User talk:Lucien86

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[edit] Welcome to Wikipedia!

Hello Lucien86, welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like it here and decide to stay. I have reverted your change to Car accident as it was primarily about automated driving, which should be in its own article. The predictions about number of accidents violates the policy that Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. You also cited a number of statistics without citing your sources. You seem to be someone with expertise in the field and on behalf of the Wikipedia community, we would love to have you contribute, but contributions need to match up with our guidelines and policies. There are a lot here and it can be confusing. I have compiled some basic tips below. If you have any questions not answered her, please feel free to ask me. You will also find the Wikipedia:Community Portal (linked to at the upper left of every page) to be full of helpful resource links. Please read through this whole message as it will ease your time as a new editor. Everyone was there once and it can be daunting. Here are some tips:

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills.

If, for some reason, you are unable to fix a problem yourself, feel free to ask someone else to do it. Wikipedia has a vibrant community of contributors who have a wide range of skills and specialties, and many of them would be glad to help. There are also the help pages for self-help and the village pump and IRC Channels, where you are more than welcome to ask for assistance. You should also feel free to ask me on my Talk page.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes(~~~~) produces your name and the current date. Please do not add this signature to encyclopedia articles you may edit, however, even if you have created them. Wikipedia articles are owned by the community, not by any one person. Your contribution is noted on the history page. Again, welcome! —WAvegetarian•(talk) 08:49, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Re:Wikipedia policies, etc.

I understand your frustration. One of the main criticisms of Wikipedia is that it is purely secondary and tertiary literature, i.e. no original research. The reasoning behind this policy is that anyone can claim to have knowledge of something and state it as fact. The verifiability policy keeps me from editing June 23, 2027 to say that, according to my research, the universe will come to an end and be replaced by a whale and a potted flower on this date. Hyperbole, I know, but the point is that we need something to weed out crackpot theorists. Since the majority of editors can't be considered peers to researchers, we can't provide the level of review needed to accept original research. Once something is published or reported on, however, we can add it with a citation back to the source. It would be extremely hard to come up with an objective standard by which to declare someone an expert and thereby allow them to contribute original research without oversight. This is why most journals are peer reviewed. At the very least, the editor of the journal will usually have knowledge of the material before printing an article. There is nothing like that here, so we just can't do it. It is true that a citation, even to a respected publication, doesn't garauntee accuracy, but it does garauntee someone else to blame. The Siegenthaller thing was shown as Wikipedia spreading lies and untruths, but the policy of Wikipedia is that everything must be cited. The stuff in that article wasn't cited, so Wikipedia became the original source for the information. If the article had cited someone else claiming that stuff, Wikipedia would be reporting on the reporting, if you get what I mean. Speculation is fine, but it has to be documented in a way that someone else could find it without the Wikipedia article. You could write something along the lines of, "Experts in the field think that this could reduce accidents by X% (as reported in the journal Y (vol Z)." Because everything on here is anonymous—even though both of us put our names on our user pages, there is no way to prove that we are who we say we are—what percentages I might claim it would change by are just as valid as yours because both are coming from unverified sources. It is one of the inherent cons of the wiki format. Being an expert in an emerging field means that you more than anyone will be likely to find whatever published literature there is on the subject, as well as being able to determine what is likely or unlikely to be accurate. I feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over again using slightly different words so I'm going to stop now. :)—WAvegetarian•(talk) 02:01, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

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