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Revision as of 00:53, 7 December 2009

Circumcision

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Circumcision. Note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions on a single page within a 24-hour period. Additionally, users who perform several reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. When in dispute with another editor you should first try to discuss controversial changes to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors. Should that prove unsuccessful, you are encouraged to seek dispute resolution, and in some cases it may be appropriate to request page protection. Please stop the disruption, otherwise you may be blocked from editing. -- Avi (talk) 19:18, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

A pleasure. You are new enough that you may not have known, and we don't anyone being blocked without knowing the rules; that is just not fair. -- Avi (talk) 22:53, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

WP:CIVIL, etc

Re "You just feel that way because it doesn't meet your purpose (sow doubt on the current recommendations).", I do not appreciate you speculating about me or my purposes. Please discuss the subject, not other editors. Thank you. Jakew (talk) 17:22, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi, Zinbarg. I came to your talk page actually to say the same thing! Please avoid posting comments like this on article talk pages: "Copper you seem to suggest, and Jakew's purpose is to sow doubt on the current recommendations of medical associations..." and "So why is HIV in the lead at all? An attempt at propaganda" and "You just feel that way because it doesn't meet your purpose" . If someone's editing style is irritating to you or if you think someone is violating Misplaced Pages's policies or guidelines, you can discuss it with them on their user talk page (as I'm doing now), or see Dispute resolution. Article talk pages are reserved for discussion of article content, and comments about other editors are discouraged there, as they detract from a collaborative editing atmosphere. I look forward to continuing to discuss the article content with you. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:51, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

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Sincerely, (although I'm often away for days and may not always be able to respond quickly to questions), ☺Coppertwig (talk) 21:55, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your friendly message on my talk page. I've struck out "Copper you seem to suggest, and" in my quote above. That actually wasn't the part I meant to refer to; I was talking about what you said about Jake. Jake knows best what are the reasons for what he does. However, the article talk page is not for discussing editors' motives, but article content. I think that editors usually dislike having that sort of statement made about them. You don't see Jake making statements on the article talk page speculating about the motives of other editors. Please help maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect.

However, I think I've figured out what you mean by sowing doubt: I think you do have a good point -- not about the motives of any particular Wikipedian editor, but about the current sentence in the article. If the article doesn't give a date for any other reference but does give a date for the AMA reference, it could be construed as implying to the reader, "Reader! Watch out! The information in this reference may no longer be current!", an implication you don't believe is justified by the overall situation. I think that's a valid point, (although I'm not convinced by your analysis of the state of current medical association policies: I think there's considerable uncertainty about their reaction to the HIV data until they publish new statements.) However, I think the solutions you've proposed, such as deleting the date, are worse, since the current version presents valid information which could possibly be construed as implying something that might or might not be true, while the version with the date deleted seems to state or imply something that isn't true, i.e. that the AMA made that statement about "current" (2009) policies. Let's try to think of other versions that would solve the problem, avoiding stating or implying anything we can't justify with citations. How about putting the year 1999 inside square brackets immediately after the word "current" within the quote? I'll try to think of other possible solutions.

Re your comment on my talk page: I don't know what exchange exactly you're referring to when you say "I addressed Jake's criticism directly with him", and I'm sorry but I don't understand what you mean by "with his own prompting discussion text". I gather you're disagreeing with me and arguing that under some particular circumstances it's OK to make comments about an editor on an article talk page. Certainly there are gray areas; however, I think the comments you made about Jake are of a type which are likely to make the subject of the comments uncomfortable, and it's actually quite important to make an effort to avoid that sort of comment if we're to maintain a discussion civil enough to have a good chance of progressing towards consensus.

You say "HIV belongs in the text, but not in the lead", but I'm not convinced by your arguments. I disagree with your statement "It is not a significant healtlh issue basically unless you live in Africa." Try telling a non-African who has AIDS that HIV is not a significant health issue! And your argument seems to assume that non-Africans are not interested to know about what happens in Africa, an assumption I'm not willing to accept, as I had already tried to explain.

You asked "You don't understand, or disagree, that medical issues are over emphasized in the circumcision article?" At the moment, I have no particular opinion about whether the amount of weight given to medical issues in the current article is too much, too little or just right. I chose the amount of weight rather arbitrarily when I shortened the article around August 2007, (when I was relatively new to editing the article), largely based on what the weight had been in the longer version of the article, and other editors accepted it in this discussion back then. I'm not sure if the weight has drifted since then. If you have information about the relative weight on medical issues in reliable sources, please present the information on the article talk page, and we can discuss whether and how to change the weight in the article based on that. It's not a simple decision, because there are different types of sources: books will give one relative weighting, and peer-reviewed review articles will give a different relative weighting (the latter heavily medical, I think). ☺Coppertwig (talk) 00:53, 7 December 2009 (UTC)