User talk:Howieanson
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August 2018[edit]
Welcome![edit]
Hello, Howieanson, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing 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 , and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! 2601:188:180:11F0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 (talk) 03:26, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
- Hi, Mr. Rosenberg, there are some concern re: your edits here, especially regarding WP:OR and WP:SELFCITE--adding original research and citing your own writing. We need to establish your expertise in the field, and that your books have been acknowledged by other sources as reliable themselves. Assuming that can be done, it's still preferable that you not add content referring to your own findings, and insert your name and links to your books into multiple Wikipedia articles. If your scholarship is notable and credible, others will do that. Otherwise, whether or not it's your intent, the edits look self-promotional. I'm going to review your edits in the future, and ask other objective editors to do the same, so we can assess what merits keeping and what does not. Thanks and feel free to read our policies and ask questions, 2601:188:180:11F0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 (talk) 03:26, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
- Good afternoon. This is my first time responding to a Wikipedia alert. (Incidentally, I just learned that I need to precede my comment with two colons and end it with four squigglies.) The alert about guarding against self-promotion is fair -- I am familiar with the subject as it relates to postings on Reddit. I had previously received an informal note from a Wikipedia non-administrator, although it wasn't as clearly written as what's in the paragraph above. In case it might engender some shock, a genuine book review inspired my most recent (partially controversial) edits of August 26; the review was by a University of Texas-Arlington professor who regularly reviews baseball and other books. Here is the link: https://www.uta.edu/english/tim/lection/180825.html
While his review is very fair, he unfairly characterized my prior book writing as "undigested." As anyone might agree, that word is so imprecise as to be open to the worst possible interpretation, of randomness. To the contrary, since I systematically plowed through nearly all surviving original coverage on topics that I touch on (especially on microfilm at the Library of Congress), it can be called "a methodically curated archive on 19th-century baseball, with large swings from analysis to minutiae." The one prior book of mine that he reviewed (Cap Anson 3) was devoted to tricky and dirty play through 1900, and some of the chronologies were very much blow-by-blow (but colorful!). As far as Wikipedia, the main upshot from Cap Anson 3 is my having contributed the entire Tricky and dirty play subhead for the 19th-century Baltimore Orioles entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Orioles_(1882%E2%80%9399)
On Cobb, one twist that I can offer on his Wikipedia entry would be: If there's an administrator or observer who the administrator might want to designate who would like to download Ty Cobb Unleashed for free from NetGalley.com, I can forward the easy-to-follow instructions in any reply. The main step would be to download a free version of Adobe Digital Editions from Adobe's Web site. (The point of seeing it, besides to validate my references to it, would be to see how dense it is, including in its number of newspaper citations.)
A second twist is that the insertions I have made to this point tend to relate, in a contrary way, to subject matter that was already in the entry -- which raises a possibly fascinating point: Is the Cobb Wikipedia entry now the, hands down, best source on the Internet for information on Cobb, by reflecting both the nouveau conventional wisdom on him and where that conventional wisdom can be contradicted by the contemporaneous record? I think the answer has to be a resounding yes. (But obviously, there can be a point of excess, for one author's research to dominate, and it's fair point to be making me aware of. I do think it is naive to expect other people to make insertions from my book, because the enthusiasm on Cobb seems so heavily weighted to showing how he was wronged! Consider that Tim Hornbaker wrote a 2015 biography of Cobb published by Sports Publishing. Not a single mention from his 392-page book was present in the entry at the time I added the Hornbaker reference that is now present.)
