User talk:JonathanCook

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

hi jonathon - this will introduce you to your user pages. The way to pop up a message when a user logs in is to add a message to the "discussion" (talk) page of his/her user page.

This is just to warn you that when you link to a page with several alternative names, e.g. redirect names like West Bank barrier and direct names like Israeli West Bank barrier, it will generally be considered more NPOV to use the direct name, unless it's just for stylistic sake. The wikipedia debate to consense on names of articles can sometimes be quite ferocious. You or i or any other individual wikipedian may not be happy with the consensus in a particular case (is it "neutral" to describe the Israeli occupation of West Bank/Gaza as a "conflict" rather than an "occupation"?), but i think it's important to remember that NPOV is not the same as neutral. NPOV depends on who gets to publish information externally to the wikipedia in a language and form understandable and accessible to wikipedians. The 90% of us (on this planet) who have no access to the internet and the even greater percentage who do not publish "credible" information on the internet are effectively excluded from the neutrality in the sense of NPOV. NPOV neutrality is not the same as (theoretical) concepts of neutrality in typical religious or other ethical systems. It is related, but it's not the same.

Anyway, if you think that a change in name is likely to be uncontroversial, then you can use a construction like:

[[Israeli West Bank barrier|some name in the text]] 

which gives some name in the text. In any case, if your edits are considered controversial, someone will sooner or later come along and correct them for you :).

BTW, if you're curious, here is a list of your contributions to wikipedia so far.

Ummm... in case i misled you, it's perfectly OK for you to put something on your user page, as distinct from the article about you - e.g. "someone (not me) started a wikipedia page about me and so i'll probably make comments every now and then on the talk page of that page if i feel that the page is inaccurate."

Boud 20:52, 14 October 2006 (UTC)