User:TriangoloDiTartaglia

Personal introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to my English personal page.

If you want to write me something, use the talk page instead; I am not an English mother tongue, but I am good at it: let’s say from upper intermediate to advanced. And I don’t care of finding how to insert the appropriate table just for saying that.

Since many Wikipedians use this page for their story and experiences on the platform, I will follow the template, so to say. This is my own thought and some personal reflections regarding my work so far.

Well, the baptism wasn’t easy

My internet adventure starts from the page listing the Italian inventions, reported as unreliable and blocked in the editing by a moderator in order to protect it from vandalism, that is, from the deletion of the inventions listed in the list itself.

To request the release of the block I had to make a registration and then follow a non-trivial procedure, which already would exclude several people. This is not bad per se, it’s more like an IQ test: if you can’t find out how Wikipedia works, then you shouldn’t contribute at all.

I then had to become familiar with the stringent criteria imposed by Wikipedia policies, which however are not always applied with the same diligence. The page also presented itself in a state of severe degradation compared to the average: there were very few sources quoted, legitimizing a severe erosion of its contents by other contributors.

The more I read, the more I sensed a hidden yet painful cultural bias

Wikipedia strives for objectiveness, users are compelled to outline any possible conflict of interest. But there will be always a bias permeating the very structure of this Encyclopedia. It’s called national culture, and becomes apparent if you dig a bit in the history pages, where this bias reaches the highest expression.

Let’s go for a practical example on the page about Western civilization “A study by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) – Japan's equivalent of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) – concluded that 54% of the world's most important inventions were British. Of the rest, 25% were American and 5% Japanese”. With all due respect for Japanese, this is a paper, but of another kind and use.

There are some notable omissions too

What should I say, I expected that, speaking of the Modern age of History, at least the discovery of the Americas by Columbus would have been mentioned. It wasn’t. Instead, the definition of “modern history and contemporary history, have changed over time, as more history has occurred, and so have their start dates”. Probably there was no room to mention that a significant part of Historians agree to trace back the starting of modernity to 1492, when Colombo, an Italian explorer, well… started a new chapter of history. I got it! Colombo didn’t write a study, that’s why he is not mentioned. Gutenberg was mentioned though.

If you look at the introduction of the history of scientific method, Galileo is missing. I mean, sure empiric philosophies were present before, but he introduced the mathematical modeling of physics phenomena. He shook the pillars of finalistic philosophy, science and religion. He was a martyr of science, together with Giordano Bruno (never heard of him? Well, that’s comprehensible. He is nowhere to be found on the page). Furthermore, he educated another generation of scientists. Many other people predated a sort of scientific method. However, those experimental methods died with them. To be called father of something, you need to have progeny. You must mention Copernicus and Kepler too, together with the observational proofs without which the theory was just one of the many other heretic theories of the time.

When a person invents something useful, suddenly a queue of people forms behind, claiming to be the firsts having thought up that. Well, if you had invented something without exploiting its potential, that is not something to be proud of. Now replace "persons" with "cultures", and read again. And don’t get me wrong, my country is the world’s champion of wasted potential.

I learned the rules of relativization:

• Of statements:

Editors being proud of an innovator just write: [someone] invented [something] + sources, while editors being less enthusiastic write: (some) sources credit [someone] with [something], implicitly questioning the universality of the statement.

• Of policies:

Criteria are also applied differently from page to page. If you take a look at my talk page, you will see that some pages about inventions and discoveries, namely the German and Chinese pages, proudly list in the introduction their most notable inventions and historical figures. This is against some of Wikipedia policies.

Anyway, the moderators of the material belonging to Germans and Chinese may not feel an urgency to even make a side note of that on the pages, leave alone modifying them. And no, I am not going to do this myself. It’s called respect for the other cultures.

Moreover, if you take a look at Dutch inventions, they have an introductory page of disambiguation, something I was not allowed to write.

• Of expressions:

If you can’t remove, then sophisticate so that the average reader does not realize what the invention truly was. Happens rarely, but happens. There is also the inverse strategy: simplify so that the notability of the invention is downplayed. In some relevant pages there are important statements that are just not true. But I am alone, in the dark territories of consensus, notability and verifiability. I came to the ultimate conclusion that avoiding original research is just not possible. Wikipedia is the original research of its community.

If you want to help me, you are welcome

• For the ignorants, Italy is just pasta, pizza, mafia.
• For the average educated, Italy is the country of the arts, music and history.
• But the truly erudite might know that Italian science and innovations had even greater impact than the humanities, and that Italian splendor didn't cease with the fall of the Roman Empire, or with the end of Renaissance. Foreign nationalism has often bullied, downplayed and censored the historical merits of the Italian genius.

You can start with my sandbox: User:TriangoloDiTartaglia/sandbox

I have added in my sandbox a list of all the entries that have been deleted (see for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/683639630) without being restored...yet. You can help by searching for reliable sources, which state that those entries have been an Italian 1)invention or 2)innovation or 3)discovery. Then, you can add the entries with the sources. It is very important for new material to be sourced. Otherwise the censoring process is very likely to happen again. Thank you :)