NavList:

Four weeks ago, I wrote these comments regarding the "sight reduction" Wikipedia page that Andres created:

"Some things for you to consider. First, your article is largely redundant. The article on the intercept method covers nearly everything in your sight reduction page, except maybe your boosterism of hav-Doniol. The "intercept method" article is better in some ways. You should consider merging the article that you created into that pre-existing article. I notice that you edited the "intercept method" article a couple of days ago to include a link to your "sight reduction" page. This is pointless, and it will be undone eventually no matter what. You are the sole editor on the sight reduction page. An orphan page like this is inevitably folded into better pre-existing pages. You might as well do it yourself.

Your boosterism of the hav-Doniol methodology breaks one of the principal article standards for Wikipedia: no original research. Of course, one could claim that an article in Ocean Navigator provides an exception --proving that this is not original research. But that's just sneaking around the problem. The fact of the matter is that your article does not describe sight reduction, as it is done, and as it exists today. Instead you are misrepresenting a new and experimental method of sight reduction, employed in practical navigation by almost no one, as a standard method.

This is proselytizing. You're trying to use Wikipedia to change the way navigators work. Arguably this breaches the basic principle of neutral point of view on Wikipedia.

All that said, a small page on a minor topic which is being read by only a handful of people, mostly connected with NavList, is a harmless thing, and in the long haul there's no damage done. But bear in mind, you're treading on those very few principles upon which Wikipedia is founded."

Enough time has passed, and I presume emotions have settled down by now. 

My post was interpreted as insulting by at least two readers, while one reader found nothing like that in it at all. Andres, I am sure, knows that I respect him highly. I communicate with him, as I communicate with the vast majority of NavList readers, as a competent, intelligent adult. 

No message can be perfect, but I try to make all of my messages interesting, with any luck "educational", and, above all, persuasive. Being "right" doesn't matter much in the world. Being "persuasive" (when you're right!) is everything. My original message on this topic was not sufficiently persuasive and therefore it did not meet my standards. I apologize to all who manged to find something impolite in it, but mostly I apologize for its failure to be persuasive.

I realize from reading a couple of messages that many NavList members may not, in actual fact, have any clear idea of how Wikipedia operates and what it is for. Hanno, for example, suggested that Wikipedia has no rules. It's true that some of Wikipedia's earliest documentation (which is still in there) makes claims that sound like this, but it's not true in practice --not true at all. Wikipedia has many rules and guidelines amounting to hundreds of pages of text starting here. You don't need to read more than a small fraction of it to get by. For an analogy, you don't have to read the whole Bible to understand the ten commandments (and to realize that even some of those "commandments" are more like "suggestions" than rules, which is also true of Wikipedia!). Some of the confusion may result from the fact that there are other projects that use various different flavors of "wiki" software, which by definition have no rules, and the "wiki" software is not the same as Wikipedia. A generic project using a "wiki" platform can set any rules that its managers choose. Wikipedia has its own unique standards.

Perhaps some of you saw a segment on the CBS news program "60 Minutes" discussing Wikipedia. It aired last Sunday evening (a repeat from April), and I listened to it on a long road trip (CBS radio in New York runs the audio feed from "60 Minutes" instead of their normal news when the program is on). Here's a key quotation from that program describing how anyone can add to Wikipedia: "You hit the edit button and you type. But your information has to have a legitimate source and some degree of notability. No love letters to yourself." If you would like to watch the video or read the transcript, go here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikipedia-jimmy-wales-morley-safer-60-minutes-2/

In addition to extensive articles on Wikipedia's guidelines, Wikipedia also has an excellent long article about "what Wikipedia is not", and there is a 'when in doubt' guideline. It says, "When you wonder what should or should not be in an article, ask yourself what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in an encyclopedia." This is the bedrock guiding principle from which most of the rest follows. We all know what encylopedias are from their long history of publication. Wikipedia continues that tradition and aims to produce content that is recognizably encyclopedic. It aims for objectivity, verifiability, and a neutral point of view. Of course every single word in that last sentence is open to interpretation, and this is where the "no rules" perception might seem reasonable. All rules are open to interpretation, discussion, and revision, and this is part of Wikipedia's philosophy: there are no "hard and fast" rules. There are no "commandments". If there are no "hard and fast" rules, then are there any rules at all? Short answer: yes, of course there are. Without them, Wikipedia would be an anarchic wreck.

