User talk:BenjaminSylvester-Bradley: Difference between revisions

Hello, BenjaminSylvester-Bradley! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes “~~~~”; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being “adopted” by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages.

Happy editing! Peaceray (talk) 17:31, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Benjamin, it looks as if you are citing yourself, as an author you are citing, “Ben Bradley”, has a name which might well be your own, as indicated by your username. If that is you, then please be aware that Wikipedia takes conflict of interest (policy: WP:COI) extremely seriously. Authors always have an interest in furthering their own point of view and often have a commercial interest in furthering their own books or in publicising themselves. Wikipedia is founded on neutrality of viewpoint, so any perceived or actual conflict of interest is highly damaging. It is very unwise to cite yourself; it is possible to edit articles on subjects on which you are expert, but always dangerous when you have published in those areas. Best is generally to edit other subjects; if you feel the need to edit somewhere that you may have a conflict of interest, you can place an edit request on the article’s talk page, and an uninvolved editor can make the edit if they feel it is appropriate for the article. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:38, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Chiswick Chap

Thanks for the heads-up … (I did wonder about this) … I will go back and remove references to myself if that is what you advise.

BTW Much as I love Wikipedia – and I do love it, and support it financially – I have become very concerned about the way it portrays Darwin’s work in particular and evolutionary biology in general. For example, the section on Natural election has no heading for ‘Controversy’ of which there is now a good deal — given the ‘fight’ over the 20th Century Modern Synthesis. Can I introduce a heading like ‘Controversy’? If so how

Thanks

Benjamin BenjaminSylvester-Bradley (talk) 12:26, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have now removed all mention of my own work. Please remove the flagging from the section I edited. Thanks again for your civil help

BSB BenjaminSylvester-Bradley (talk) 12:47, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the inputs. I’ll check over the article now. ‘Controversy’ sections are deprecated, as they tend to fill up with blow-by-blow accounts of the latest news, cited to more or less trivial sources. There are actually many articles about evolution and creationism, right down to the 1860 Oxford evolution debate (Huxley, Wilberforce et al), so the ‘controversy’ over the past 2 centuries has certainly been addressed in some detail. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:18, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No worries. Not a big issue. I’ll stick to making sure Wikipedia doesn’t misrepresent what Darwin actually wrote. My next target is the Baldwin effect — which needs to acknowledge that Baldwin admitted his ‘effect’ just repackaged what Darwin 1859 called ‘transitional habits’ BenjaminSylvester-Bradley (talk) 15:36, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]