifiability is.
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• Articles are to be written from a neutral point of view. Wikipedia is not concerned with facts or opinions, it just summarizes reliable sources. This usually means that secular academia is given prominence over any individual sect's doctrines, though those doctrines may be discussed in an appropriate section that clearly labels those beliefs for what they are.

Reformulated:

• "Truth" is not the only criteria for inclusion, verifiability is also required.
• Always cite a source for any new information. When adding this information to articles, use <ref>reference tags like this</ref>, containing the name of the source, the author, page number, publisher or web address (if applicable).
• We do not publish original thought nor original research. We're not a blog, we're not here to promote any ideology.
• A subject is considered notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.
• 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.
• Material must be proportionate to what is found in the source cited. If a source makes a small claim and presents two larger counter claims, the material it supports should present one claim and two counter claims instead of presenting the one claim as extremely large while excluding or downplaying the counter claims.
• 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.

Also, not a policy or guideline, but something important to understand the above policies and guidelines: Wikipedia operates off of objective information, which is information that multiple persons can examine and agree upon. It does not include subjective information, which only an individual can know from an "inner" or personal experience. Most religious beliefs fall under subjective information. Wikipedia may document objective statements about notable subjective claims (i.e. "Christians believe Jesus is divine"), but it does not pretend that subjective statements are objective, and will expose false statements masquerading as subjective beliefs (cf. Indigo children).

You may also want to read User:Ian.thomson/ChristianityAndNPOV. We at Wikipedia are highbrow (snobby), heavily biased for the academia.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. All we do here is cite, summarize, and paraphrase professionally-published mainstream academic or journalistic sources, without addition, nor commentary. We're not a directory, nor a forum, nor a place for you to "spread the word".

If you are here to promote pseudoscience, extremism, fundamentalism or conspiracy theories, we're not interested in what you have to say. Tgeorgescu (talk) 30 May 2020 21:23:41 (UTC)

References

May 2020

Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia. However, discussion pages are meant to be a record of a discussion; deleting or editing legitimate comments, as you did at Talk:Book of Exodus, is considered bad practice, even if you meant well. Even making spelling and grammatical corrections in others' comments is generally frowned upon, as it tends to irritate the users whose comments you are correcting. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:24, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Hello, and thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. I noticed that you recently added commentary to an article, Evangelism Explosion. While Wikipedia welcomes editors' opinions on an article and how it could be changed, these comments are more appropriate for the article's accompanying talk page. If you post your comments there, other editors working on the same article will notice and respond to them, and your comments will not disrupt the flow of the article. However, keep in mind that even on the talk page of an article, you should limit your discussion to improving the article. Article talk pages are not the place to discuss opinions of the subject of articles, nor are such pages a forum. Thank you. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:25, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Hello, I'm Tgeorgescu. I noticed that you made a comment on the page Talk:Book of Exodus that didn't seem very civil, so it has been removed. Wikipedia is built on collaboration, so it's one of our core principles to interact with one another in a polite and respectful manner. If you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:27, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Explanation to WP:NPA: being antisemitic and also groundlessly accusing others of being antisemitic are grounds for being banned from English Wikipedia. Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:04, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

To be specific:

This article, and others like it, are clearly anti-Semitic. The authors used to support this view are also anti-Semitic and humanistic. They state from the start that they do not believe Jewish claims and relegate their history to myth status without adequate support. But that's argumentative. If there is going to be genuine material about Jewish history, customs and beliefs, then it must follow their history, customs and beliefs. Writing articles stating your personal belief that they are misguided or ignorant of their own heritage does not belong.DLWyer (talk) 20:54, 30 May 2020 (UTC)User:DLWyer

Means that you have groundlessly accused many established editors of being antisemitic. We tell it the Ivy Plus way, the Bar Ilan University way and the Tel Aviv University way. Do you also accuse Ivy Plus, BIU and TAU of being antisemitic? Because there our article would be recognized as a fine, up-to-date summary of mainstream Bible scholarship.

@DLWyer: We kowtow to Ivy Plus, we don't kowtow to true believers, be them Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Hindu. If you think that the history, religion and archaeology departments of Ivy Plus, Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University are actively preaching antisemitism, then you don't belong among us, if you insist admins will show you the door. E.g. it is highly unlikely that a full professor from BIU or TAU would tell his/her students that the Exodus really happened, precisely as reported in the Torah. The position that the Exodus happened as described in the Bible is WP:FRINGE/PS at Ivy Plus, it is WP:FRINGE/PS at BIU and TAU. And this is how every experienced Wikipedian knows that you have already lost this debate. Tgeorgescu (talk) 16:42, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Quoting myself. I hate antisemitism and also hate fake accusations of antisemitism. You sought to infect this website with fake accusations of antisemitism and even dared to tell me that I don't know the meaning of the word "antisemitism". So bogus! Calling a myth a myth never was antisemitism and will never be. Don't you realize how preposterous is to claim that we are antisemitic merely because we do not take the Bible at face value? As Neil Asher Silberman stated, what we're doing is just continuing a struggle a scholarly struggle that's been going on for a hundred years the boundary just now happens to be in the story of the Israelites and the Israelite Kingdom and it's moving forward slowly to separate religious literature and spirituality from what we call history. Tgeorgescu (talk) 18:01, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

If we apply whoever disbelieves the Bible is antisemitic then Haaretz would be an antisemitic newspaper. Tgeorgescu (talk) 10:30, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes. We are biased.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, once wrote:

"Wikipedia’s policies [...] are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.

What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn’t.[1][2][3][4]"

So yes, we are biased.

We are biased towards science and biased against pseudoscience.
We are biased towards astronomy, and biased against astrology.
We are biased towards chemistry, and biased against alchemy.
We are biased towards mathematics, and biased against numerology.
We are biased towards medicine, and biased against homeopathic medicine.
We are biased towards venipuncture, and biased against acupuncture.
We are biased towards actual conspiracies and biased against conspiracy theories.
We are biased towards cargo planes, and biased against cargo cults.
We are biased towards vaccination, and biased against vaccine hesitancy.
We are biased towards magnetic resonance imaging, and biased against magnetic therapy.
We are biased towards crops, and biased against crop circles.
We are biased towards laundry detergent, and biased against laundry balls.
We are biased towards augmentative and alternative communication, and biased against facilitated communication.
We are biased towards water treatment, and biased against magnetic water treatment.
We are biased towards electromagnetic fields, and biased against microlepton fields.
We are biased towards evolution, and biased against creationism.
We are biased towards holocaust studies, and biased against holocaust denial.
We are biased towards the sociology of race, and biased against scientific racism.
We are biased towards the scientific consensus on climate change, and biased against global warming conspiracy theories.
We are biased towards geology, and biased against flood geology.
We are biased towards medical treatments that have been proven to be effective in double-blind clinical trials, and biased against medical treatments that are based upon preying on the gullible.
We are biased towards astronauts and cosmonauts, and biased against ancient astronauts.
We are biased towards psychology, and biased against phrenology.
We are biased towards mendelism, and biased against lysenkoism.

And we are not going to change. Tgeorgescu (talk) 13:47, 8 June 2020 (UTC)