User talk:ChristineBaker1

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Welcome![edit]

Welcome to Wikipedia, ChristineBaker1! Thank you for your contributions. I am Bluerasberry and I have been editing Wikipedia for some time, so if you have any questions feel free to leave me a message on my talk page. You can also check out Wikipedia:Questions or type {{help me}} at the bottom of this page. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Also, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name using four tildes (~~~~); that will automatically produce your username and the date. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:06, 14 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

More sources about Encore[edit]

Hello, I saw that you edited the Encore Capital Group. Good job managing your citation - that is how it works. As you noted on your user profile page, sometimes companies do have PR people come to Wikipedia. Usually they do not, because if they do, public records are created whenever they try to change anything.

Right now the section you editing has gaps in the history and is a little difficult to follow. I found some additional sources and formatted them neatly here, in case you might want to copy and paste any facts from these to more clearly tell the story in that article.

Douglas, Danielle (May 9, 2014). "Taking on the country's biggest debt buyer". The Washington Post. Washington DC: WPC. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
Bricker & Eckler LLP; Campbell, Drew H. (1 April 2013). "Sixth Circuit vacates class settlement, applies new "preferential treatment" test - Lexology". lexology.com. Retrieved 26 January 2015.
Silver-Greenberg, Jessica (February 18, 2011). "Encore Capital Settles Class-Action Suits". wsj.com. Retrieved 26 January 2015.

I share your worry about unfairness in financial systems. We have a quotation collection at Wikiquote, which is a sister project of Wikipedia. From there I found Keynes comment that "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." I try to reflect on that. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:55, 26 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the links! The other day I did a lot of reading on conflicts of interest and I found that I shouldn't have edited the Encore article because I am in litigation with its subsidiaries Midland Funding and Midland Credit Management. That Washington Post article is great, hadn't seen that yet.

I'd really like to find out the current status of the Encore class action and have that added, maybe somebody will update the page if I post info on its talk page? ChristineBaker1 (talk) 23:02, 26 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there is a WP:COI policy. Making people aware of it is the biggest part of the challenge, because after people see it they usually understand. Yes, you have the right idea - if the topic is close to you and you still want to contribute, then post to the talk page. There can you post sources or proposals for actually changing the text. If no one responds you can ping me and I will assist. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:21, 9 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Cowspiracy documentary[edit]

I was just wondering how you came upon this topic? I see it has IMDb credits. -Shirley Nishimoto Nkelika14 (talk) 22:17, 2 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The Youtube link to Cowspiracy was posted in one of the Yahoo groups I subscribe to and I watched it (before it became private.) My first reaction was that I ought to join my partner and become vegan. But then the Yahoo group people had a lengthy discussion about the facts presented in the film and it is definitely ludicrous to state that ALL animal production including raising cattle sustainably on pasture will destroy the planet. In fact, responsible grazing is proven to revert desertification. So now I have to find acceptable sources to add that to the WP article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowspiracy ChristineBaker1 (talk) 01:43, 3 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There are two issues here. One is coverage of the documentary movie, and the other is coverage of the topic covered in that documentary. For the general issue, it is best to put information in articles such as intensive animal farming or overgrazing, then have this article on the documentary link to information there so that the coverage is not forked in multiple places. Video documentaries can also be used as sources for information and can be cited in Wikipedia, although in this case, I expect much of the information in the documentary comes from published scientific papers. I just went to their website and they themselves have a list of citations at http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/. Some time ago I did a review of a book at Modern Meat. Mostly there I summarized reviews just because I wanted to help people decide whether they wanted to trust the book as a source. It can be difficult for people to evaluate the reliability of content.

Did you see that someone came behind you and cleaned up some tech problems with those links you added? You made the documentary more accessible by saying who is in it, and it is nice when it works out that someone responds and builds from that.

If you wanted to go further into this, either adding reviews of the documentary or jumping from this into the concept of farming would be good options. As you said, it is a complicated issue and there are multiple convincing perspectives. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:31, 9 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I just saw that I had a bad link. I thought I'd get notified of any edits since I'm watching the page. I guess I'm still a little confused.

What makes Cowspiracy so important (in my opinion) is that Kip had changed his life after watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth and then found that it lacked some "truth" and that his personal efforts to stop global warming were rather insignificant compared to meat production. Kip also documents the corruption of some of the most influential so-called environmental organizations. But then he went overboard with his call for global veganism, ignoring the benefits of sustainable (pasture) meat production. For a MONTH I've been looking for a new computer in my price range and hopefully we'll soon have HIGH SPEED wireless here in the desert. While the WP pages load very fast, research on the rest of the web is very difficult. And the weather has been fantastic, it's more like April and I've been so busy with outdoor work. I'll be doing a LOT more editing soon, am really glad I got the WP training. ChristineBaker1 (talk) 21:24, 9 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I do most of my computer work on older machines. Since I almost exclusively work online and not with local software, anything that gets online quickly works for me. A lot of my work I do with a $200 Chromebook just because it is lightweight, has wifi, and is portable, but other than that I have always bought used laptops.

If Kip has taken an extreme position then in my opinion that still makes his perspective useful. Some people benefit by learning about extreme positions just so that they can say they do not want to adopt them, and so that they can developing feelings about what is right for them. On Wikipedia, we have a policy called WP:FRINGE which helps people make decisions about the extent to which extreme positions should be featured on Wikipedia. In some cases they are, and in some places they are not. Depending on the sources available, including a section on "veganism" in some intensive farming article may or may not make sense in describing the reaction to the practice.

The watchlist is difficult like so many other things on Wikipedia. It has to be manually checked. There is an alert system which signals people in some cases, like if their name is spoken. If you say {{u|bluerasberry}} (or any other name) then I will appear at the talk page where you say it. Like with so many other things on Wikipedia, it is awkward to ask people to learn these codes when on platforms like Facebook you can just say people's names and they know, and alerts happen for everything. But as I said - Wikipedia is nonprofit, software is expensive, and a lot of things here simply do not work right yet and probably will not for years.

I appreciate your going through the class with me and hope you found it meaningful. Message me anytime and I will be around. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:26, 11 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]