Among the "not" items in the article above, we learn that "Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought". This is a key statement. Wikipedia is not a publication medium. But what does it mean? Let's compare with NavList. NavList is a basic type of publication medium. An "author" can compose an article of almost any length containing objective content as well as subjective opinion, personal experience, and including imagery and other content. When a message (in this context, an "article") has been posted to NavList, assuming it does not violate minimum standards of being on-topic, the authored article is "published" to the web for an extended period of years. Other authors and editors cannot make changes to posts, with the single exception that I myself occasionally make small edits to fix problems or modify subjects when I think it will help communication. The point here is that as a "publication medium" or "publisher of original thought", NavList posts have authors, and we, as authors, can express our own interpretations and points of view, and our words, our prose, and our style are fixed and not editable by later posters. We can describe novel ideas, new research, and also knowledge founded on experience in NavList messages because this is a medium for publication.

By contrast, Wikipedia was designed from the beginning as a collaborative project in which articles would be created, edited, and re-edited many times, frequently without limit, by numerous volunteer "editors". They don't publish whatever they want, and anything can be deleted, re-written, and re-organized, though the editor who deletes must usually come up with a reasonable cause that others can discuss. Rather than publishing "authored articles", editors collaboratively attempt to create content that has educational merit as an objective encyclopedia of "notable" topics --a compendium of current knowledge on subjects in almost any (legal) field of human endeavor.

Hanno also suggested in his post that I should not comment on the work of Andres unless I am part of Wikipedia management. That is clearly a misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works. Decisions by actual management are a tiny, insignificant fraction of the process by which Wikipedia pages are developed and edited. Every editor has a right to comment on any article, and every editor of Wikipedia has to live within the limits of what Wikipedia is intended to be: an objective encyclopedia. The actual management team of Wikipedia is quite small and rarely gets involved in the process.

Wikipedia "editors" are ordinary people with knowledge on some topic (usually diverse topics) that they would like to share with the world, without being compensated in any way except for the entertainment value of "making a positive contribution". NavList members should be prime candidates for the position of "Wikipedia editor" since many NavList members have knowledge on diverse topics, often have free time, and frequently have an "open" attitude towards knowledge that is satisfied by the prospect of making a contribution to the world without formal compensation. Andres mentioned that he has been a Wikipedia editor since 2008. Here I have him beat by a few years. But there is a small difference in our approach to Wikipedia. I much prefer anonymous editing, for many reasons. For those of you who might want to check in on my contributions, unfortunately, I know of no way to collect together all of the edits that I have made on many topics over the years. I also generally prefer not to edit Wikipedia pages on celestial navigation, with a few exceptions, since they tend to be in a problematic category: minor articles with few editors, often opinionated, who have feelings of ownership over "their" articles. But for some of you, engaging with these folks might sound fun!

How can you, as a NavList member, modify a Wikipedia page? It's easy. Find a paragraph with a problem. Start small, maybe look for a typo or a strange turn of phrase. These are not hard to find in navigation articles. Click the "edit" tag above the paragraph. Now experiment! You'll see lots of "mark-up" tags which format the text (e.g. adding "bold" or "italic" text) and you'll see mark-up for hyperlinks to other articles, references, etc. On your first edit, you can ignore most of this. Just find the word that needs to be fixed, and fix it! Then preview the page to see if you did it right. If everything looks OK, include a few words to describe your edit in the appropriate box. For example, if you spotted and fixed a typo, like the word "sextant" written as "sextnat", you would simply write "fixed typo" in the description box. Then save your edit, and you're done. You are now a Wikipedia editor with all the rights, honors, and privileges associated with that high office.

