User talk:William Oxford Orwigg

Welcome

Hello William Oxford Orwigg and welcome to Wikipedia! We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but some of your contributions, such as the ones to John Hays Hammond Jr., do not conform to our policies. For more information on this, see Wikipedia's policies on vandalism and limits on acceptable additions. If you'd like to experiment with the wiki's syntax, please do so in the sandbox (but beware that the contents of the sandbox are deleted frequently) rather than in articles.

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I hope you enjoy editing and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Feel free to write a note on the bottom of my talk page if you want to get in touch with me. Again, welcome! Drmies (talk) 15:43, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

August 2022

This is your only warning; if you vandalize Wikipedia again, you may be blocked from editing without further notice. Enough with the well-verified removal of homosexuality. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 15:43, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

Dear Drmies:

Hello, good day, and thank you for your message. As someone who is relatively new to editing at Wikipedia I am, however, confused by your warning claiming that I am vandalizing Wikipedia pages. I have made no derogatory or slanderous postings on Wikipedia, either within the main body of an article or in the explanation for the edits I have instituted in the pages I believe you are referring to (namely: Henry Davis Sleeper, A. Piatt Andrew, and John Hays Hammond Jr.) A review of the explanations for my edits will quickly reveal I have only one objection to the claim these three men were homosexual: a complete lack of reference to reliable sources that make use of primary sources to verify the claim.

I am only asking that posters provide reference to reliable sources that make use of primary sources (letters, diary entries, etc.) to verify said claim. To date, all verifiable sources cited in the three articles in question make no use of primary sources and indulge in speculation. If Wikipedia is to be taken seriously as a reference source, I would posit it must abide by the basic and time-honored standards of historical scholarship. Namely, if a claim is to be made, it must either have a secondary source that quotes a primary source, or the claim must be identified as being speculative. Would you not agree?

My efforts have been to assure that the levels of scholarship on these three particular pages in question be elevated, not denigrated. I have not been acting in a malicious manner, and I would invite you to indeed provide any evidence to support such a claim. If anything, I believe I have been acting out of a good faith effort to improve the encyclopedia. (After all, I cited in the John Hays Hammond Jr. article that he in fact attended Yale University, not Harvard, as previous editors had mistakenly asserted. Was this vandalism? Or trying to improve content? And my admittedly small entry on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress alerted other editors to a facet of this book’s history that had been neglected, and other editors have since added to this contribution of mine.)

If I have somehow indeed conducted vandalism as you have asserted, please illustrate to me how I have done so and I will ensure that I do not inadvertently vandalize a page again. I would also ask that you perhaps take a moment to ask if fellow editor MisterWhizzy indeed conforms to Wikipedia’s core policies of neutral point of view. A brief perusal of his contributions will reveal he may hold a particular slant/bias to the topics he has published on. His referring to me——a gay man whom he has never met——as a “tiresome bigot” is not only insulting but certainly smacks of someone who is anything but neutral…

I look forward to your reply, and thank you for your time!

William Oxford Orwigg

William Oxford Orwigg (talk) 16:37, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

Christ that's a lot of words. OK, so you're brand new, and you walk into an article on a collaborative project, and you make an edit and you get reverted, and instead of talking things over you start edit warring. I don't need to support anything pertaining to the content of your edits, though there is this: in the Hammond article you are completely missing the point. The article said, basically, "there's speculation he was gay", and that's what the sources prove--and that one source, as I suggested, is impeccable. You're saying "we have no proof he was gay" and that just does not matter: the claim is there's speculation, and there's plenty of proof for that. That there's not a primary source is just not relevant, and for historical characters it's often really just a silly thing to ask. But the bottomline is this: you got into an edit war with the persistent removal of sourced content without properly explaning what was problematic about the sourcing.

If there are individual smaller parts in those edits that you think are unproblematic, put them in there. But it is obvious that there are editors who had problems with parts of your edits. You found the talk page for one of those articles, but not for Hammond, and that is where you need to argue your case. Drmies (talk) 21:52, 7 August 2022 (UTC)