User talk:Dwringer

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[edit] Gomez Mill House

I'd appreciate it if you didn't make plagiarism accusations so casually, not just on my own behalf but anyone else you may be inclined to make such statements about without contacting them on their own talk page first. To do so without laying out the evidence in detail is, IMO, tantamount to a personal attack. In real life that can get you sued for slander.

As it happens, the claims about the house and its history that the foundation makes are quite carefully worded on its own webpage to avoid misinterpretation (so it seems to me), and I decided to use their wording for that reason. I changed the syntax slightly after reading your post, but I really see no way to improve upon it without sacrificing the clarity of the language and/or its meaning. If you think you can, go ahead. Daniel Case (talk) 17:40, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I apologize, and I have replied in part on your talk page and in part on the article discussion page (as I felt some of my comments were pertinent to the article discussion itself). Below I have reproduced the two posts:

I understand where you're coming from about the claim being reproduced from the agency's website, and that's why I didn't take it upon myself to actually change anything in the article. I know that the article discussion pages are where you're supposed to go when discussing proposed changes to an article, and that's all I was doing - I didn't even look at WHO had written the thing, as that was completely irrelevant. As for specific places where the text of the article is exactly borrowed from the original website, I noted that the last sentence of the first paragraph from the reference was duplicated, though you've changed that now. The second to the last sentence was also identical except that the two clauses were reversed. Wording was the same.

I sincerely apologize if you took my criticism as an attack, and I completely understand how when there are only a few ways to say something it's easy to accidentally use identical wording. It was never my intention to call this deliberate; in fact I was simply trying to save us all trouble in case the Gomez foundation came on here and leveled such an accusation. Your remarks on the history page about obfuscating the paragraph so I don't think it's plagiarism appear pretty personally hostile to me, and I don't appreciate that - I was only trying to help. I personally don't care how you word it, and though you appear to think otherwise ("now this is the sort of constructive editing contribution I'd appreciate" regarding the comment following mine), I was indeed trying to make a constructive suggestion. My apologies for not duplicating the copied text on your personal talk page, but you seem to have known exactly to what I was referring. Again, also, I had no idea who had written the original article as this was not part of my concern. Please don't think that I would casually accuse anyone of plagiarism - I merely said that it could be construed as such, and that I construed it as such. I am by no means an authority, and I still stand by my statement. On the article's discussion page [Above], I have clarified exactly what sentences caught my attention, though you've already somewhat corrected the matter. Dwringer (talk) 18:35, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

And I, too, apologize for my edit summary. I was a little angry, as you can guess, about the imputation of plagiarism (which I have never been accused of in any professional capacity), since I do edit under my own real name. It was only later when I checked the source and realized you had a point. Your reply here has shown me that you are undeserving of such opprobrium on my part. Again, please accept my apology for a comment that did help improve the article. Daniel Case (talk) 18:58, 19 December 2007 (UTC)