User talk:Silvaatan

September 2022[edit]

Your recent editing history at Dentistry shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See the bold, revert, discuss cycle for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in you being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you do not violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly. Graham87 14:33, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've been on Wikipedia for 17 years. Trust me when I say that you *really* don't want to have random lists of things in Wikipedia if you can at all avoid it. They are a slippery slope to spam and clutter. Graham87 14:33, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Graham,

Your reversion makes no sense since: 1) I did not make a list, and 2) the piece I edited isn't at the beginning of the page as you asserted.

While you may have a longer history of editing on Wikipedia, it does not make you an expert in this. I am the expert – I am a dentist with 13 years of clinical experience, and I've used Wikipedia probably for longer than you have since I see you're 34. I'm 37. Please leave my edits as is. That is a useful edit to have for context on dentistry. Silvaatan (talk) 14:39, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My mistake re the positioning of your addition, but you absolutely added a list ... "such as Nigeria, India or Australia" is a list of three items that can be arbitrarily extended to a ridiculous level (and almost certainly will be ... also "and" is a far more grammatical word than "or" in this case, but that's neither here nor there). Unlike you, I have been using a Wikipedia watchlist for seventeen years so I know what eventually happens with sentences like these. Graham87 15:08, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What you're practicing here is called gate keeping. Google that.

I changed "or" to "and" - grammar.

I don't see you nitpicking over other instances where country examples are listed in this same article – or elsewhere for that matter. You seem to have a bone to pick with me the dental expert here and I'm wondering if my race. color or coming from a developing country has anything to do with it. Again, gate keeping. Silvaatan (talk) 15:11, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes in Wikipedia we have a policy about ownership of articles. Your ethnicity and nationality have nothing to do with this; I'd react the same if the list was "Australia, New Zealand, and Canada". Graham87 15:17, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone and generalised the section further. Graham87 15:34, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It matters because there are other lists in that article with country names from the Global North - I don't see you editing them out. Silvaatan (talk) 12:35, 17 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've checked and can't find any further lists like this (I've tweaked your edits). The problem with lists like this is that people from other countries not listed will clammer to add them and the list could potentially grow to dozens of countries, which would be completely ridiculous. Graham87 14:57, 17 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Silvaatan, I wonder if you would help us out with the article on Dental education throughout the world. The purpose of that article is to add country-by-country information about which degrees are used in which countries, and as you can see, it's an under-cited mess. You seem to know what you're talking about, and I'd really appreciate it if you could fix that up.

To make it a little easier, this link will take you to the visual editor for that article. It works more like Google Docs or Microsoft Office, plus it has an automatic reference formatting feature in the "Cite" button, so you paste in a URL (or an ISBN, DOI, or PubMed id number, if you're citing a textbook or a review article from a dental journal), and it does its best to fill out the blue ref numbers for your sources. (It also lets you edit the results of the automatic ref filler, so if it gets the date wrong or leaves something out, you can edit it in a dialog box, instead of having to go through the wikitext code.) Lots of editors like this, especially for adding information and sources to long articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:09, 17 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and whenever you add a source to a section that has one of those "no sources in this section" banner, or at the end of a ^{[citation needed]} sentence, please just remove the tag yourself. You don't have to wait for someone else to check up on it. We don't have any unnecessary bureaucracy around that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:11, 17 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]