Next you should explore two key pages associated with every Wikipedia page: the "history" and the "talk" page. The history page allows you to compare different versions of any Wikipedia article as it has changed over time. This history highlights one enormous difference between Wikipedia and a traditional encyclopedia: there are no established "editions" and nearly every article is fluid, with content added and often later deleted when issues of objectivity, or quality, or copyright, or other problems arise. Even prose style can lead to major re-writes. 

The "talk" page is the place to go in most cases when you believe that an extensive edit should be made. For example, if a page contains misleading or incorrect information, it's considered good practice to post a notice on the talk page before diving into a wholesale revision of the article. For example, if you believe something is true but you can't come up with a reference for it, you can often find someone willing to spend their own time looking for a reference. This is also a place to discuss competing points of view, reliable references, and anything relevant to the future of the article. These talk pages are not intended to be posting forums; they are not intended for general discussion of the topic of the main article. As with other features of Wikipedia, there is a long article describing the "rules", guidelines, and general etiquette for Wikipedia talk pages, but you certainly don't have to read any of those rules in advance. Just dive right in. One small tidbit of editing info for new editors: when you reply to a comment on a talk page, it's considered good practice to indent your reply. You do that by starting a new paragraph with a colon ":" to indent (or multiple colons "::" to indent multiple levels). There are lots of little tricks like that. You can learn them as you go.

All of this can be learned "live", on the go. You don't have to study up. You can be a Wikipedia editor in ten minutes if the idea appeals to you. But don't be disappointed if your clever contributions disappear twenty minutes later. Sometimes new, anonymous contributions are summarily deleted by responsible, concerned (and occasionally over-possessive) editors of some articles. If you have been wrongly reversed, feel free to visit the history page and re-reverse (there's a simple un-do feature on most recent edits), but be sure to offer some explanation for your change, or direct other editors to the "talk" page for further discussion. Reversing edits without explanation is one good way to make a nuisance of yourself on Wikipedia.

Back to the article which Andres created on sight reduction. It has a number of small problems which could be fixed by helpful editors, in addition to the bigger problem which I have already described. There are several spelling errors and some odd word choices. Maybe some of you could fix those small issues? As I noted previously, the basic problem with the article (improved from the first version, but still problematic) is that it is not really an encyclopedic article about the topic of "sight reduction". Instead it is an article primarily aiming to boost interest in a specific, novel method of sight reduction, the hav-Doniol technique that we have been discussing recently. The hav-Doniol methodology, as enhanced and developed by Hanno Ix with help from a few others, especially Greg Rudzinski, is very slick, and it solves one specific problem in manual celestial navigation efficiently. But it is not for everyone, it is not a panacea, and it depends on a unique and somewhat anachronistic conception of what celestial navigation is. Critically for the Wikipedia article, the hav-Doniol methodology is a new, novel technique, employed by a mere handful of navigation enthusiasts. Describing it prominently, in detail, and almost to the exclusion of other very widely-used methods of sight reduction is not "encyclopedic". It does not describe the subject as it exists today. Instead, the Wikipedia article, as it stands, is attempting to change practice, to "create an impact" on future practice. That's a problem. It's a big problem. Wikipedia is not a place for original work and new ideas.

On quora.com, someone asked this question: "If Stephen Hawking created a new article on Wikipedia before publishing it, would his article be deleted as 'original research'?" And in a rare appearance, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia showed up to answer this question. He wrote: 

"If Shakespeare himself came back from the dead and wrote a new play, the greatest play in the history of the world, and he tried to publish it for the first time on Wikipedia, we'd delete it.  Not because we wouldn't be in awe and have the greatest respect but because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
If it's a new article, detailing some new ideas, then by definition it isn't an encyclopedia article.  It'd be deleted but due to his fame and importance, I'm sure we'd try really hard to find some other home for it.
Original scientific research is not an encyclopedia article."

Some of you may be more intrigued by the replies to this comment by Wales. Visit the original question here on quora. Look at the outrage from some quarters, the anger over the idea that Wikipedia has limits and rules. Folks do get upset about this stuff! It's not just NavList members who are surprised to learn that Wikipedia is quite different from what they imagine it to be...

Frank Reed
ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA