User talk:Patrick Henry 1776

Please stop. If you continue to violate Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy by adding commentary and your personal analysis into articles, as you did to Barack Obama, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Tvoz |talk 20:55, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Again: Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton

This is your last warning. The next time you violate Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy by inserting commentary or your personal analysis into an article, as you did to Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Tvoz |talk 19:02, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't think your edits are so bad

Editing contentious political articles will get you the above reaction if you don't conform carefully to Wikipedia's content policies. Some of the policies that you seem to not be aware of are avoiding weasel words and verifiability. I hope you get the opportunity to make some more constructive edits. You might also want to read the articles in question and verify the information you want to include is not already present. i kan reed 01:01, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Patrick Henry 1776, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! i kan reed 01:01, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Bill Clinton

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Bill Clinton. Note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions in a content dispute within a 24 hour period. Additionally, users who perform a large number of reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring, even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing. Please do not repeatedly revert edits, but use the talk page to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors. --John 01:05, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. On many keyboards, the tilde is entered by holding the Shift key, and pressing the key with the tilde pictured. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot 18:44, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Greenspan

The problem to me was that you seemed to be shopping for a quote just so you could include something about Reagan - you included one quote, then a different one, and it seemed that you were doing your own analysis of what was important in the book. For example: he might have said in one place that he was drawn to Reagan's conservatism, and you quote that. But then somewhere else in the book he might have said that he found that Reagan's conservatism was an act, not his true beliefs, and that he was disappointed in him. (I'm making this up, not claiming he really said that.) By quoting only the first, you would be giving a spin to the source material - however unintentionally - that would be a problem to have included. However, if you are quoting from an article preferably by a scholar who has studied the whole work - or at least by a journalist who we hope has read it all - and they present a quote about Greenspan's view of Reagan, we hope that it will be reliable and accurately reflect the totality of the work. Cherrypicking a quote from the original source just to get something in there about Reagan I think is problematic. So yes, we can quote from Greenspan's book, but it's best if we have reliable secondary sources who have evaluated what the subject wrote and present a thorough view with some analysis, hopefully having studied the entire document. Hope that clarifies what I said. Tvoz |talk 23:06, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

As stated in WP:RS and WP:BLP, and explained above, we do best with quotes from scholarly sources, and second best from journalists. Quotes from autobiographies can be acceptable as reliable sources, but still better to come from second party synthesis, for the reasons explained above. I'm not saying we can't include anything from his book, I'm just saying it would be better to find objective critical commentary. Yes, of course journalists cherrypick too, but presumably they have editors who review their decisions on what to include in their articles, and there's always another article to quote from to give a more rounded view if needed. It was a journalist who characterized his praise of Clinton as the highest praise - if you have sources who point out different statements about Clinton that contradict that assessment, those might be acceptable to include. And as for censorship - first, "a verifiable quote" was not "continually deleted". You added one quote which was deleted by one editor because of a reference problem, then you replaced it with a completely different quote which appeared to me to be quote shopping - and now we're discussing it. So you can tell your "student friends" that baseless accusations like that aren't welcome or warranted. If you'd like to continue this discussion about the article, please do so on the article's talk page, not mine, so you can get other editors' input. Thanks. Tvoz |talk 19:30, 10 November 2007 (UTC)