User talk:135.180.118.179

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Someone using this IP address, 135.180.118.179, has made edits to Émile Zola that were made in good faith, but have been deemed not to contribute positively to the article. These edits have thus been reverted. The Talk page is available on this article (and every article) to discuss improvements to the article with other editors; that would be a good place to start.

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Again, welcome! Mathglot (talk) 01:58, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Zola

Are you by any chance a Zola expert? From some of your content, it sounds like you must have at least studied him seriously. Besides your changes to the Zola article mentioned above, I noticed your changes to Naturalism (theatre) regarding Zola as well, and have removed it for now. (Don't worry, your changes are preserved in the article history, so nothing is lost, and you can access it again.) The reason is two-fold: you removed sourced content without an adequate explanation, and you added new material without providing a citation to a reliable source to back it up. Even if you are the author of the definitive biography of Zola, all content at Wikipedia must be verifiable, and the way to do that, is to create citations in the form of footnotes to the sources you used. You cannot simply add content to an article, regardless how familiar you are with the topic; this is to guarantee that readers viewing the page can have confidence that the material is backed up by valid, published sources.

As far as removing material, there are valid reasons to do this, and you are welcome to be bold and just remove it, to see what happens, but if someone objects, as in this case, the next step is to discuss it on the Talk page of the article. If you believe your change to Naturalism (theatre) is a definite improvement, which I assume you do, the please raise a discussion on the Talk page of the article about it, to explain why the removal, including removal of citations to reliable sources, improves the article. You may find that other editors agree with you, and when you achieve consensus your change will stand. Don't hesitate to contact me at my Talk page, or below, or at the Talk page of any article you're concerned with. Once again, Welcome to Wikipedia, and please do follow the links in the Welcome message above, especially the 3rd and 4th bullets, as well as anything concerning verifiability and reliable sources. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:22, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Message by 135.180.118.179 relevant to this discussion, from my Talk page

Hi Mathglot, Thank you for your feedback on my revisions to the Émile Zola and Naturalism (Theatre) page. I am indeed a new official user and am still learning the etiquette and logistics of editing articles. Usually I refer to the French versions of pages like these, but happened to skim the English ones today and noticed a number of inaccuracies and pet theories. I have completed an M.A. thesis on Zola and am currently writing a doctoral dissertation on him and one of his contemporaries (I'm happy to provide these credentials, if you like). While I wouldn't say that makes me an "expert", it does make me pretty good at spotting inaccuracies, bad research, confusing language, irrelevancies, and invalid citations. I would like to revert your reversions and add citations to my revisions, if that's okay. All of the "cited" information I deleted did not come from credible sources. What are my next steps? Thanks, j 135.180.118.179 (talk) 02:43, 7 January 2021 (UTC) Moved. Mathglot (talk) 03:03, 7 January 2021 (UTC) Moved to User talk:135.180.118.179 § Zola

Thank you for your message at my Talk page. In an attempt to avoid fragmenting the conversation, and keeping everything all in one place, I'm going to respond to your comments here instead; that will also keep it somewhere where you can find it more readily, as I archive my Talk page periodically.

I'm not at all surprised you're writing your thesis on Zola; it shows in your writing. And don't worry about being new and learning the ropes, we all go through that. (And no, there's no need to demonstrate your credentials, due to Wikipedia's particular organization, credentials don't gain you any additional privilege, and you still have to follow the requirements of Verifiability by citing sources; the main difference being, that you might be able to cite your own publications, while most editors here are not in that position. You might want to take a look at the WP:ESSAY on WP:Expert editors, keeping in mind that an "essay" at Wikipedia is the opinion of one (or more) editors here, and is in no way a rule, a policy, or a best practice; it's just advice from somebody which you are free to consider, or to ignore..)

