User talk:Ohio Mailman

Welcome!

Hello, Ohio Mailman, 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:

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! Jauerback (talk) 21:06, 5 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

December 2007[edit]

In a recent edit to the page Knowledge Management, you changed one or more words from one international variety of English to another. Because Wikipedia has readers from all over the world, our policy is to respect national varieties of English in Wikipedia articles.

For subjects exclusively related to Britain (for example, a famous British person), use British English. For something related to the United States in the same way, use American English. If it is an international topic, use the same form of English the original author used.

In view of that, please don't change articles from one version of English to the other, even if you don't normally use the version the article is written in. Respect other people's versions of English. They in turn should respect yours. Other general guidelines on how Wikipedia articles are written can be found in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style. If you have any queries about all this, just ask anyone on Wikipedia and they will help you. Thank you. "Organisation" is the British spelling of "organization" Jauerback (talk) 21:03, 5 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Katz Vandalism[edit]

Thanks for the info about the experiment. In the chance you are interested in my perspective of your experiment from the "other side", I'll give you some feedback. I think you're probably already aware that vandalism, and therefore the quickness of the subsequent reverts, are directly related to how popular particular article topics are, and thus directly related to how many editors have contributed to those articles. The article on Katz is pretty low on the hierarchy, but I would imagined that similar vandalism to the main University of Pittsburgh article or the Pitt football article would have been reverted much more quickly as there are more "eyes" watching it.

I myself am heavily involved in the University of Pittsburgh Wikiproject and have created or contributed heavily to most of the articles under that topic. Almost all Pitt-related articles are on my watchlist so I usually check the edits for accuracy and vandalism control daily (there aren't typically that many...2-5 per day on the hundreds of articles on my watchlist). Despite their relatively narrow focus, vandalism is an issue for particular university articles more than you'd expect because of issues with rival school fans, but generally they don't trickle down to the medium or lower pages like Katz. However, I wouldn't say that your edits were "not-so-obvious". Using the words "stinks" and "heartless tyrant" are pretty obvious, but I don't think using those words contributed to the general speed of the reversion (maybe 5 minutes of me having to investigate an accompanying citation). Personally, I imagined you were a disgruntled student. Vandalism that would be much harder to catch would be simply incorrect information or intentionally misleading edits that are worded to sound authoritative. If one was especially mischievous, you could add a fake citation. I noticed in your contributions you seem to have followed up on citations. The real strength of power behind the reliability of Wikipedia, I believe, is that most editors have a strong interest in the topics they spend their precious free-time updating, and therefore their previously developed devotion to the topic is unlikely to let sloppy edits go unchecked on one of the most publicly accessed information sources in their subject of interest. I agree with you, therefore, that Wikipedia is for the most part very reliable, and will continue to become more so as it accumulates more and more participating users. However, that doesn't mean users should use caution when using it for potentially controversial or contentious information, and checking the reference list is a necessity.

In any case, congratulations on your presentation and continued luck with your endeavors. CrazyPaco (talk) 21:53, 1 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]