Xpaperboy

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The perils of being an unpublished expert

Hello, Bill Steigerwald. As a journalist, you're in for some crazy times trying to edit Wikipedia. The problem is that the place requires references for anything that is controversial or sounds like self-publication. You can summarize other people's work, or even your own if it has appeared in "print" (on paper or anything peer reviewed) but you're out of luck if you "know" something because you researched it yourself, and you want to write it up in Wikipedia first! Blogs don't count as "publication."

I once had an experience where I found that Wikipedia gave the wrong number of holes in the monkeyball fruit from the American Sweetgum in my own yard. I knew wikipedia was wrong, but every source on the web led ultimately back to wikipedia. I couldn't change it until we found some old botany catalog from the 1930's. I made the change, then watched the correct number propagate through the web, changing reality like something out of the Word Processor of the Gods.

Don't get frustrated. Wikipedia's worst problem is actually writing biographies of living people, and not accepting them as experts on their own lives, if what they say is contradicted in print somewhere. You journalists are SO careful with your facts, that newspapers have come to be trusted TOO MUCH. Go figure.

Anyway, I suggest you start gingerly on the Travels with Charley article on WP, changing as many things as you have citations for, and add stuff you'd like to put in, on the TALK page for discussion.

My father used to teach English Lit. His private name for this book was Steinbeck's Travels in Search of his Manhood. Add a grin to that, and you may find there's some truth in it. But we have to quote other published authors, not our own opinions. SBHarris 23:52, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

That's good. I'm sure that if you had cited the newspaper article, it would have "stuck." Do you want me to add it, or do you want to wait till you become an "autoconfirmed nameuser"? For that, you need to make 10 edits after you first pick your username and wait 4 days. Your time is nearly up, but you need to make some more edits, even minor ones, to WP. You can edit any article that doesn't have the silver lock on it (called semiprotection). After you get to be autoconfirmed, you can edit sprotected articles, too. SBHarris 03:20, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

On John

Thanks for your edits at John Steigerwald. They added a lot of info to the article. By the way, do you happen to know John's exact birthdate? I can't find it anywhere on the internet, and it would be good to know for the article as it presently only says (September, 1948) If you know it, could you please add it to the page? Thanks in advance. SteelMariner^Talk 07:48, 18 November 2013 (UTC)