User talk:EricLaupot

Welcome![edit]

Hello, EricLaupot, and welcome to Wikipedia. We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your recent contributions, such as your edit to the page Historical Jesus, seem to be advertising or for promotional purposes. Wikipedia does not allow advertising. For more information on this, please see:

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I hope you enjoy editing Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! Valenciano (talk) 17:22, 27 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

--EricLaupot (talk) 19:52, 29 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No Original Research[edit]

Wikipedia has always had a policy of no original research. We are not a means for the rapid or unreviewed publication of research that has not yet been published in reliable sources such as peer-reviewed journals.

(E.L.) My article was published in Vigiliae Christianae, which is one of the finest peer-reviewed journals in the world.

Where did you ever get the idea that VC wasn't peer-reviewed? And as for my research being "rapid," it took me 14 years. That doesn't sound rapid to me.

Do not use Wikipedia as a vehicle to publish a paper stating that it has resolved a centuries-old controversy "for once and for all".

(E.L.) Are you suggesting that nothing ever gets resolved "once and for all"? If that were the case, we would still be living in the Middle Ages. The question of whether the earth was flat would still be in doubt. Etc. I won't argue the point further, except to say that you still haven't checked out my sources, so you still would have no way of knowing whether the matter of the historical Jesus has been laid to rest once and for all or not.

It will violate Wikipedia policy, which will result in its deletion and possibly in a block, but it also won't resolve the question of the historical Jesus.

(E.L.) ??????????????????

Just don't even think of using Wikipedia to resolve a scholarly controversy for once and for all.

(E.L.) Surely Wikipedia could accept that the earth is not flat.

 Robert McClenon (talk) 18:29, 29 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Any further efforts to use Wikipedia to promote your own studies will probably result in Extended-Confirmed Protection, restricting editing of the article pages to editors who have been active for three months.

(E.L.) Use of threats will not strengthen your embarrassing arguments one bit.

Robert McClenon (talk) 18:33, 29 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Eric Laupot --EricLaupot (talk) 19:52, 29 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Mr. Laupot, several issues:

First, a minor stylistic issue: Interlining responses on talk pages is, if not prohibited, at least strongly discouraged, see TPO. Instead, indent your response using colons at the left margin line.
Second, Wikipedia has strong prejudices against producers or authors of outside works directly inserting their own work into Wikipedia. While there's no policy which directly prohibits it unless it becomes widespread, repeated, or obviously spamming, both our conflicts of interest policy and spamming policy strongly discourage it. The proper road for authors who wish to have their work considered is to propose text and citations on the article talk page and then leave it to the community to determine whether or not it will be included. You can use the {{edit request}} template on your article talk page post to bring attention to it.
Third, I've taken a look and it would appear to me that Vigiliae Christianae is probably a reliable source as defined by Wikipedia, but your second source http://www.christiani-nazorean.info/ is clearly a prohibited self-published source, so the material in it cannot be used in Wikipedia.
Fourth, the text you wish to insert into the article has to be plainly stated in the supporting source, in this case in your paper. I've only glanced at your VC paper as published online, but I do not see anywhere in it that it says "The question of the identity of the historical Jesus has apparently been settled once and for all." I stand to be corrected if I missed it. If, however, that is correct, to take the conclusions reached by your paper and extend them or interpret them to mean or imply something other than what they actually say is, indeed, as Robert McClenon has pointed out, clearly prohibited original research. That does not mean, however, that it cannot be used for what it does say. If the existing Wikipedia article has discussion of the import of, to quote you, "the sect identified by Tacitus in Annales 15.44 as the Christiani" or "the authenticity and historicity of all of that fragment known as Tacitus' fragment 2" then you may well be able to word your proposed text to address what is said in the article about those things, so long as you don't draw conclusions or make analyses which aren't made in the text of your paper. For those conclusions to be in Wikipedia they need a reliable source which actually draws those conclusions.
Fifth, even if you can come up with a relevant text and properly support it with your article, that does not guarantee its inclusion in Wikipedia. Having a reliable source is merely the threshold to inclusion, not a guarantee. The neutral point of view policy, and its subpolicies, the undue weight policy and the fringe policy must also be satisfied. They're a bit too complicated to explain here, but Wikipedia is primarily a source of mainstream knowledge, generally as reflected by the number and weight of reliable sources. Dissenting or fringe opinions can also be included, but they have to be sufficiently widespread and acknowledged so as to have some weight behind them. The views of tiny minorities, even if reliably sourced, can generally be excluded or severely downplayed. It may well be that your theory and your paper have been widely discussed in other reliable academic publications or other reliable sources, but on the other hand it may have been generally ignored in the 18 years since its original publication in 2000. If the former is the case, citing those discussions will be of help in justifying its inclusion; if the latter, it may well clearly imply that it should be omitted.

I hope this helps sort out the issues you're having. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 22:44, 29 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

A Lesson in Intellectual History[edit]

As an intellectual historian (that is, a student of the history of ideas), I will comment with regard to the question about resolving something "for once and for all". It is very rare for any one paper to resolve a controversy for once and for all. The would-be comparable example that you pose is not even wrong, because you are implying that the Earth was thought to be flat in the Middle Ages. That is not true. The idea that the Earth was thought to be flat in the Middle Ages is incorrect, and was made into a literary myth by Washington Irving, who should have stuck to ghost stories, which do not claim to be true. Irving said that Christopher Columbus argued with King Ferdinand's wise men about the shape of the Earth. That is not what they argued about. All scholars, and all sailors, knew that the Earth was round. Scholars had known that it was round for two thousand years before Columbus. Peasants likely thought that it was flat, because it looks flat on a plain (or hilly in rough terrain).

It was the size of the Earth that they argued about. The wise men (professors) said that the Earth was approximately 24,000 miles in circumference. Columbus said that it was approximately 15,000 miles in circumference. The wise men said that he would either run out of food and water or run into unknown land, because he couldn't make it to Asia with his ships and his supplies. The scholarly estimate of the size of the Earth was approximately correct, and the scholars were correct in that Columbus ran into unknown land (although, at the time of his death, Columbus still thought he had reached Asia). The shape of the Earth was never a subject of scholarly controversy in the Middle Ages.

The scholarly controversy that is sometimes confused with the shape of the Earth is the matter of the center of the solar system. The Earth was thought to be the center of the universe (and thus of the solar system). No one scholar changed mainstream opinion as to the center of the solar system for once and for all. The works of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton all figured in the paradigm shift. The idea that one publication can resolve a controversy "for once and for all" is absurd. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:45, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]