Talk:Edward Burger

Latest comment: 4 years ago by NotAdamKovic in topic Removal of Material

A note on sourcing edit

I just finished a complete re-write of the article. Since I referenced the home page and six other pages of Dr. Burger, I thought it might be wise to place a note here to avoid any concerns people might have about that. First of all, I'm not Edward Burger, have no actual knowledge of him, nor have I ever met him. This was a page that I saw needed some help, so I pitched in.

All information in this article came from a variety of websites, and thus is fully sourced. Most of the sources have some of the information here, and some of it there. Dr. Burger's faculty website helps pull that information together into a cohesive and comprehensible manner. That is why I chose to use his pages as primary sources. Furthermore, since the pages are part of his faculty pages at the college, it is reasonable to assume that his peers and superiors have reviewed the information occasionally in the ten years he has had the information there. If there were inaccuracies in it, it should have been corrected. This is as opposed to a personal profile posted to MySpace or something which is never a particularly trustworthy source.

If anyone disagrees, feel free to track down all the various details and re-reference the information through other sources. The information is probably out there, but since it is consistent as-is, I think that would be overkill.

Finally, editors in the future should be careful in moving or deleting the <ref> tags around in the article. I have occasionally duplicated reference information in full in a few places in the article to help avoid accidental removal of an important source, but that could make it a bit difficult to update links in the future. Also, if someone deletes the full reference, the short references could become orphaned. This is normal, but not everyone is familiar with <ref> tags, so I thought I would mention it just to be safe.

Feel free to leave me questions or comments on my talk page. Thanks! Willscrlt (Talk) 09:22, 2 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Let me start by saying I know Ed and he's a fine guy.
Here's the problem with the sourcing here. It's mostly written by the subject of the article, his students, close associates and friends. From a WikiPedia NPOV standpoint, it reads like those articles where software companies pay people to post their internal product marketing.
A personal web page bio should hype (at least in the US; perhaps not in the UK and many other places)-- that's OK. A Wikipedia article should strive to evaluate the subject with neutrality.
This article still reads far too much like "my favorite professor, look, he's so cool." And that's true-- Ed's a really cool guy. But Wikipedia isn't the place for this.
Article thus deserves a re-write for true NPOV and eval of independent vs. internal sources. KenThomas (talk) 21:01, 8 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

Image? edit

I'm not familiar with the image policy, so I'm not sure about copyright or all that, but I could give a image of him from the thinkwell program? Is this desired? --The Dark Peria (talk) 14:11, 30 September 2010 (UTC)Reply

Removal of Material edit

Hello, I like to do this when I cut out substantial parts of biographical pages so people can understand my logic. Much of this article seemed to be written more as a promotional piece for the subject than an article itself -- and it seems like that might be because the subject or people close to the subject wrote this article? (As is speculation in the 2008 discussions surrounding this page.) Some of the material that was in this article just isn't encyclopedia worthy in my view (the 'Assessment of Mathematics' section for example). Even some of the cited things that I've kept in (that segment about the Boston Red Sox boxer shorts demonstration is newsworthy, perhaps, at the time, but not really worthy of being on here) could be cut, but I kept large sections in the interest of, one, not doing a number to an article only for someone to overrule it, and two, since I generally stick to sport-based articles. That said, I think these edits are for the better and should help this page read a bit more like a proper biographical entry as opposed to something you might find in a magazine about the subject. For transparency, in looking at this article, I believe this page should be re-written and would be happy to make more edits, but I do not know enough about subject to do a full rewrite. NotAdamKovic (talk) 22:49, 18 September 2019 (UTC)Reply