73.17.150.215

Personal attacks

I'm pretty thick skinned, but there is only so much I am going to take in the way of your personal attacks before I ask for administrative action to be taken against you. Please just stick to the issues (and cite sources to back up what you say), that's the Wikipedia way. It is especially bad to see this on article talk pages - it is corrosive to collegial discussion, discouraging other editors from taking part. If you have something personal to say to me, take it to my user talk page.

You seem to assume that I am responsible for everything that is wrong with the Passivity (engineering) page. In fact, very little of that page is a result of my editing and I have no desire to preserve it exactly as it is. SpinningSpark 09:15, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Please do bring the administrators in. Wikipedia isn't about personalities or editor backgrounds. It's about sources and authoritative information. If you're going to claim that you have the right to make edits based on YOUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE INDUSTRY, and substitute having been an engineer for having proper references, you're going to get pushback on that. No one made this about you except for you. Once you did that, that's what got responded to.

I understand you have a particular experience with how you used it in your job, sometimes correctly and sometimes not correctly, and you'd like the page to reflect that. That's not how Wikipedia works. It's not about how the term was used in YOUR jobs with YOUR coworkers. It's not even about how the term is used in YOUR subfield. It's about the technical, established definitions. The term is used in many fields, including electronic engineering, aerospace engineering, and control systems. They've converged on standard definitions (with just a little bit of slop, around whether "passivity" without a qualifier refers to incremental or thermodynamic passivity). The page ought to communicate and reflect that.

The canonical references from the control systems side include Khalil. His book is widely considered canonical in the field. On the analog design side, it's references from Chua and references from Wyatt, who are recognized as the world experts in network theory in analog design. If you can find a better reference than that, please go for it. I'm glad to be proven wrong. But I don't think you can, since those are the recognized world experts in their respective fields. A sentence in an oddball popular electronics book, a misread of how the USPTO classifies devices, or sales catalog isn't it (although those would great for describing the diversity of colloquial uses of the term!).

To emphasize: It's fine to say there are conflicting popular uses, and describe some of those. Indeed, it's important to say that. But that has to be state that CLEARLY, not conflated together with established technical definitions. There's also no reason to have the page highlight and focus on how YOU use it. If you go to a different company, or a slightly adjacent field, the colloquial uses will be sometimes slightly different and sometimes significantly different, depending on where you go.

And yes, the really aggressive edits introducing errors did come from you. The occasional ignorant person coming by and making a well-intentioned but incorrect edit is easy-to-deal-with. On the other hand, an edit war isn't something any reasonable person has time for. So in the end, I left the page as-is: with errors you introduced, and a comment in talk pointing out that the page has serious technical errors. If you bring the admins in (I have no idea how one does that, but I hope you do!), I hope they can deal with that. It'd be nice to first and foremost have Wikipedia have a correct information, especially on topics where there is a lot of confusion like this one.

I also agree with your comments about readability. But a readable, but incorrect page is worse than no page.

As a footnote, this IP is shared by many people. I'm not sure this is the best place for this discussion. Strangers are likely to stumble upon this page randomly (indeed, it's sort of by fluke that I even saw the Wikipedia notification about this). The article talk page seems like a better place, or your own talkback page. I'll check this spot at some point again, but... 73.17.150.215 (talk) 11:26, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree that the article talk page is the right place for a discussion of the article content, but I came here to raise a behaviourial issue, not an article content issue. Trust me, Wikipedia administrators do not hand out judgements in content disputes. That's not how things work on Wikipedia.

But anyway, as you have raised the content issue here, I'll reply to you here, just to keep the conversation together. On "aggressive edits introducing errors", all I have done is revert a passage to what it originally said (more or less) when first put in. It now reflects what the source actually says, whereas it was saying pretty much the opposite of what was in the source. It was not me who originally put in this passage and it was not me who added that source. I have no great investment in it (other than having been forced to buy the book) and I wouldn't care much if it was removed altogether. I think we both agree that the article should be based on sources. It is just not acceptable to have something cited to a source that says the exact opposite of what is claimed.

On shared IPs, you can avoid that problem by creating an account. You don't have to reveal your identity, in fact, it will improve your privacy as people will no longer be able to make WHOIS and GEOLOCATE inquiries on your IP. It also has the benefit of allowing you to create a watchlist and e-mail alerts so you won't have to keep coming back to check pages. SpinningSpark 12:15, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Regarding: "On 'aggressive edits introducing errors', all I have done is revert a passage," this is factually not true. There is a page history. You made 15 of the past 50 edits, and are by far the most active individual in this space. You clearly invest a ton of time into this page, even going as far as to buy books on the topic. That's not something anyone else (at least with a job) can hope to keep up with. However, many of those edits introduce serious errors, which you justify with your 40 years of experience rather than on primary sources (or on the rare occasions that you do bring in sources, they're not very good sources or, as in the USPTO example, are misinterpreted). When confronted, you admit errors, but for the most part, stick by the edits.

I have absolutely no idea how Wikipedia conflict resolution procedures work, either on the content front or on the behavioral front. There's a clear issue here on both. I apologize if my most recent comment was insulting, but it was honest and showed that I'm at my wits end here. Wikipedia should provide information based on accurate sources and expertise, not based on what edits the most energetic individuals want. From the talk page, it's clear there are significant gaps in your understanding of the fundamentals here (even as basic as what a small-signal model is, without which you can't understand incremental passivity). If you don't grasp the concepts or only tenuously grasp the concepts, you shouldn't be editing the page -- that generates a massive amount of cleanup work for everyone else. Stating that you have a lack of understanding here is not intended as an insult either; no one is an expert in everything, and it's okay to have a knowledge gap. However, if you can't make changes you're confident are CORRECT, you shouldn't be editing. In this case, both the edit history and the discussion page shows that you either edit when you're unsure, or you can't recognize when you're introducing a potential error; you've introduced not just one error, but a ton of them.

Again, if you do know how these procedures work, please do bring in the admins. I'm obviously not versed in Wikipedia's procedures here; I've never run into this sort of issue before. For the most part, editing Wikipedia has been super-rewarding, and the collaborative processes have worked really well. This is the first time I've seen this sort of thing. I do think it's important for Wikipedia to first and foremost have a correct page, and second one that's readable. That's clearly not where we've converged. The page is not very readable, and has many serious errors. 73.17.150.215 (talk)

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