A second twist may be that because my book always credits or cites, in the main text, the first Cobb author to have located something that I weigh in on, I can easily add in credits in the Wikipedia entry to other authors without snubbing the true original source. The one deletion to date of one of my additions (an August 26 one), at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Redding, was made in response to my addition after seeing the mention of Redding in the review by the UT-Arlington professor on August 25. Hornbaker was the first Cobb author to cite the Redding-Cobb episode -- and I could revive it by mainly citing him instead in case an administrator
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might like to referee that insertion. In my now-deleted insertion, I did cite Hornbaker in the Edit summary.Howieanson (talk) 21:51, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
- Your contributions are welcome, but you should make yourself familiar with the site's policy on conflict of interest. While in-text attribution to an author is sometimes appropriate, your attribution to yourself has drawn concern whether it was necessary or not. Regarding your publisher, do you have more information on Tile Books, is it a subsidiary, or was it self-published? Indeed, it could allieve others' concerns if you chose to cite the secondary sources you used for your book, in lieu of citing your book directly. Regards.—Bagumba (talk) 09:18, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you Bagumba for your reply. You make a valid point about advising me to instead, if at all possible, focus on citing original sources than citing my book's particular analysis. The Dick Redding example is an interesting case. I will try to insert a toned-down reference that cites the contemporaneous coverage -- I can cite both Hornbaker's book and mine purely in the footnotes -- and omit my book's take. I will plan to do so later today, if you don't mind refereeing the addition?
One of the interesting aspects of Wikipedia is that plain facts are the hallmark of the site, but every so often, there may be some "glue" that only a primary source-heavy author can provide that makes sense of disparate facts. In other words, there exists two seemingly unrelated facts, but an author's discovery of a possible tie (provided that it comes across to the Wikipedia reader as informed speculation rather than a statement of fact) may give your readers something to chew on. Also, maybe the problem with the Redding addition was that the informed speculation that I added so drowned out the surrounding text! But, as you can sense, I was inspired by the University of Texas-Arlington professor's singling out of the Cobb-Redding episode in his August 25 review, in making the addition on August 26.
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- Thank you Bagumba for your reply. You make a valid point about advising me to instead, if at all possible, focus on citing original sources than citing my book's particular analysis. The Dick Redding example is an interesting case. I will try to insert a toned-down reference that cites the contemporaneous coverage -- I can cite both Hornbaker's book and mine purely in the footnotes -- and omit my book's take. I will plan to do so later today, if you don't mind refereeing the addition?
To answer another of your inquiries, Tile Books is my own publishing company, for only my books. In case it might be a huge surprise to those who may come across what I'm writing on this page, there probably is no correlation between the accuracy of a history book and whether it was self-published versus from a major publisher. The fact-checking of major publisher books is often minimal; the greater emphasis is on readability and legal concerns. (One could easily argue that self-published history authors may stress accuracy over readability, since a hallmark of self-published authors can be getting "in the weeds"!) Two somewhat recent articles that touch on the lack of fact-checking in mainstream books are accessible at https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/why-books-still-arent-fact-checked/378789/ and http://www.vulture.com/2015/06/will-book-publishers-ever-start-fact-checking.html
A likely better indicator of a book's accuracy is to what the degree the author presents full endnotes, and mine include all of the articles that I cited; I slug each in a way that gives an idea what its thrust was. And I renew my invitation for a Wikipedia moderator/facilitator or a designee to download my book for free from NetGalley.com
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; I'd be glad to forward the instructions for doing so.Howieanson (talk) 13:06, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
- Please read WP:SPS and WP:EXPERT. The most recent additions to Ty Cobb included a lot of promotion of your recent book; even without, however, it's a very good policy not to cite yourself. Thank you, 2601:188:180:11F0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 (talk) 13:49, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
- Much of what you say, such as your comments about "an author's discovery of a possible tie" which "may give your readers something to chew on" may be perfectly valid in some publishing contexts, but not in Wikipedia, where the policy, as already pointed out to you, is that we don't publish "original research".
- Of course being self-published does not make a book inaccurate, but it does make it impossible for us to know how far we can trust it. A lot of complete crap is published, much of it by people who are convinced that they know better than others, and we can't assume a publication is valid just because its author comes along and says so. We cannot use vast armies of experts in every conceivable subject to assess the accuracy of every one of the works cited in the millions of Wikipedia articles. We can, and do, however, require that sources satisfy certain reliability criteria, and one of the criteria is that we do not generally accept self-published sources.
