Talk:Sharon Nicholson

The "unsourced" "resume-like" edits

Hi @Melcous:! I appreciate the attention to my contributions!

• The information that you are trying to remove is NOT unsourced, please re-check.
• If you have an issue with my style & phrasing of these particular sentences, please suggest how to reformulate them. See, biographies are not my forte, but I recently started to work on African Geography project here at Wenard, and I'm just publishing these bios as a supplementary material to my main theme on Angola climate. So, being new to all this, I can definitely miss on my style, but based on the stack of Wiki rules that I mastered, the appropriate move forward is not removing of the information by rephrasing it. Thanks, Eugene (talk) 20:22, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

Eugene at Wenard - phrasing like "dedicated four decades of her life" and comments about inspiring students to get involved are most definitely resume-like rather than encyclopedic. I would also note that I am not paying attention to your contributions, but rather editing the encyclopedia - that might seem like a subtle distinction, but please take note that articles here are not owned by anyone, including their creators or their subjects. Melcous (talk) 00:28, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

@Melcous:, I didn't imply anything malicious when I mentioned my appreciation above. Please take that at face value. I certainly understand that nobody owns a Wiki article; you misunderstood me. I'll try to rework some of these sentences myself then, but, please understand that I simply using the sources at hand. If the sources praise the subject, it's okay for an article to do the same, but perhaps you're right -- some toning down is in order. Thanks, Eugene (talk) 02:08, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

I toned down the biography section bit. The other one seems fine to me as is. What do you think? Eugene (talk) 16:22, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, I think that is better. I have also removed the comment about what a colleagued "opined" - one person from an institution giving their opinion about that institution/their colleague is not independent or neutral. Melcous (talk) 23:53, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

@Melcous:, I had to undo your edit because I cannot agree with your new argument here.

• First of all, please re-examine your motivation here. Please notice that you moved far and wide from your initial justification for your removal, and you are now invoking completely different policies. Are you sure that you're not trying to justify your initial edit by any means? I mean, it's okay to make a mistake, and we are all on the same side here. There is no reason to battle just for the sake of it...
• Now let's carefully examine your new line of argument.

1. There is no Wikipedia policy that requires sources to be neutral. A Wikipedia article has to be neutral per WP:NPOV, of course. Neutrality of the article is achieved by properly combining many, often non-neutral and opinionated sources. The quality of sources is regulated by verifiability policy, WP:V which, of course, does not require the sources to be neutral.
2. If another university professor comments on the scale of contribution of his colleague to the recognition of the whole department, this is clearly not a prima facie case of a dependent source with respect to his colleague. You can make a good argument that this is a dependent source with respect to the department, as the embedded praise for the department comes from inside of it, but the argument for the dependency with respect to his colleague is very weak, as the professor's praise comes at his expense. The more the departmental success is ascribed to Nicholson, the less remains for him. However, even if we presume that the source is dependent, this should not preclude us from using it. Dependent sources are not banned, they are just more tightly regulated, and the current version of the article uses the source exactly as prescribed by WP:NIS.Eugene (talk) 17:36, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Please don't start asking about motivations - I could just as easily ask why you are so keen to have this content included. As the original editor of this article, it could appear that you are unwilling to accept an opinion that differs from your own when you say you "had" to undo my edit, but that's by the by. Simply put, I do not think that someone within an institution "opining" that that institution is "the leading" one for something is encyclopedic content (that is, because encyclopaedias are generally uninterested in what people/organisations say about themselves). You are free to disagree. But it would be better to seek consensus on neutral wording here rather than simply revert. I will leave it at that. Melcous (talk) 00:42, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, Melcous. I consider the resulting sequence of edits and our parallel discussion to be a textbook case of WP:EDITCON, as thanks to your suggestions, both of the blocks of texts that you initially deleted have changed from my original version. In my opinion, this exchange and the resulting modifications have improved the quality of the article.Eugene (talk) 06:59, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

Sorry Eugene at Wenard but you have misunderstood WP:EDITCON. I have disputed the current text; I am just not going to edit war to change it. That is not consensus. Melcous (talk) 07:11, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

• No, Melcous, I haven't misunderstood WP:EDITCON or WP:CON :). I was just referring to our conversation as a whole, using a larger frame of reference. See, as far as I'm concerned, I wasn't seeking any formal admissions from you. Instead, for all intents and purposes, it's sufficient that after I fully presented my argument, you chose not to revert. My previous message was intended to express my genuine gratitude for your efforts, as they led to modifications which did make the article better.
• Having said that, I assure you that I do not intend to eschew any additional efforts within the WP:EDITCON/WP:CON framework. We can certainly continue our conversation. I hear your concern about the source dependency as far as the department is concerned. As of now, however, my counterarguments remained unaddressed: (1) The article is not about the department, but about Nicholson, and the argument for the dependency of the source as far as she is concerned is weak at best. (2) Even if we assume that the source is dependent, it makes no difference, as the current, modified phrasing follows WP:NIS to the letter.
• Finally, let me address my motivation, because I think editors' motivation is a legitimate topic. You're correct in ascribing my initial motivation to the authorship of the article. Of course, if you do the research and writing, you are already invested, so seeing some of your work discarded is no fun. Who would enjoy that :)? However, I think that I have amply demonstrated my willingness to adhere to reason. Again, both blocks of texts that we discussed have already been modified based on your arguments; moreover, in the first case, my modifications almost exactly followed your suggestion. As to the second block of text (which we are still discussing now), I still don't see any good reason to discard such an important evaluation of Nicholson's lifetime contribution to the scientific stand of the University. There is a collection of reliable sources about Nicholson that I came across, and within this collection, there is a high praise for Nicholson. There is no Wikipedia policy that precludes us from including this information in an appropriate, encyclopedic format; so, as the primary author and researcher of the subject, I do feel responsible to give the subject her due, regardless positive or negative. At this point, I'm simply trying to be fair to her (in WP:NPOV sense of the word "fair"). Eugene (talk) 16:17, 3 January 2021 (UTC)