User talk:John W. Ratcliff

Welcome

Hey, John, Welcome to Wikipedia! Hope to decide to stick around here, because it's a great project. You're an open source guy; I'm sure you already know that :)

Just so you know, you can sign a post with two dashes and four tildes, like - - ~ ~ ~ ~ without the spaces.

Also know that there's also a "3-revert rule" here; you can edit a page as often as you want, but you're not allowed to revert it to a former state more than 3 times in a 24 hour period. Just letting you know, since Will has declared to me his intention to enforce that policy on the page about you.

I've been working to get your page as NPOV as possible - Wikipedian policy dictates that criticism of you, if it exists, should be on that page, but I agree with you that the profanity link out of context actually creates a more POV page.

What would be a good resource to look at if I want to write up the section about UFOs? --Hyperbole 20:10, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

--John W. Ratcliff 20:32, 16 August 2005 (UTC) Thanks Hypebole. I'm sorry I messed things up on this initially. I read in the Wiki section that it was generally reasonable to remove personal attacks. As I said, I'm completely happy with the way the article reads now and I appreciate your efforts in getting it that way. It was when I logged in originally this morning and saw all of the nonsense in there I figured I had just as much right to remove the nonsense as they did to enter it; at least until someone objective could come along and straighten it out. At first I tried editing the post, but then the other author just removed it immediately and I figured that was going to be pointless pretty quickly. I apologize for reverting your edits, I assumed it was just the other guy putting his crap back in again.

Was your question how to find references about my involvement in UFOs? I wouldn't bother. Is this thing really supposed to be a personal biography? That seems inappropriate. I am a published author and have been involved in creating a number of computer video games and I think that is relevant. If the AARM this is relevant, I'm fine with that too. However, beyond that it doesn't seem particularily useful. I have a personal weblog of people are interested in knowing about me personally. Gee..let's see..I'm an artist, sports car enthusiast, etc. etc. All that personal data seems, well, personal. Are we all going to have our own Wiki entries some day?

No, Wikipedia isn't a personal profile page like, say, MySpace. If less than a couple hundred people are likely to be interested in something, it isn't considered encyclopedic - and thus the vast majority of people do not and should not have pages. When people put up pages about themselves, they are usually swiftly deleted for being unimportant. Personally, I am not significant enough in any field to qualify for a Wikipedia page; I have no publications, there's no controversy surrounding me, and I am not a public figure.

However, you did mention that you were involved in some highly-publicized UFO/alien research, and I got the impression that that *is* significant to a large number of people. If that's the case, I'd be inclined to write a section about it.

No problem on reverting my edits - I can understand why you'd want to get all that obviously biased, misleading, POV shit off the page as quickly as possible, and might shoot first and ask questions later. At any rate, I think we're making progress toward getting it NPOV. Few more days, probably, before all parties are basically satisfied and the page enters a "semi-canonized" state. --Hyperbole 22:22, 16 August 2005 (UTC)