- I am at a loss to understand why you think that "to what the degree the author presents full endnotes" is an indication of accuracy. There are plenty of cases of people who have no idea what they are talking about painstakingly providing detailed notes and references for the nonsense they write.
- If you have not already done so then please read the conflict of interest guidelines, and please drop your hope of getting mentions of your book or your opinions published in Wikipedia.
- Please don't use more than one "admin help" tag at once. Doing so achieves no useful purpose, and just makes a little extra trouble for whoever deals with your request, as he or she has to search through the page source for both of them to close them.
- Nothing you asked for actually needed an administrator. The only times you need to ask specifically for an administrator is when you want a task performed which needs administrative rights, such as blocking an account from editing, deleting a page, protecting a page from editing, etc, and in other circumstances please use {{help me}} rather than {{Admin help}}. A full list of administrative tasks is at Wikipedia:Administrators#Administrators' abilities. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 14:46, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
- Hi. I would have responded earlier but I didn't hear back until nearly 6 p.m. Friday from the general Wikipedia inquiries e-mail respondent ("inquiries respondent" hereafter) and I rarely communicate in any fashion on Saturdays -- so my silence shouldn't be taken as willful!; the one thing I'm happy about is that this dialogue (and resulting actions) took place this weekend (with an extra secular holiday Monday) and not on the eve of Rosh Hashanah (which starts next Sunday night) or close to Yom Kippur the week after.
With regard to one of the six items in editor Watson's reply, the inquiries respondent apologized for advising me how to insert the administrator's help code without asking me why I wanted to use it. And the inquiries respondent had been aware that I was new to User Talk, because I asked such a basic question that he responded to it with the following advice: "On that page, click on edit source:, and add your comment. Procedure comment by two colons to indent it correctly. Sign it with four tildes(Howieanson (talk) 14:53, 2 September 2018 (UTC))" In answer to another of the items, the inquiries respondent also had told me, in response to a question, that I should insert the administrator's help code if I have a question. Well, since I posed two questions (or subjects to weigh in on) in at least one of my User Talk entries, and assuming that Wikipedia style would dictate the use of a code in each situation, I figured that each should be slugged with the admin code.
I have various reasons for writing. The main one would be to make one possibly not obvious observation and one that may be obvious. The "not obvious" one is that while I was glad to answer the questions that were posed to me (except that doing so for potentially anyone to see was and still is unnerving, since this is being done for anyone to see) -- it would be nice if
2601:188:180:11F0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 Bagumba JamesBWatson
(or designees/substitutes in their places)
would be willing to communicate with me by regular e-mail without the possibility of my feelings being hurt again simply because of the public spectacle of this interaction forum. I feel that Mr. Watson's reply on Friday crossed the line of cordiality, by writing in an over-the-top negative tone that really wasn't alleviated by some inserts of the word “please.” (I offer examples below.) Plus, while the worst thing that happened in prior exchanges in my User Talk were leaving some points unanswered, Mr. Watson seemed to possibly be writing for dramatic effect -- as if to humiliate me. As I interpreted it, he started out on an angry note and decided to make "alienate the Wikipedia community from Mr. Rosenberg" and “hurt Mr. Rosenberg's feelings” the organizing themes of his reply.
I had written in my most recent post, “One of the interesting aspects of Wikipedia is that plain facts are the hallmark of the site, but every so often, there may be some 'glue' that only a primary source-heavy author can provide that makes sense of disparate facts. In other words, there exists two seemingly unrelated facts, but an author's discovery of a possible tie (provided that it comes across to the Wikipedia reader as informed speculation rather than a statement of fact) may give your readers something to chew on.”
