Talk:On Naval Timber and Arboriculture

Welcome to the Matthew 1831 club. Help yourself to the light refreshments, find yourself a hammock, and let's enjoy a friendly debate. First up,

A Wikipedia editor's personal feelings

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The page got it's inaugural review; thank you to the reviewer, @Velella:: these flags are now active,

That's understandable, and even expected. The problem is that, the subject matter is at the forefront of research on Matthew and his influence on evolutionary understanding. As I think any reader of this may know, what, "may be truly termed, in a double sense, an extraordinary" set of claims, originating from a source hell-bent on promoting their singular view, has motivated a scholarly effort felt necessary, to halt and reverse the spread of misinformation.

The relevancy of Matthew 1831 in evolutionary scholarship is beyond contention. Even in general literature, the book has an impressive presence as a nearing bicentenarian. For whatever these numbers are worth, I think the meaning is in the quantity, not the quality this time, although I'm not saying all these tally as valid: 7,500 results from Google ("On naval timber and arboriculture"), 70-100 citations from Google Scholar (several not in, source 1, source 2, source 3)

The collaborative effort looking into those spurious claims, has found, and continues to find, contradictory proof accumulating to their wholesale refutation, often from within the same source as originally used to posit the claim. The actuality that the claims have proven to be falsehoods, attributable to research that has been poorly approached and executed badly, combined with an evident paucity of fact checking, only makes the number of publications where this material has been disseminated all the more discombobulating. Why don't people check information, instead of publishing purely on face value? Where that does not occur, it is hoped, is in Academia, which is notoriously slow in processing new findings, ostensibly through caution. Ergo, the substantial version of history which contradicts the fantasy, has yet to be published in an academic context. This is hoped to be seen as both, a positive reflection on Wikipedia, that it has been aired here in this form, on this forum, first, as well as by way of revealing the machinations of a supremely topical and relevant situation being unraveled and worked through in the natural sciences, concurrent to the timeline, herein (e.g., Scholarly peer review, Academic Bias, Publication Bias, Statistical testing, Plagiarism, research misbehaviour, misinformation diffusion, etc., etc., etc.).

How best to strike the balance is open to debate. The accuracy of the findings and interpretations is open to debate. That the correct version needs presenting in place of the false, I don't consider worth discussion, but enlighten me. As per the flag, above, my "personal feelings", I'd rather were kept out of it :)) Jfderry (talk) 17:04, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

@Jfderry:My choice of flagging would have been WP:OR. You might do better moving it to Wikibooks or WikiUniversity, though I am not very familiar with their acceptance policies. Much of the content here is likely to be deleted if not supported by suitable references. WIkipedia is looking for published sources that have written about this content; what you can see or read in the original work, or facsimiles thereof, is not acceptable. For example, unless some other published source has written about the the typeface used, it is not suitable for inclusion here. see WP:NOT Derek Andrews (talk) 11:46, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

You might also refer to the section on Article structure at Wikipedia:WikiProject Books. Derek Andrews (talk) 11:55, 22 August 2017 (UTC)