Talk:Thomas McEvilley

message: After the latest edits on the article by Dave, I removed the text and image on systems art and refraised a sentence all on Thomas McEvilley earlier request. I hope we can make I clear start now to expand this article agian, and I hope that we can work on this together. We can lay our differences aside, and use this talk page in the way it is ment in the first place. To change ideas about improving the article. I would like to continu here to talk about that. -- Mdd (talk) 13:44, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks so much for your patience and understanding. I think a lot the problem has been culture shock, of which the shock of new notability is a part. Thank God Tom does not have to endure a malicious reputation smear; he would never get over it. It is true that when a large number of socially uncontroled hands get in these matters errors are rampant. Let us say that if x people are involved in a set of articles they might have an error rate of y. If nx now get involved then you might find an increase of errors to ny or more. What the critic might not realize is the increase of n in the size of the audience and n in the size of the true material made available. So for an increase n in errors you get a powerful new capacity. If you then have a mechanism in place to reduce the errors you get all this new capacity for free! I remember Jack Caskey decried what he saw as a decline in the field now that it seemed to slipping out of his control and that was way back in the 1960's, ancient history for most of us. Again, culture shock. It isn't out of control, merely in wider control and I do believe the correction mechanism is in fact effective. The whole Wikipedia/Nupedia issue reflects the same shock. I am not going name any names but certain very nasty experienced editors surviving evidently from Nupedia times formed a resistive clique to drive the masses off of Wikipedia by being insulting. I only got one thing to say to them. How could you possibly do 2.5 mil articles by YOUR methods? Harvard University (and a few others) has thrown its entire prestigious weight onto the side of the people by having much of its previously nearly inaccessible library put onto the Internet. Hoorah! If it were not for Google Preview it would be pretty tough to write quality articles here. Anyway, there is a bit of published still rare biographical info on Tom. I knew I saw it somewhere. I am not going to be involved in this article now. Take it easy on Tom. Some authors clamor for the publicity and insist, demand, we put them and their stuff on here. This is a different case. If you write about Tom's work, make sure you read what you are writing about, OK? If you need me you know where I am.Dave (talk) 10:49, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

text: I archived the all previous discussion. There clearly have been a lot of confusion on both sides and I apologize, that I couldn't clearify this earlier and save you all the trouble. At the moment the article is in a format from which it can be expanded again. New data and sources can be add to the biography and work sections etc. I watched the two video's and I do believe this article can use a lot of more apropriate content. It is still in a premature state, but that is with a lot of articles like this. We are working on it and this will improve sooner or later. Good luck. -- Mdd (talk) 12:44, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  A clear start 

message: There are at the moment two video's on Thomas McEvilley on YouTube and video.google but these links don't seems to be stable:
* Thomas McEvilley on The Shape of Ancient Thought. video 34 min - 14 jan. 2008 
* Dr. Thomas McEvilley Air date: 5-28-03, video 58 min - 10 feb. 2007 
Now I found a new link for the YouTube video:   
* Dr. Thomas McEvilley Air date: 5-28-03, video 58 min - 10 feb. 2007 
Does this work -- Mdd (talk) 12:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It works for me in The Netherlands. -- Mdd (talk) 12:04, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

text: Ok but these are very interesting... and there are very interesting new movies on YouTube. I even started a project there to collect these rather notable movies, see here. -- Mdd (talk) 13:40, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Movies on YouTube and video.google 

message: I looked at all of the references for his career, but they are all kind of short and fragmentary. Does anyone know Prof. McEvilley? Could someone interview him about his career, and publish it online or somewhere else? He is oviously an important scholar, someone should do it. -- Margin1522 (talk) 18:33, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That's not Wikipedia's job. This article is is doing what it is supposed to do - when books by McE are referenced we can get some idea of who wrote them. The same thing is true of this author as of any other current - they aren't dead yet so no one has dared to write a biography and there are no biographical sources. We can't work those up and he can't tell us about it. We are not newspaper journalists writing articles for the yellow pages. We only work from published material. It's a sort of median arrangement - he doesn't get to control the article and we don't get to investigate further than published, credible sources. If you really want to know someone, point to that person in the mirror and ask yourself who that person really is. That's not our job, either. Best.Dave (talk) 10:00, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does anyone know Prof. McEvilley? 

message: I added pronunciation based on his saying his own name at the start of  moogsi(blah) 13:02, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation 

message: I removed the list of Essays as minor works; Wikipedia is not a catalogue (WP:NOTCAT) and not a CV repository, and it is therefore not appropriate to provide exhaustive (and generally unmaintainable) lists of minor works such as published papers, individual poems, essays, newspaper articles and so forth. An editor has seen fit to restore the list without bringing a discussion here, so here we are. I think the list is superfluous. If there is evidence from other authors, i.e reliable secondary sources, that McEvilley is known specially for his essays, in particular essays A, B, and C[refs x, y, z], then of course it would be right to keep such a list. Currently the article is poorly cited, many sections being wholly without references, and the amount of space devoted to lists, including an excessively long and improperly used "See also" list, is excessive. Either these lists should be cut down, or the text and inline references should be expanded considerably. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:48, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Essays and other lists