Academicland

Persistent edits on one topic

Dear concerned academic and litigant-in-DCU-dispute (or close friend or supporter-on-staff), thank you for some added depth and detail for DCU and Prof. von Prondzynski articles. However, you have failed consistently to properly comment and explain your edits, have stubbornly repeated edits even when they have been part-accepted but judiciously recrafted to meet standards, have made excessively personal edits, and not always displayed proper good faith. You really need to work with Wikipedia people. I understand that your edits are probably born out of frustration and strong feeling, but this is not the place for those feelings. It is also not a talking shop on Irish educational policy or the operation of DCU. You may also be frustrated at facing the Professor-President directly, but that is the nature of Wikipedia, and you yourself are also working with a potential conflict of interest, and if I may say, less professionally than he. As an Irish expat, I share concern with the direction of Irish third-level structures, and the increasing CEO-like nature of university heads, rather than academic collegiality, and faculty autonomy, which are far more appropriate and productive. But that debate needs to happen in Ireland, physical or virtual, not Wikipedia. Please go read our policies. 79.124.147.240 (talk) 06:53, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

As an Irish ex Pat, it seems you take a special interest in Von P. The accuracy of the original posts on this topic by both Von P himself and his supporters grossly misled the reader. Whether you were involved or not, the edits that were accepted were grossly inaccurate. If wikipedia is going to survive as an authoritative space, it must be accurate in its submissions with verifiable cited work. As a person close to the proceedings and who knows Von P personally, it is outrageous that the original submissions were so one sided, self gratifying and indulgent. While I can appreciate everyones right to pen a narcissistic blog, it is unacceptable that this would transfer to wikipedia Academicland (talk) 16:48, 19 July 2009 (UTC).

July 2009 - Conflict of Interest notice

If you have a close connection to some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest. In keeping with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy, edits where there is a conflict of interest, or where such a conflict might reasonably be inferred from the tone of the edit and the proximity of the editor to the subject, are strongly discouraged. If you have a conflict of interest, you should avoid or exercise great caution when:

1. editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with;
2. participating in deletion discussions about articles related to your organization or its competitors;
3. linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see Wikipedia:Spam); and,
4. avoid breaching relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies.

For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have conflict of interest, please see our frequently asked questions for businesses. For more details about what, exactly, constitutes a conflict of interest, please see our conflict of interest guidelines. Thank you.

Per your own words: "As a person close to the proceedings and who knows Von P personally" - and from the pattern of editing, including some cases of negative implication and of "cited statements" which, contrary to the principle mentioned above by yourself, were not properly supported by the citations. 93.74.6.159 (talk) 19:15, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

I have no conflict of interest whatsoever bar knowing when its looks like a rat, smells like a rat and walks like a rat...it's a RAT.

Many academics in Ireland are appalled at the behaviour of this Hull University export and are outraged that wikipedia would countenance such overt 'conflict of interest'

The edits made by Groschowitz are highly suspect given he is Ferdinand Von P as a quick perusal of his contributions clearly reveals !!! From editing this article, the DCU article, the A fine Frenzy article (VonP's fav band) and of course the Knockdrin Castle article !

And finally Ferdinand Von P's home town is Groschowitz ! Excerpt from his blog - A little family History !

http://universitydiary.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/a-little-family-history/

My father died ten years ago, after a long and debilitating illness that stripped him of most of his dignity in the two or three years before he finally passed away. When he died, it might have been that the link between my family and its history would have been cut, perhaps for ever. He was an enthusiastic researcher into family roots, and during his retirement he spent an increasing amount of time on it, amassing boxes of documents and papers and memorabilia. I watched this with some bemusement, but not really with any interest; I did not consider myself to be a ‘roots’ person.

Some time after my father had died, my two sons expressed an interest in seeing his home village in Silesia. I need to explain that just a little. The Prondzynski family (or rather, I should say Pradzynski) had its origins in the Kasubian region of Poland, and my father’s branch of it eventually migrated to the Opole region of Silesia (or as my father would have called it, Oppeln). There they developed a strong profile as landowners, soldiers and industrialists, in what became a Prussian or German province. In the Second World War my father was a German army officer, and at the end of the war he was unable to return home (which hadbecome part of Poland), and re-started his life in what became West Germany. Later he and the family moved to Ireland. Although he had lost his home and the property located there, he never lost a sense of belonging there, and later when the political situation became easier he was a frequent visitor to his home town. I think he regretted that his family home had been lost, but I never heard him complain, and he was full of praise at what Poland had made of it. It was his wish that one day I would visit it, too. I probably wouldn’t have, but on the urging of my sons we did, during a family holiday when we were based not too far away across the German border. When we actually made it there – the town where he was born and raised is called Groszowice, or Groschowitz in German – my sons almost immediately lost interest (partly because we got there in foul weather), but totally unexpectedly I found myself emotionally engaged. Seeing his old family home (still intact but with new owners who kindly let me in), and suddenly recognising places and scenes from his descriptions that I had, after all, stored away in my memory had a profound effect on me. This was reinforced even further when some local people, who had heard I was there, stopped me in the street and assured me how important my family connection was with the town. And finally, in the pouring rain an elderly lady who remembered my father as a boy showed me the small square which, until the 1950s, had been named after my great grandfather, an association the town council was hoping to re-establish (but a petition for which I gently declined to sign). The lady told me, as I left, that they considered me as the town’s most celebrated living son, which while absurd at one level left me speechless.