So, when I read Mr. Watson's very first comment, I was shocked (and still am) that an example I gave in which I think I clearly stated that I understand Wikipedia's standard way of presenting information (“plain facts are the hallmark of the site”) and cited an infrequent exception, involving offering some “glue” for readers to chew on in the case of disparate facts, morphed into the following observation by Mr. Watson:
START OBSERVATION
- Much of what you say, such as your comments about "an author's discovery of a possible tie" which "may give your readers something to chew on" may be perfectly valid in some publishing contexts, but not in Wikipedia, where the policy, as already pointed out to you, is that we don't publish "original research".
END OBSERVATION
On item 2 of his reply, before Mr. Watson gave his strong opinion (which included the word “crap”), it would have been courteous for him to state whether he had previously seen either of the two articles that I provided links to.
Mr. Watson also could have given me an opening to reply, had he asked me to provide any strong analysis, by an independent baseball historian, of the nature of my writing style, in my books to date.
Well, I can offer up this one, as perhaps the best example.
I invite you to go to the following link:
Look for the name “Rosenberg” in the two references. The author of that book is Bill Felber, who, if you do a Google search for "Bill Felber (chair)" is revealed to be the chairman of the selection committee for the 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 Society for American Baseball Research’s Research Awards. And you can see for yourself that in his book, Felber is saying that Cap Anson 3 “puts most of the handed-down claims through microscopic scrutiny.” Plus, the second search result lauds my book as the best on catching errors and overstatements on the era that the book featured (circa 1897)!
On item 3 of Mr. Watson's reply, “I am at a loss to understand” is a harsh thing to write – because I had written, “A likely better indicator of a book's accuracy [than who its publisher is] is to what the degree the author presents full endnotes, and mine include all of the articles that I cited; I slug each in a way that gives an idea what its thrust was.”
“Likely” is a very loose qualifier, and Mr. Watson's point seems to barely skirt it. He wrote, “There are plenty of cases of people who have no idea what they are talking about painstakingly providing detailed notes and references for the nonsense they write.” The point I was making was not that there of course couldn't be obvious exceptions – I can readily think of ideologically extreme authors and authors who cite sources that only they can vouch for (such as a conversation that he or she had with a now-deceased person) – but that as an indicator, that the presence of full endnotes is probably a better one than who one's publisher is. For one thing, if there are full endnotes, then anyone can try to fact-check the book. If there are thin endnotes, then there is no way to truly fact-check the book – without someone else coming along and trying to do gobs of independent research (many months at least) to try to challenge its claims. Believe it or not, that's a big thrust of my new book that is causing such a ruckus: on Ty Cobb, my organizing principle is to present what prior authors have missed, muffed, or been unheralded for being the first author to locate, and otherwise to fill in gaps on Cobb that other authors have missed: mainly Cobb's 1929-to-1961 post-career.
Item 4 of Mr. Watson's response seems to be “personalizing” this matter. He wrote, “If you have not already done so then please read the conflict of interest guidelines, and please drop your hope of getting mentions of your book or your opinions published in Wikipedia.”
The phrase “mentions of your book or your opinions” is not a nice thing to write, since in my most recent reply, to an earlier post, I had acknowledged that “plain facts are the hallmark of the site.” Nearly all of the references to my research to date have been based on having written books that are trailblazing in my being able to personally account for the sources that I cite (especially newspaper sources).
I feel that Mr. Watson's reply was a crude-to-me escalation (that has unnecessarily hurt my feelings) that in itself may be of concern to others. That escalation may have had the effect of casting me as so alien that some large number of my Wikipedia additions to date have been removed (at least temporarily).
If possible, I would like to reach some understanding (there does seem to be obvious middle ground) sooner than later – and to avoid hurting my feelings further, by not subjecting me to having to communicate for all to see in this forum. In other words, as I noted much earlier, can I exchange thoughts with one or more persons in the Wikipedia community by private e-mail?
