User talk:Maxim
Welcome to OrthodoxWiki!
Hello, Maxim, and welcome to OrthodoxWiki!
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—Dcn. Andrew talk random contribs 15:59, June 16, 2006 (CDT)
Thank you for your recent edits
Maxim, welcome to the OrthodoxWiki! It seems that you have some knowledge to share so keep doing it! Your user page and talk (or discussion) page are yours, make yourself at home. Feel free to add a little information about yourself on your user page. Again, welcome. Joe 2006-06-16
Various
I understand your concerns. It can indeed be frustrating if it seems that a particular "side" in a controversy is dominating the media stage. But this is precisely why with controversial subjects our own opinions and experience cannot be included in OrthodoxWiki entries, and we must instead limit the articles' content to what can be verified and cited. WRT the Sourozh controversy, documenting the published statements of the parties involved should be the main task rather than attempting to balance out content by editing to make our own opinions and perceptions appear as fact.
You've clearly stated that you are in opposition to the Basil/"Oxford" group, and in such cases where we have strong opinions about a controversial topic, we must work doubly hard to be sure that what we write is not simply our own opinion but is rather verifiable, documented information. It is true that not everything on OrthodoxWiki is documented with citations, but where controversy comes into play, then it is our practice to insist on such documentation.
The whole Oxford/ex-Anglican/London-corridor analysis, for instance, has yet to be documented. Has there, for instance, been a poll taken and published regarding the religious background of the concerned parties? Additionally, it would be appropriate to include the published statements by Bp. Basil regarding why, for instance, he suspended Fr. Andrei Teterin. We may disagree with what he says, of course, but since he is a major party to the controversy, his public statements are very much relevant to the article.
I'm concerned that your edits are often the sort of thing that would be appropriate for an opinion column rather than for an encyclopedia (e.g. "unhappily," "sentimentalised," etc.). Placing controversial value judgments in articles without making them part of a documentable citation is not the established practice of OrthodoxWiki. Where our articles do include such things, we would hope that all editors would continually work to improve them to be verifiable and as neutral as possible, conforming to the policies described in the Style Manual. —Dcn. Andrew talk random contribs 14:53, June 29, 2006 (CDT)
- I don't have much substantive to say in response, but I did at least want to mention that I don't regard writing on OrthodoxWiki or Wikipedia as necessarily being slapdash—in fact, I think "scholarly" (but also "popular," since it is an encyclopedia) is precisely what we're going for. In any event, it's also the case that my work on this wiki and the other is not really representative of my writing in general. Rather, it's a particular way of doing things that is adapted for this medium. In person, I'm actually much freer with my opinions. :) —Dcn. Andrew talk random contribs 17:35, June 29, 2006 (CDT)