While I can't tell you what to do since you are free to edit as you see fit, I would advise against just reverting my revert, for a couple of reasons, both of which are based on Wikipedia's policy on WP:CONSENSUS: the first is a guideline called Bold, revert, discuss which recommends rather than reverting a revert, talk it out first, and the other is the sheer size of your edit makes it hard to demonstrate a well-justified policy-based reason for it in the relatively small space of the edit summary field. There's nothing wrong with making 25 separate edits in a row of 200 bytes each, each with its own edit summary that explains it, and also has the advantage of making it easier for an editor who objects to 20% of your edit from only reverting five of them, instead of the whole thing, and also makes it clearer exactly what it is they are objecting to. (Not everyone agrees with me on that, and it's not a policy, just my view.) [I probably skipped some points, but that's all I have time for now; more later...] Mathglot (talk) 02:58, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

Why don't we start by you raising a discussion on the Talk page of one of the articles, and let's go through the references you find invalid, and why, and the material you find should be removed. Unreliable sources is certainly a valid reason to remove something, but before we start in on the Talk page discussion, it's important to understand a couple of things: Wikipedia has a special sense of what it means about the word reliable and it's probably not what you know the word to mean; in particular, it's not about truth. There are more than one guideline written about this, you should read through WP:Reliable sources for starters. The point being, we are absolutely not a jury trying to figure out which of two or many competing theories about Zola might be right or accurate, that is not our job; we are an encyclopedia, i.e., a WP:TERTIARY source; all we do, is examine all the WP:SECONDARY sources, summarize them, write citations for each source, and make sure that the content in the article is in proportion to all majority and minority viewpoints on the topic without passing judgement on them. So, as an expert (I'm going to call you an expert on Zola, even if you don't) you have a slightly more difficult task than most of us, because I *have* to look at the secondary sources first, since I don't know that much about him, whereas you could (er, *did*) write a book about him. This is actually a trap for you, because you will often be tempted to write about what you know perfectly well to be the case, as if I wrote about the topic I know best. In the morning, you might be editing publishable material blazing new trails about Zola and creating original syntheses of disparate threads that no one noticed before, something likely to get you rave reviews for your originality, and in the evening, summarizing in the Zola article what you wrote that morning for publication. But your afternoon work might get you banned from contributing here, as original thinking is the very *last* thing you want to do here (see WP:Original research). In a nutshell, your/my/our role here is as observer-reporters: read, digest, summarize proportionately, cite; that's basically it. So, make sure you change your expert-original-dissertation-writer hat at lunch, for a reader-summarizer hat for the afternoon.

Now, that said, a talk page operates under completely different set of rules, and verifiability, reliable sources, and citations do not apply. There are other rules, but much simpler: everything on an article talk page should be related in some way to discussing how to improve the article. That can take many forms, of which one of the most common is discussing with other editors some ideas for improvement, the goal being, to achieve WP:CONSENSUS for a change (an addition, or removal of sourced content). But you can also post solitary messages proposing some improvement. There are some "don't", one of which is WP:NOTFORUM, which basically means, stick to how to improve the article in some concrete way; as an expert, you might be tempted to expound at length on some facet of Zola that you know well; unless the goal is specifically to discuss it and add it to the article, you probably shouldn't.

Since I reverted you, it would be perfectly appropriate to raise a discussion explaining why the revert was a mistake, or more positively, why your original edit was a net positive to the article. Since you are an expert in Zola, I look forward to learning more about him from you, and in exchange, I'm happy to give you whatever advice I can about becoming an editor here. I don't doubt you'll be a good one, but the initial learning curve can be a bit daunting. You may get more reverts from other editors going forward (hopefully fewer), but we all do; if it happens, just shrug it off cheerfully, figure out what was wrong, or what they didn't like, and how to address it, and then just try your same edit, or a modified version of it, again.

One last, housekeeping point: have a look at WP:THREAD to learn about Talk page conversation style (indentation, in particular), and at WP:4TILDES regarding adding your signature at the end of each post. And once more, Welcome! Mathglot (talk) 04:30, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

One more thing: I'm fluent in French, if you need any help on that score. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 04:32, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

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