As may be obvious, in all-to-see forums, it just takes one non-courteous reply to ruin someone's day (in this case weekend to date -- although I feel better having now conveyed these thoughts -- even though I am by no means guaranteed another angry-sounding reply). My suggestion would be (even if it's highly unusual) that we can always put on the record the upshot of any such exchange.Howieanson (talk) 14:53, 2 September 2018 (UTC)
- I put a significant amount of time and effort into writing a fairly long and detailed message in the hope that it might help you to better understand various aspects of how Wikipedia works that you appeared not to understand. The thanks I get for my effort is that long diatribe against me, which makes such absurd claims as that I was "writing for dramatic effect -- as if to humiliate [you]". Fine: if that's what you think of my attempts to help you then I won't try again. I have better things to do with my time. If, however, you get blocked from editing for making mistakes that you could easily have avoided had you chosen to take note of the help I offered, so be it. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 19:52, 2 September 2018 (UTC)
- Dear Watson pseudonym editor (not sure if that’s a good way to refer to you),
I truly appreciated this reply of yours on a Sunday (in light of today, Monday, being a holiday, as opposed to having me potentially only see it when the new work week was underway and my trying to find time to reply. I waited until this morning to check my e-mail after a roughly 22-hour blackout -- in case there might be multiple replies). Plus, I appreciate its short length -- and can apologize for any hard feelings for my response yesterday. I actually do respect, in your earlier reply, the instructional parts (because they are statements of official policy and are not arbitrary); it's just that the overall tone that you conveyed them in seemed arbitrarily rough. (Plus, there is an elephant in the room that I note three paragraphs down.)
An analogy could be that 90 percent of communication is often conveyed through body language, and especially in such a public form, the tone in which something is written is the equivalent of body language!
Dishing out criticism can be a dicey endeavor, because one never knows how sensitive the recipient is. And I can't think of another occasion where I've been forced to enter a public forum to discuss an issue so personal to me.
The elephant in the room is this: other than a few incidents before Friday, I have had a long productive relationship with Wikipedia, based on my one-of-a-kind expertise (on major tricky subjects of 19th-century baseball that, I can dare to say, there likely is no expert on besides me; in one case, I can think of an expert, but he may not be inclined to contribute to your site). I can assure you that that has hardly translated financially to me, which I would be happier to explain privately. Based on my experience on contributing to Wikipedia (in a way that has ensured that your site is accurate on subjects that I'm arguably the expert on), I have written publicly about Wikipedia's authoritativeness (in an entirely favorable way and in a way that I'll bet few of your contributors have. However, for various reasons it probably would be more appropriate for me to share that privately.)
Accordingly, I still would be glad to go offline with some combination of you, 2601:188:180:11F0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 and Bagumba (or designees or substitutes), to explore a possibly mutually beneficial compromise. As I wrote in my last e-mail, there does seem to be obvious middle ground. (By the way, I don't see where in your earlier reply you had made an offer of help, by the way. And if it does make sense to communicate offline and it’s too cumbersome for all of you to create disposable e-mail accounts to communicate with me – if you are that protective of your privacy – then maybe just one of you could interact with me and check back with whoever else you would like. We can potentially put any understanding on the record here.)
Finally, another reason why I liked your short reply is that it didn't touch on a point that, with an additional day of thought, I would be glad to revise and extend, for the record. Here goes:
It's too tricky to argue whether it is more likely than not, in the entire universe of nonfiction books published, say, in a given year, whether having full endnotes is a better indicator of accuracy than who its publisher is. (I would be glad to merely let the two articles that I linked to, about mainstream publishers and fact-checking, stand “as is” as a possible eye-opener.) For one thing, "full endnotes" needs to be defined. I was thinking only of books in which the citations at the back of the book are consuming lots of space. And, stacking the deck further (in essence, to what I think make the best potential history book matches for being sources of Wikipedia content), those full endnotes should include a heavy presence of primary sources that the author seemingly researched or reviewed personally.Howieanson (talk) 16:15, 3 September 2018 (UTC)