User talk:Thesmallfriendlygiant

June 2022

Hi Thesmallfriendlygiant, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your recent edits - some of them have been helpful, like correcting the statistic at University of Chicago. However, I need to let you know that some of your recent 'grammar' edits have been incorrect. At best, they make an unnecessary change; at worst, they replace correct grammar with entirely incorrect grammar. I understand that you want to help improve Wikipedia, and that's great, but you must understand that the some of of your changes in this area have not been helpful. A couple of examples:

Changing 'however' for a synonym (e.g. 'but', 'though'). 'however' is a perfectly valid conjunction in English, and is used to join two sentences making contrasting points. It does not need changing where it appears, unless the usage is clearly wrong (which has not been the case in any of the changes I've seen you make).
'comprised' -> 'composed' at Stanford University. To say 'the student body comprises 54% women' is correct. To say 'the student body composes 54% women' is not. To use 'compose' here, you would need to write 'the student body is composed of 54% women'.

Also, if you want to update statistics, like you did at University of Oxford, you must cite the source from which you obtained the new statistics. Otherwise, your edits will just be reverted and your hard work will be for nothing.

Please don't be put off by this - a lot of your edits have been good and helpful - however I just felt I should let you know about the few that weren't.

Cheers — Jumbo T (talk) 09:40, 14 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Edit: I also did not make an error with Stanford University. You claim that I made an error that I never did make. The sentence in reality is, "Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates..." not "The student body comprises 54% women." Your sentence flips the grammatical subject from "women" to "student body," so now this is a completely different sentence that is not currently on the Stanford page. I was correct: "comprise" means "made up of." So, the original sentence was "Women are made up of 50.4% undergraduates." Does this make sense to you?

If you're going to point out someone's errors, you must be extra careful.

I am disappointed.

And I stand by all my changes with "however": those changes are correct because "however" was used erroneously. "However" can never join two independent clauses without a semicolon. So, this is wrong: "I cannot eat oranges, however, I can eat apples." This is right: "I cannot eat oranges; however, I can eat apples." I did not see a semicolon during the times I changed "however" to "but."

Please see any style or grammar guide.

Thank you again!

Thesmallfriendlygiant (talk) 12:32, 14 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Huh, turns out I don't actually know English grammar as well as I thought. You are correct about the 'however' semicolon thing, however, as you may have seen from the numerous times the 'rule' is ignored, few native speakers are aware of this (including me until just now!) But either way, I was wrong to attempt to correct you on this.

As for 'comprise', you're right - I misquoted the text. That said, if you look at the second sense of comprise at Wiktionary, you'll see that it can also take the inverse meaning of 'to make up'. Thus 'women comprise 50%' can in fact mean 'women make up 50%'. I also say this without strong evidence (apart from a Google Ngram for relevant terms - take from this what you will) that 'women comprise/make up 50% of' both sound more natural than 'women compose 50% of'. I think there was a reason it was written that way initially, and it wasn't because the person who wrote it had a poor grasp of English!

Anyway, I must apologise for inconveniencing you with my misguided message. I should have been more careful to check what I was saying before I posted it. Happy editing — Jumbo T (talk) 22:49, 14 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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Your "Marxist Scholar" claim on Marxist cultural analysis

I've reverted and corrected your edit on the page Marxist cultural analysis. You can't just go around asserting your opinion on Wikipedia. You have to (as per WP:BLP) use someone's correct title, and source any claims you make about them. I'm leaving this note here so that other editors in the future can see this, as you'll likely eventually be investigated if you have a consistent behaviour of contentious edits, and questionable/biased editing practices.

Wikipedia's job is to objectively report on what sources say, not to subjectively make political determinations based on the editor's own opinions. That's called WP:Soapboxing and is strongly frowned upon, and most serious when done as a direct violation of WP:BLP. This comment is the lowest level form of warning on this issue, as your edit wasn't done on an article that's directly about Joan Braune. Be more careful about sourcing your claims in the future, and you'll do fine on Wikipedia. Act fast and loose with the facts, and you'll eventually get caught. 14.2.34.45 (talk) 04:51, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ok. I will follow your rules if you stop pretending like Wikipedia champions facts. The Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory page literally only sites scholarly opinion — none of it is fact. Thesmallfriendlygiant (talk) 05:51, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"literally only sites scholarly opinion" - if this is a belief you're editing under the premise of, then I don't believe your time as a Wikipedia editor will be a long or accomplished one. I say this not as a personal attack on you (I'm sure you're a fine and intelligent person) but instead because that sentiment about scholarship as a source on Wikipedia expresses an ignorance of one of Wikipedia's most core policies: WP:RS - Wikipedia's Reliable Sourcing policy.

If you go to the WP:SOURCETYPES section of that policy and scroll down (paying attention to just the headings) you will find they're listed in order of importance and well... reliability. So here on Wikipedia it can be said that Scholarly and Academic sources, that relate to the topic being edited, are considered the highest form of sources available. This is because Scholars have systems to peer review, methodological strictures on their research, and work in fields and ways where their facts and research must be checked, verified, and read about by other academic experts (from their own institutions as well as by competitors) and are then critiqued in a similar way (eg. from within their own institutions and by competitors).

But even within that source-type there are subsets (eg. statistical and scientific findings tend to be ranked higher than humanities findings assuming a topic where both apply, universities and journals in good standing, tend to rank higher than lower, smaller, or unheard of universities). Academic reputation counts on Wikipedia, as does the age and relevance of the findings and the journal they're published in.

After Scholarship and Academia, comes news outlets and the media. Again, this is because they have Journalistic standards, they usually have a board of editors checking their work before it's published, they employ fact checkers, and researchers to verify their claims, and they can be sued when they get things wrong. So News and Media outlets rank second highest in terms of Reliable Sources to use on Wikipedia.

....and again, News Sources are graded in terms of their known biases and reputations. The better known an outlet is, the better its reputation for objective reporting, the higher Wikipedia will rank those outlets as sources. Inversely - the worse, the worse. There are various bias rankings out there that can be referenced or sought.

Below News Outlets as a source might be non-academic books, news-blogs and opinion and pieces, less well credentialed writers, "experts", and part-time or self-employed journalists.

Then there's websites, professionals, hobbyists, popular opinion, blogs, and celebrities. These are on the lower range of credibility, especially if they're not mentioned in any news outlet and their reputations/ownership/interests can't be found or verified. When quoting from these sources it's best to include the source in the body of your edit, so people know you're reporting/quoting the source's subjective opinion, rather than declaring it as fact in "wikivoice".

Anyways, that's a crash course in the Reliable Sourcing policy... and as you can verify for yourself, scholarly papers and sources are considered quite highly here. In many cases, they're considered to be the highest in terms of their reliability. Is this the case in the real world? That's debatable outside of Wikipedia, but on Wikipedia, it's one of the main policies of conduct and can't really be disputed or defeated. If an academic is writing particularly if that writing is peer reviewed content, and is relevant to the topic, and well credentialed on the topic at hand, they basically have to be included. 14.2.34.45 (talk) 06:51, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]