User talk:JTGILLICK

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Hello, JTGILLICK, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! -- Doctormatt 00:42, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Strange loop

Thanks for your recent additions to Strange loop. However, as these were unsourced, or personal research of your own, I reverted them according to Wikipedia policy. Take a look at WP:OR and WP:VERIFY for information on how to avoid original research, and how to cite sources. In particular, your claim that these things constitute strange loops needs to be verifiable. Cheers, Doctormatt 00:42, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] questioning the basis for deletions made

Thanks for the welcome, the tips and the guidelines references. Being new, there are no doubt many solecisms I have, am, and soon will be committing until I get my chops. It's always good to be offered well-meaning assistance.

In regard to your reasons for the broad-brush deletion of my contribution, some questions immediately spring to mind - all of the “please be more specific in your objections” variety. Let me lay them out ...

In offering up the general statement that SF time-travel paradox stories are built on strange loops, I believe I made sufficient reference to acceptable - and accepted - material/sources; to wit,

1. For my specific examples I cite specific stories by Bester and Heinlein - with both authors being recognized as masters of the genre, and both stories being recognized as classics within it. I also link to the current Eikipedia entries on BESTER, HEINLEIN, and "ALL YOU ZOMBIES --". Ifv Wiki[pedia itself does not suffice as a reliable source, the whole operation may be slipping into a streange loop of its own, don't you think? Therefore, if these citations do not suffice for verifiability/reference/citation/NOR, please delienate (with some specific detail) how they fail or are insufficient.

2. The general statement of how time-travel paradoxes are strange loops - from which my specifics flow - derives directly from the content of the current strange loop article itself ; to wit,

    a) "Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox" - in first paragraph. 

    b) “ ‘... an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.’ “ (Hofstadter, as quoted in the article.)

To break this out in even more detail: the time-travel paradox stories I offer up as examples (again, as referenced to Wiki entries) meet Hofstadter’s criteria exactly - in that forward (or “upward) motion in “subjective time” (the traveler’s sense of his personal time) passing at normal rate as he transports backwards in time) actually shifts him backward (downward) in “objective time”. This is quite obviously ...

    (a) the “cycling-around” - in these case cycling around in a time sequence,
    (b) the “shift from one level of abstraction to another”,
    (c) “feels like an upward (forward) movement in a hierarchy (in these cases, the hierarchy of sequential time), 
    (d) “gives rise to a closed cycle” - specifically, the so-called “time-loops” that are the core of time-paradox SF stories. 

And so, my question to you (here restated): if all my references/citations are to/from material extant in Wikipedia, how exactly do they violate or fail to meet the standards laid out in WP:OR and WP:VERIFY. As in your comment there is some suggestion (implied, underlying, not specified or overt) that Wikipedia itself is not a suitable source or reference, I again request some specificity regarding to what degree the material entered does not meet criteria (or form).

Finally, absent such specifics, I would suggest that you might have done better in this matter to have placed the “citation needed” tag where you felt such citations were required (and absent). This seems to have sufficed for the two popular culture paragraphs that preceded mine.

JTGILLICK 21:47, 20 June 2007 (UTC)