Talk:John D. Morris

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talk page for John D. Morris.

Contents 1 Geology professor? 2 Criticism Link

[edit] Geology professor?

He his YEC chums claim that he is a geology professor. They do not mention which university he is supposed to be a professor of. If he is it is clearly a fundamentalist Christian university with an appropriate statement of faith, but which one? — Dunc|☺ 20:44, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Nevermind, found it, San Diego Christian College. — Dunc|☺ 21:10, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism Link

The link worked fine with me, and adding "Dr" in front of his name is a standard creationist POV edit, I have therefore reverted them. JoshuaZ 01:00, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

The link did not work for me. Does the link contain direct quotes from Morris? Does it have a citation regarding where those quotes originated? And is the citation verifiable?

I have no idea what "a standard creationist POV edit" is, but Morris has an accredited degree, from a regionally accredited university, so "Dr." should be on his bio. --Yuk Yuk Yec 01:11, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually for most people who have such degrees we don't bother calling them Dr. (see for example the pages on Eistein and Martin Luther King) and we are in the process of formalizing this on the style page. To verify, the relevant page that doesnt seem to be up for you is http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_piths.html yes? JoshuaZ 01:20, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

The Dr. thing isn't a real big deal, but I think it is allowable.

Yes, that's the link that doesn't work for me. If you don't mind, let me know the answers to my questions above or I'll try the link later. --Yuk Yuk Yec 01:34, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

The link does have the quoted comments and responses. Looking at your other edits they seem to make sense, but we I would strongly prefer to deal with the Dr. issue also. JoshuaZ 01:45, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I removed "Dr.". I think it's appropriate, but some other entries don't have it and his degrees are mentioned, so that's good enough. --Yuk Yuk Yec 01:50, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I am glad that we can reach a consensus on this. JoshuaZ 05:07, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

This section is copied with slight edits from the "talk.origins FAQ" linked above. As such, it appears to be a copyvio, although it's hard to say, as the FAQ doesn't identify the original author. (The website claims only to be an archive.) Also, that FAQ appears not to be sourced, itself. It's a little hard to evaluate the verifiability of a web page with no author and no sources.

In other news, I removed the six redundant external links. They all link to the same FAQ, and the paragraph resembles the original enough (and has no content not found in the original) that I think it really only constitutes one large quote, rather than six little quotes of successive sentences. Sam8 19:40, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

After looking around a bit more, I believe the whole section needs to be removed as a copyvio. Here are the salient points:

• The section is copied verbatim (with the addition of two words "anthropologists, argue") from the talk.origins FAQ linked above.
• The web page is marked Copyright Jim Foley.
• Perusing Google's Usenet archives suggests that Foley is indeed the original author, and wrote it in 1995 or sometime before.
• I have seen no evidence that it was released to the public domain or under the GFDL. To the contrary, the website explicitly asserts copyright.

Sam8 18:27, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

It is not a copyright voilation to quote academic sources provided the whole work isn't reproduced and proper credit is given. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ErRe (talk • contribs) .

To comment further, I believe the statement above is a misunderstanding of fair use. While the conditions mentioned are part of the tests for fair use, they are not sufficient. (See Common misunderstandings.) The primary problem is that there is no content in that section except for the quote. One of the tests of fair use is that the use be transformative and not derivative, meaning that the use is in talking about the source, using the source to illustrate a point, study of the source, parodying the source, etc., as opposed to just appropriating the source's words.

The way I see it, there are two ways to resolve the copyright problem. One is to actually write a section in your own words describing criticism of Morris. You can then quote Foley's words as one example of such criticism, and it would be fair use. The other is to rewrite Foley's statements in your own words, as copyright applies only to the exact words, not the ideas they express. For now, I'm going to remove the section again, until one of these two things happens. Sam8 05:20, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

No, that attempt to WP:LAWYER to remove criticism isn't going to work. — Dunc|☺ 07:50, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

I have fixed up the quote to something that is more likely to be fair use. The amount of quoted material is still a bit much for my taste though. (See WP:FAIR.) Sam8 00:22, 17 September 2006 (UTC)